Cooking is about so much more than the assembly of ingredients. It's about building and combining flavors and textures in a way that creates something greater than the sum of its parts. The collective knowledge of both chefs and home cooks has yielded an arsenal of particular ingredients known for their unique properties that, without further alteration, add a very special flourish to a dish. I see them as shortcuts.
Some of these ingredients, because of their rarity, are prohibitively expensive. Foie gras, the rich, fatty liver of goose or duck, and truffles, the earthy, aromatic mushrooms that grow in symbiosis with the roots of certain trees, are particular favorites in fine dining establishments and will drive up the cost of a meal with devastating certainty. Saffron will run you around $5,000 per pound. Of course you'd need to make a literal boatload of paella and risotto alla Milanese to use a pound of saffron, but the point remains that some flavoring agents are too precious for everyday use — make that any-day use for college undergraduates.
But some of the most incredible flavors can be achieved with the most humble of ingredients. Some of my personal favorites — shallots, onions and garlic — hail from the genus Allium. All three pungent plants are versatile, cheap and keep forever if you don't live in a jungle. It's a shame that, for the most part, shallots, onions and garlic are relegated to supporting roles. Slice a head of garlic laterally, wrap in foil with a drizzle of olive oil, place in a 300-degree oven and you're an hour away from the most incredible, mellow, butter-soft spread for toast.
Equally stunning is the Cinderella transformation of homely onion to star of a quiche via caramelization. I've never seen a recipe or cooking show host properly explain how to caramelize onions to their most sweet and complex potential. Cooking them for 20 minutes at medium heat won't do it. Adding sugar is cheating. Caramelizing onions is not for the lazy; it's endurance cooking, marathon waiting. The tarte a l'oignon, basically a shallow onion quiche, employs caramelized onions as the primary filling ingredient, and it wants for nothing more.
11" x 1" tart pan
Enough pie crust, rolled out 1/8 inch thick, to fit in the pan. Store-bought is fine.
7 medium onions, sliced. Tissues recommended for the inevitable tears.
1/4 cup butter
5 large eggs
1 1/2 cup heavy cream
Salt, pepper, nutmeg to taste
10 ounces grated gruyere
Water
Prebake the crust at 350 degrees for 35 minutes. Fill the crust with pie weights or raw beans to prevent the crust from puffing up and remove those when the crust has finished prebaking. Cook onions over low heat with a pinch of salt and butter in a large pot until a brown layer (the fond) forms on the bottom. Add a few tablespoons of water, scrape that layer up, let the water evaporate and do that again and again until the onions are a deep shade of brown. This will take at least one hour.
In a bowl, mix the eggs, cream, salt, pepper and nutmeg. Spread onions in bottom of crust. Cover with the cheese and pour in the egg mixture.
Bake at 375 degrees for about 35 minutes.
I realize that not everyone has an 11" x 1" tart pan lying around. For a nine-inch pan, use three or four eggs, one cup cream and seven ounces of gruyere. A nine-inch pan may be deeper and require additional baking time.
