Keeping Onions

The keeping properties of onions vary inversely with the amount of moisture in them. Hard, dry, round onions keep for months. This property has had a considerable effect on commerce in onions, making possible, for example, the traditional practice of French onion-sellers from Roscoff and Saint-Pol in Brittany bicycling around English towns selling their wares. Alexander Dumas père relates one of his most charming (albeit improbable) anecdotes in explaining how this practice first arose. It was still flourishing in the 1970s, but Lindsay Bareham (1995) cites a press interview of 1994 with Jean Leroux, described as the last onion-man.