Browning Onions

Kando ne lal karvanu (literally “making the onion red”): When you work with the drier pink onions in India, the term makes more sense. Here, we brown onions. Most meat dishes of the wet type start with browning onions, sometimes sliced, sometimes chopped. To some cooks, like my epicurean friend Eddie Khambata, it makes a huge difference whether they’re chopped or sliced to begin a dish; to other Parsi cooks, it might be a case of angels on a pin. Whether you’re turning your onions red or brown, a chopped or sliced onion should have the merest tracery of brown on its edges. At times, you want the onion to soften without browning. This should never take more than a few minutes unless youre scaling up the quantities, and your sense of smell and the way the onion looks tell you the right time to stop.