Onions, oh my – we love ‘em or we hate ‘em. Personally, I am a lover but I wasn’t as a child. I didn’t acquire the taste until I was about 25 or 30 years of age, but today I cannot fathom a hamburger without one chipped on top of the meat.

Waitress: “What you want on your burger, ma’am?”

Me, “Extra onion, plus mustard and ketchup, please.”

I’m just saying without the extra onion, I might as well go home. I have observed the journey of an onion-eater will begin with a burger dressed only with ketchup. Let a year or so pass and gradually additional condiments are added, with the onion as the crowning glory. That crowning glory will occur around the eater’s age of 25 or 30, just like me.

Oh, there are so many yummy ways to enjoy an onion. I like to wrap a peeled one with tin foil and bake it in the oven. Of course, I’ve added salt/pepper and butter prior to the baking. Same thing can be done only cook the delicacy on a charcoal grill. Then there are grilled onions placed on top of just about everything: steaks, potatoes, veggies and chicken or even barbecued pork.

Don’t forget to add onions to tacos, green salads, scrambled eggs, chicken or tuna salad, pan-fried beef liver, ole fashioned beef stew and as well veggies, such as cabbage and turnip greens. Cold slaw is just so, so without lots of onion, hush puppies, too.

I might as well confess. If you noticed potato salad is not included in my best-with-onions list. Nope, I don’t want onions in mine. I know this makes me a little weird but I must not lead you astray. The next time you invite me for supper, please make certain raw onions are not chopped into my potato salad. Thank you.

Now in our part of the Deep South folks will practically arm wrestle for a Vidalia onion, such is the sweetness of the taste. Any farmer can grow their version of a sweet onion, but the true-blue Vidalia is only grown in southeast Georgia or so says the folks who live over there in what is traditionally known as the Peach State. Good grief, come on, they already have the drippy-sweet peach, give us non-Georgians a little sweet onion slack, but that’s just the way it is.

I have another confession. I have never gotten up the nerve to try an onion sandwich, just with bread, mayo and the onion. Nope, not there yet, but it could happen. I mean I do love me some onion and I don’t seem to be alone with this fetish.

It wasn’t too many years ago when on a rainy Saturday afternoon I discovered a fascinating program on History TV. I remember it clearly. I sat cross-legged on my green shag carpet practically with my nose against the 24” TV screen. It was a show about Egyptians and I do love Egyptians.

My teenage son arrived home to find me entranced. He stopped long enough to see Egyptians as they worked to build a Pharos burial pyramid. He walked briskly through the den without stopping as he said, “You really are weird.”

But what he didn’t see were the archaeologists as they dug into a village where the workers lived. The pyramids took years to build and some of the men spent their entire lives there. They lived in little hovels along with their families. As the excavations revealed on my TV program that day, there were found cooking utensils, pottery, even ovens where their bread was baked.

At first, I thought these poor workers had only bread to survive, but suddenly it was announced the remains of large quantities of onions had been found. Yes, these poor people had what is equivalent to our Deep South cornbread and onion for their mainstay diet. I admit I felt much better.

Quickly I must add it was not Vidalia onions, but just the lowly onion. Yes, the lowly onion had taken its place among one the great events of history – not so lowly, I would say.

Anne McKee is a Mississippi historian, writer and storyteller. She is listed on the Mississippi Humanities Speakers Bureau and Mississippi Arts Commission’s Artist Roster. See her website: www.annemckeestoryteller.com.