I’ve always had trouble telling apart the many different flavors of onion. Remind me which is the SCALLION, which is the SHALLOT? When topping a baked potato, can I use GREEN ONIONS instead of CHIVES?
Flip over a ONE dollar bill. You’ll find our US motto in Latin - E Pluribus Unum - out of many, one. That one, UNUM or UNIO, is the source of both our union and our ONION. The plant was named for its many layers unified into a single BULB. And yet with ONIONS and the United States, the diversity of the many is equally present.
Despite great efforts to become a Union, European countries can’t help but choose totally different words for ONION. Some prefer offspring of CEPA, the Latin ONION, like the Italian CIPOLLA or Spanish CEBOLLA. The Germans went that way for a while, then decided to morph the word into ZWIEBEL, firmly meaning two balls, defiantly not one.
The French of course had their own ideas and chose OIGNON, offspring of UNIO. It’s the foundation of their cheese-coated French onion soup and the proximate source of our ONION.
When talking about CHIVES, however, the French opt for CIBOULETTE, a little onion and obvious cousin to Spanish and Italian words. Deciding to keep things divisive and unresolved amongst themselves, some French also use CIVE to name the thin and elegant green leaves. No matter, CIVE gave us our CHIVES to add just a touch of onion flavor to sour cream.
Up North, the Scandinavians seem to all prefer LEEK-like words for ONION, LØK and LØG. Fine with us. We nabbed it for our LEEKS and our GARLIC. The GAR is the spear for the shape of cloves or shoots that come out of that pungent white BULB. Curiously, BULB also comes from another ONION word, BULBUS in Latin, naming the vegetable for its swelling stem.
Back to my origin question: which are the SCALLIONS, which the SHALLOTS? To simplify things, we use a color for SCALLIONS, calling them GREEN ONIONS. Enough Brits were probably equally lost and so chose SPRING ONIONS. The best part of all this confusion is that they were once the same. There's a town on the Mediterranean shores of present day Israel, Ashkelon, that was parent to both words. SCALLIONS were first named ONIONS from Ascalonia, CÆPA Ascalonia. The French took from there, first making ESCHALOIGNE for SCALLIONS. Only centuries later did they split off ESCHALOTS and used it to describe the delicately flavored two-bulb onion we know today. The German ZWEIBEL, two balls, would have been a perfect descriptive name for SHALLOTS, but I suspect the French would have resisted on principle.
In American English it should be noted that we comfortably defer to childlike colors to tell our ONIONS apart - YELLOW, RED, WHITE and GREEN - all while keeping at lease some of the family together.
Back in Europe there’s a bit more agreement on GARLIC. While the Germans seem aligned with our spear-LEEK, calling it KNOBLAUCH or knob leek, much of Europe goes back to ALLIUM in Latin. Spanish created their AJO and French made their AIL. Somewhere between the two of them they invented a delicious dip AIOLI, a linguistic and actual fusion of GARLIC and OIL. Like an ever competitive sibling, Italians took the same two ingredients to create the simplest (perhaps the best) possible pasta sauce imaginable, AGLIO E OLIO. Until now I hadn’t realized the two, AIOLI and AGLIO E OLIO, are fraternal twins!
That discovered kinship is worth celebrating. It’s probably close enough to our original, idealistic union.
“Fine with us.”