A Southern Rite of Passage
The only onion we can eat like an apple.
There was a time when Lady’s Island wasn’t the manicured landscape it is today. Before the developers arrived with their blueprints for Dataw and before the neon glow of a Publix and Harris Teeter hummed in the distance, the island belonged to the marsh, the tomato fields, and men like Mr. Ed.
Ed lived over on Lucy Creek, a man carved out of Lowcountry salt and red clay. One morning, he pulled up to my porch in a Chevy pickup that was more rust than paint, the engine idling with a rhythmic, metallic cough. His forearm, tanned to the color of polished teak, rested heavily on the window frame. He looked less like a neighbor and more like a character stepping out of a Steinbeck novel—a man who spent his dawns chasing wild turkey and his afternoons wrestling life from the dirt.
“I’m starting the list,” he called out, his voice gravelly but neighborly. “You want in?”
I leaned against a porch column, a newcomer still trying to decipher the unwritten codes of the South. “The list for what, Ed?”
“Vidalias,” he said, as if the word itself were a secret password. “The only onion in the world you can eat just like a Gala apple.”
I scoffed, my skepticism as thick as the humidity. “An onion? Like an apple? Ed, I’ve spent my life crying over cutting boards. I’m not sure I’m ready to eat an onion for fun.”
Ed didn’t argue. He just smirked—a slow, knowing grin that suggested he knew something about the earth that I hadn’t learned yet. He reached into the flatbed, pulling a heavy, twenty-pound burlap sack toward him. He reached in and produced a golden, flat-topped bulb.
With the practiced grace of a surgeon, he flicked open a pocket knife from his bib overalls. The blade caught the afternoon sun as he peeled back the papery, translucent skin. Then, without a blink or a flinch, he took a deep, crunching bite.
I waited for the recoil. I waited for his eyes to well up or his face to contort. But there was nothing but the sound of a satisfying snap.
“Sign me up,” I whispered.
I didn’t realize then that I wasn’t just buying a bag of onions; I was buying my way into a Southern rite of passage that involved old yelow school buses, pantyhose storage, and the best fried rings I’d ever taste.
Who remembers the battered old yellow bus that sat in the Sea Pines Circle? It was there for years, providing us with fresh Vidalias.’ Now it’s a legend.
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Bon Appétit! And thank you for stopping by. With love to all. Pat
From the Village Creek section of our Tides of Tradition cookbook:
Pat Conroy’s Pickled Shrimp with Vidalias and
Best Fried Onion Rings, Vidalia, Georgia
