Like Peeling an Onion: Depth and Variety Revealed : Santa Clauses and their ilk grow singly, the way bulbing onions do

Some baby vegetables are just that: vegetables in their infancy. Ears of corn, finger-length zucchini and filet snap beans are examples. As for flavor, some believe that the taste of baby vegetables is as scanty as their size.

The rest of the teenies are cultivars that reach maturity as miniatures. This is true of such vegetables as Planet carrots, Little Ball beets and currant tomatoes. Their flavor is superior because it has had a chance to develop.

Green onions (scallions in the East) come in both forms.

Had they grown up, the green onions you find in the misted section of the produce department could have been with the dried white onions across the aisle. Cultivars like White Lisbon and White Sweet Spanish are grown for harvesting in both stripling and fat globe stages.

When a cultivar is uncommonly tasty and appealing in its youth, seed companies develop that line. So instead of Southport White Globe, you’d sow Southport White (Green Bunching Strain), which is especially sweet when small.

You can tell whether green onions are baby globes if their tips are rounded--the nascent bulbs. Another clue is that a slice of a hollow leaf has the shape of a D. The flavor of these onions is thin and mild.

For green onions, breeders stay almost exclusively with white. Too bad, because the stems of baby yellows are soft gold, and stems of baby reds have a rosy glow. One very pretty baby is Purplette, pearly purple at the tip and pale burgundy at the boiling stage.

Most beautiful is a knock-your-socks-off green onion that’s perfect this time of year. Its straight stems are more scarlet than holly berries, its leaves greener than Christmas trees. Just as with red lettuce and radicchio, chilly weather intensifies the red in Santa Clause (a.k.a. Red Beard and Barberossa) onions. What makes them the more decorative are the touches of white above and below the red, so the long slender onion is green then white then red dipped in white. Mature plants can reach 2 1/2 feet tall, with red stems a foot or more long, but they’re still only as big around as your thumb.

How can these onions grow so tall and stay so slender? Because they’re a different species, one that forms little or no bulb--the tip is rarely thicker than the stem. A slice of these leaves makes an “O.” They’re Japanese or Oriental Bunching onions, cultivated from Welsh onions (“Welsh” in this case comes from a Middle English word meaning “foreign”).

Santa Clauses and their ilk grow singly, the way bulbing onions do. There are a number of single-stemmed bunching onions (a seeming contradiction in terms); because they don’t form globes, they pour their vigor into length.

Bunching green onions are so called because they form a clump--or bunch--above the ground. The species of onion that forms a bulb produces one onion per seed. One seed of a bunching onion may produce a dozen or more onions, and when you plant one of those onions, it can produce a dozen.

When you harvest single-stem onions, they’re gone forever. When you harvest onions from a clump, new ones appear in their place. You won’t harm the plant as long as you don’t take more than half the onions at once. This is a vegetable that gives you the deep-down comfort of knowing you can harvest it well-nigh forever.

You can pull bunching onions as babies. But let them get as thick as your little finger and they’ll have a rich flavor--much better than a bulb of the same size. They’re more mature.

Another reason to have green onions in the garden or in a pot on the deck is that you can snip greens any time of year and harvest onions at any stage. Bunching onions just keep getting taller. Bulbing onions just keep plumping out. If you’re busy and miss the baby stage, you can harvest pearl onions or boiling onions or big fat globes.

Bulbing onions are fascinating. They respond to the number of hours of daylight, which are determined by latitude. If you want to let some of your bulbing babies mature, choose a cultivar suited to this latitude. (If you plant an onion that needs more daylight than you can provide, its time clock will send up a flower before it has the chance to form a bulb.) To grow mature bulbing onions in Southern California, we need intermediate-day onions.

White Portugal is an all-purpose onion that grows well here. It’s a 19th century American cultivar that has fine sweet flesh from the skinny stage to the large, flat silver-white slicing onion.

For full-size bulbs where winters are balmy, sow in late summer or autumn to harvest in spring. Where winters are freezing, sow in early spring.

In fine weather, green onions are ready to pull in seven to eight weeks. In winter, growth is slower, but greens will sprout and you can look forward to a tasty crop come spring. Full-size bulbing onions take half again as much growing time.

As exciting to me are the single stems of pure white onions called nebukas , a Japanese term for white blanched stems. Nebukas are the aristocrats of green onions, and producing them can take a year. Slowly and carefully, the growing stem is kept buried up to its leaves in earth; deprived of sunlight, it blanches to moon-whiteness. I found every step of the painstaking process thrilling, as close to ritual as I expect to get in the garden. If you are interested, consult Joy Larkcom’s “Oriental Vegetables” (Kodansha International, 1991) for details.

In choosing which bunching onions to grow, be aware that seed catalogs sometimes apply the word “bunching” to baby bulbing onions that are to be marketed in bunches. Be sure you find “Japanese bunching” or “Oriental bunching” in the description and note whether they’re single or multi-stem.

Onions survive all but the coldest winters, but bunching onions are hardiest. Graceful in their symmetry, leaves of most cultivars stay green all winter, which makes them valuable in the border. Where the earth freezes, it’s best to lift the onions and replant them in a cold frame before the first hard frost. In spring, return clumps to open ground, but to a different place. (Onions must be rotated through the garden, the same as every other vegetable; wait at least three years before returning to the same area.) Evergreen Hardy White is a good choice for over-wintering. In hot dry climates, grow Beltsville Bunching or White Spear.

Green onions do best in full sun in fertile well-draining soil or potting mix amended with plenty of compost and a little wood ash and bone meal. Keep the soil moist, weed free (crucial) and mulched with well-rotted manure. Clumps of onions have a loony gaiety about them and single-stemmed onions are stately. All are enhanced by zinnias.

Most of these onions will flower mid-spring starting in their second year. Exceptions are short-day onions sown in fall, which may flower the first spring. Puffs of white flowers are delicious dropped whole into salads or snipped over delicate egg and cheese dishes. When they ripen a couple of months later, the specks of coal black seeds are as tasty a condiment as seeds of caraway or dill. They’re sensational over creamy dishes.

Producing flowers and seeds weakens bunching onions and finishes bulbing onions. With clumps, I enjoy letting one or two plants bloom, but before the rest can form flower stalks, I divide them: I tease the onions apart, then plant the young ones, starting new clumps. We eat older onions in the center.

You know what to do with green onions: There isn’t a salad that doesn’t profit from their presence. But have you chopped them up and stirred a handful into mashed potatoes? Have you butter-steamed (a spoonful of butter, a splash of water) whole green onions in a covered skillet with chopped tarragon, sage or thyme? Cut them in long pieces on the diagonal, softened them in olive oil, then floated them with small pasta in beef broth and topped the bowl with wisps of Parmesan cheese?

Although wreathed in red (inside, they’re white), the color holds when red stemmed onions are cooked briefly. Brush whole Santa Clauses with a fragrant oil, sprinkle with lemon juice and grill just enough to soften. Stipple with freshly ground white pepper and garnish with lacy leaves of cilantro. It’s a delightful first course.

Green onions are the only onion used in Japan; in China, they’re as essential as bulb onions are here. The Chinese celebrate their “spring onions” with delectable rolls and pancakes.

A special way with green onions in Tokyo is to set a sheaf of raw strips of the white part down the center of a sheet made of overlapping paper-thin slices of raw beef. The two are rolled together, tied, skewered and grilled, then the roll is sliced crosswise into pieces about 1/2-inch thick. The medallions are served hot as an entree or at room temperature for hors d’oeuvres. You might prefer to shape the roll with pounded slices of chicken breast.

The white (or red and white) part of green onions can be used in any recipe instead of the white of leeks. Or substitute it for shallots, adding a bit of garlic for depth.

A lot of people throw out the tops, but if you slice them thin, they add verve to pale food like sole, scallops, cauliflower, chicken or cottage cheese.

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Sources

Save seeds from any of these cultivars and sow them within one year; after that, they’ll lose viability.

Seeds: Evergreen Hardy White and Purplette from Johnny’s Selected Seeds, Foss Hill Road, Albion, ME 049100-9731

Santa Clause from Thompson & Morgan, Box 1308, Jackson, NJ 08527-0308

White Spear and White Portugal from Liberty Seed Co., Box 806, Philadelphia, OH 44663

Nebuka, Welsh green onion from Kitazawa Seed Co., 1111 Chapman St., San Jose, CA 95126

Others from Stoke Seeds, Box 548, Buffalo, NY 14240-0548