How NOT to Consult an Onion Oracle

Andy is blogging today. Ann is in OurLittleCorner writing about an ingredient that is little in the U.S. but “Big in Japan.”

Who would have thought that I could become so intrigued with the common, everyday onion? Aside from figuring out how to dice them without tears, I had never given onions much of a second thought. That all changed after David from Albuquerque – whom you might recall is an occasional BigLittleMeals guest blogger – sent us a link to something called “How to Consult an Onion Oracle” by Roxanne Hoorn. Typical of David’s penchant for finding obscure tidbits of wisdom, this is from a web site aptly named Atlas Obscura.

Hoorn informs us that beginning sometime in the Middle Ages farmers started using the onion as an oracle to predict precipitation patterns for the upcoming year. Although most farmers today depend on modern climatology for such forecasts, consulting the onion oracle still has some followers. Farmers in the small town of Urbania, Italy, the site of some of the oldest records of the oracle, continue to practice il barometro delle cipolle (onion weather predictions). The onion oracle even has made its way to the United States. Hoorn’s article is largely based on an interview with a farm couple from North Dakota who for the past 50 years have continued their ancestral tradition of the onion oracle.

Before getting into the nitty gritty of how an onion oracle works, I would like to point out that this weather-forecasting business plays just a small part in the onion’s amazing history. According to the National Onion Association (no joke, there really is such an organization), the onion was one of the first edible plants to be cultivated, dating back more than 5,000 years. “While the place and time of the onion’s origin is still a mystery, many documents from very early times describe its importance as a food and its use in art, medicine, and mummification.” I could understand the food part, but its use for “art, medicine, and mummification” piqued my curiosity – so naturally I began poking around the Internet to find out more about the history of this unassuming root vegetable.

I hit onion-history pay dirt when I came across an article entitled The Onion’s Role in Ancient Egypt, posted on the French-based web site Archeolog. According to this article, the onion was so highly venerated in ancient Egypt that “of all the vegetables that ancient Egyptian artisans fashioned from precious metals, only the onion was made from gold.” Indeed, archeologists have established that the onion was center stage in ancient Egyptian society for “a plethora of spiritual lore, artistic representation, medical papyri, and various cultural rites.” The Archeolog piece provides so much detail about the role of the onion in early Egyptian society that it’s difficult to summarize here. But the following short excerpt about the supposed medicinal properties of the onion provides some idea of its revered status at that time:

Turning back to the weather-predicting potential of the onion, let’s get to the nuts and bolts of how to go about using the onion as an oracle. Roxanne Hoorn’s article I referred to above provides an illustrated, step-by-step set of instructions for doing just that. Here’s a truncated version of those instructions:

• Step 1: Select a nice round onion. The color and where it’s grown doesn’t matter.
• Step 2: Cut the onion in half lengthwise and carefully separate the six outermost layers so that you have 12 sections total. Lay the sections out in two rows: The first half should be January through June, with January being the outermost layer and June the innermost. The second half represents July (the outermost layer) through December (the innermost).
• Step 3: Add a teaspoon of salt in the center of each onion cup.
• Step 4: Let sit overnight. Some people keep it inside, but many agree it should be outside to get the most accurate reading.
• Step 5: In the early morning—ideally around 5 a.m.—bring the onion inside and quickly jot down your readings before the inside temperatures change the results. [Note: A BBC article on the onion oracle specifies four possible readings: “undissolved salt means dry and sunny; melted salt means rain, possibly snow for a winter month; slices hardened with salt crystals mean frost and/or snow; bubbles mean humidity.”

Because our policy at BigLittleMeals is to test our recipes before posting them, I figured I should test the oracle instructions prior to publishing today’s blog. So, I made my very own onion oracle. It was actually kind of fun. I followed the step-by-step instructions precisely. I separated the onion into “cups” and laid them out by month (see the below photos). I measured exactly one teaspoon of salt per onion section and set it all outside on a tray at around 10:00 pm. At 5:45 am the next morning I brought in the “oracle” and quickly did my readings. l was quite excited to see what I would find.

What I found was not what I had expected. According to my “readings” we are either in for 12 months of dry, sunny weather or 12 months of snow and sleet. There was no melted, bubbly, or crystalized salt – the salt in every one of the cups was slightly crusty but other than that I could see no difference from what I put out the night before. What a bummer! Does this mean that I have disproven a practice that dates back hundreds of years? I doubt it.

I can think of a couple of reasons for my uncooperative oracle. First, much of what I read suggests that the oracle be done at the first of the year. I’m not sure why that would make a difference, but maybe I should have been patient and waited until next January to try this. Another thought about why it may have fizzled is that I used kosher salt. Would a finer-grained salt be more likely to interact with the onion? Or maybe, like so many foods today, onions aren’t what they used to be.

Regardless of the reason for my failed oracle debut, I’ll never again look at an onion as a common, uninteresting root vegetable perpetually relegated to a supporting role in our recipes. Instead, I’ll see a magnificent tuber with a colorful history and the potential to predict the weather. In the meantime I have to decide on what to do with twelve sections of heavily salted onion. Got any recipe ideas?