‘No one is born knowing how to chop an onion’
An essay on being autistic and chopping onions. Plus an announcement. Words and photograph by Charlie Benjamin.
Good morning, and welcome to Vittles! Today, Charlie Benjamin writes about cooking, chopping onions, and living with autism.
However, before today’s newsletter, we’re delighted to announce a collaboration with our favourite (and least-evil) institution, the British Library. Each year, since 2022, we have organised a panel talk for the British Library Food Season, which we will be doing again this April. However, this year will also see the first British Library Food Season Food Awards, which will recognise the value of narrative cookery writing and storytelling in archives, museums, and exhibitions, and shine a light on the Library’s extensive food collections.
Vittles is partnering on one of the four awards: the Food Stories Fellowship Prize. This prize will be awarded to someone who needs to use the British Library’s unique food collections to inform a piece of exciting new writing on some aspect of contemporary food or drink culture. Food is found across every area of the British Library’s collections, from manuscript recipe books to published cookery books, from oral histories to food magazines and trade literature. The winner will be awarded £1500 to facilitate use of these collections, have access to British Library curatorial support, be mentored by editors at Vittles, and have their finished article published in the magazine. The winner will also be paid the standard Vittles fee for the published article.
This is a great opportunity, so if you have a fascinating and significant food story to tell that would be transformed by use of the British Library’s collections and our editorial support, then we urge you to apply for the award here.
‘No one is born knowing how to chop an onion’
An essay on being autistic and chopping onions. Words and photograph by Charlie Benjamin.
Last summer, I stood in the kitchen, chopping an onion. Halfway through, I realised I’d frequently sat on the floor in this kitchen as a teenager, overwhelmed by meltdowns caused by the same task. I had been preparing onions without assistance for at least five years, but that summer, it felt like I was backsliding, on the cusp of burnout, faced with the loss of functioning I experience when adult life becomes too much. I allowed myself to remember how far I had come with this everyday chore, and it gave me some respite. I kept chopping the onion. I can’t even remember what I was cooking.
As a child in the mid 1990s, I was diagnosed with what was then called Asperger’s syndrome. At the time, Asperger’s was a newly formalised diagnosis for a form of autism associated with less significant verbal and intellectual impairment, but it has since been merged with ‘classic’ autism and two other diagnoses as autistic spectrum disorder.
When I was diagnosed, it was before the social panic about vaccines causing autism, and long before it became more mainstream to talk about neurodiversity (ie autism as a neurological difference rather than a disease). It is hard to understand now just how rare it was to see examples of autistic adults living without formal support. My parents and I had no real concept of how I was likely to develop past puberty. Understandably, my parents assumed that in my case, this would mean living with them in adulthood.
When I started secondary school in Bexleyheath, I remember the thinly veiled excitement from the senior leadership team that they would be able to prove their ability to cater for a student like me. It was true I needed support, though I found making use of it the real challenge. I could mask well, and it felt like the real problem preventing me from fitting in was constantly being accompanied by a well-meaning adult: being constantly observed made it difficult to form connections with peers, which reinforced my sense of shame about needing support.
As I got older, I got better and better at masking. I went through daily life undetectable as a disabled person, although I couldn’t hide from my own internal monologue. Although I had been reassured from an early age that there wasn’t any particular shame in needing support, I wanted to be the same as my peers. Any task that forced me to confront being different became a site of personal crisis, no matter how absurd.
My mum encouraged me to learn to cook when I was a teenager to improve my confidence and sense of independence. But I quickly began to treat cooking as another test of my capability, rather than something I could enjoy. Onions were often the stumbling block. I would try to slice them while still spherical, without cutting them in half first. They would roll around on the chopping board, frustrating my attempts to insert the knife, as I would wipe the completely normal tears with a hand covered in onion juice, making everything much more unbearable. Meltdowns are often caused by sensory overload, so it’s not a surprise that chopping onions was a trigger. The actual tipping point, though, was my sense of existential calamity at the idea that I couldn’t complete simple tasks. Even when I managed to remember to wash my hands before wiping my face or to take a deep breath before things got too much, it would often take me the same amount of time to finish chopping an onion as it was supposed to take to cook the entire meal.
No one, autistic or not, is born knowing how to chop an onion. Despite my difficulties, I never asked anyone to show me how. The first thing that helped me was a plug-in mini-chopper bought for me by my mum, which meant that all I had to do was peel the onion, cut it into rough chunks, and press a button to do the rest. I realise now I was using ‘assistive technology’ – it just happened to have been endorsed by Delia Smith.
When I went to university, I bought myself a manual handheld device with a bladed compartment into which you put the onion. I hardly ever used it because it was almost impossible to clean, and besides, I quickly began to prioritise avoiding my housemates over cooking. I dropped out after three years because I could never seem to get myself together enough to finish assignments or attend exams. I had fixated so much on being able to cook as preparation for university that I had not taken into account that I hadn’t managed to complete homework for two years of sixth form – a far greater hindrance to getting a degree than not having food preparation skills, I realised much too late.
I can trace when preparing onions stopped being a barrier for me back to a decade ago, when I had to readjust to life again after a psychotic breakdown and hospitalisation. It stopped being possible to think of the future: the heavy medication meant that life was lived on a strictly day-by-day basis. The loss of independence I had been terrified of since childhood had come to pass, and I had nothing but time. It no longer mattered if it took me thirty minutes to chop an onion by hand; every other activity also now took me much longer than before. Whether or not struggling to chop onions was a sign that I could cope with a normative model of adulthood didn’t matter anymore.
Gradually, I recovered. I successfully advocated for myself to be able to stop taking medication. I started working again, I moved out of my dad’s flat, where I had been living after the hospitalisation, and I got married to a woman I met two years after then. On that day last summer, when I was chopping onions in the kitchen, I had achieved a life that could have easily been taken for granted if I hadn’t been autistic.
Now I need to cook both less and more than I thought I would. On one hand, I have accepted that it is an unrealistic aspiration to cook from scratch every night, and I have learned that if I am finding the idea of chopping an onion too difficult, then it’s a helpful indication I shouldn’t cook at that moment. On the other hand, I know that cooking for my wife makes her happy, or that taking leftovers to my sister means it’s more likely she will eat lunch. And I know that it is satisfying to have made something.
One evening, as I was dicing onions by hand without any fuss, my wife saw me and told me that there was an easier method. It wasn’t the first time she’d told me this, but previously I had dismissed it, taking no insignificant level of offence. This time was different. I knew how far I had come, so I asked her to show me what she meant.
She cut the onion down the middle, and placed the uncut side of each half on the chopping board. She showed me how to leave the tip of the onion intact, and score the onion with the knife from the root to tip. She then cut the tip off and continued to cut cleanly along the width of the onion, leaving the layers to fall away in neat squares. She passed me another onion, and watched as I followed the method she had just shown me. The task that had been taking me thirty minutes for my entire adult life, the thing that had caused disproportionate shame for so long, was finished in five.
This recipe for a cheese and onion puff pastry tart, which is adapted from a recipe in Rukmini Iyer’s The Green Roasting Tin, is one I’ve found to be a useful benchmark, as it requires the bare minimum of skill – these days, I know that if I’m too overwhelmed to chop the onion for it, then it’s not safe for me to use the oven as I will end up burning myself. It makes a good lunch, or dinner with a microwave packet of grains.
Cheese and Onion Puff Pastry Tart
Serves 4
Time 40 mins
Ingredients
3 small onions or shallots
1 roll of shop-bought puff pastry
1 tbsp Dijon mustard
80g mature cheddar
black pepper
1 tbsp capers
Method
Heat the oven to 180°C. Halve and peel the onions, then slice them.
Unroll the puff pastry onto a baking sheet, keeping it on the greaseproof paper that it comes wrapped in, then use a knife to score a 2.5cm wide border onto the pastry.
Spread the mustard evenly within the border, then lay the onions on top.
Sprinkle over the cheese and season with black pepper, then bake the tart in the oven for 30 mins, checking on it after 20 mins to ensure that it’s not colouring too much.
Remove from the oven, and top with the capers before serving.
Credits
Charlie Benjamin is a writer from South East London. He writes a newsletter about music and culture from a neurodivergent and trans perspective, which you can find here: https://buttondown.com/scarierhandles.
The full Vittles masthead can be found here.
Thank you, that was such a memorable read. I’m not sure chopping an onion will ever be the same.
a heartrending story with a happy ending.