Dad held the onion in his left hand. In his right, a small paring knife. And he cut. Photograph by Iqbal Farooz

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Instinct, inheritance and becoming a Masaalchi

by Arun Kapil

My father never learned how to chop an onion.

At least, not in the way I would later be taught. There was no chopping board, damp cloth underneath to stop it slipping, expensive German knife or clawed fingers tucked obediently out of harm’s way. No rocking motion. No beautifully uniform dice lined up like little translucent soldiers awaiting inspection.

Dad held the onion in his left hand. In his right, a small paring knife. And he cut. Chunks fell directly from his hand into hot oil in a high-sided pot, hissing as they hit. His fingers moved around the onion, the knife towards them, in a manner that would probably have caused one of my later cookery-school teachers to require a lie-down.

He was making dinner.

This was our kitchen in the late 1970s. I would have been seven or eight, nine perhaps. It was a modest kitchen in a modest house, arranged with the practical optimism of the period. Freestanding cooker. Tiled floor. Sink beneath the window looking into the garden. Cupboards and worktops. A breakfast bar. You know. A 70s set-up. And on the breakfast bar, naturally, the SodaStream. Nothing fancy. Everything practical.

I loved that kitchen. And it seemed to be where love was. Not that anybody would have said anything quite so ridiculous at the time. Dad cooked. Mum cooked. We ate. My brothers were there. Life happened. The kettle went on. Things got chopped. Things got fried. Somebody invariably needed something from the cupboard you were standing in front of. Mum and Dad talked. We got under their feet. Dinner arrived. Love was considerably less complicated when nobody felt obliged to call it love.

Onions were everywhere. Dad had learned to cook from his sisters before leaving India. Their reasoning was wonderfully straightforward: if their brother was going to leave home, he needed to know how to feed himself. Not become a cook. Feed himself. There is a universe of difference between the two. He arrived in the UK carrying a way of cooking that had never been formally described to him as philosophy, methodology or culinary heritage. It was simply useful knowledge.

You put this with that.

You listened.

You smelled.

You waited.

You knew.

Especially onions. He knew how an onion was doing from the sound it made in the pan and the smell coming off it. I don’t remember timers when he was cooking. Mum – yes. Always with the timers. And I certainly don’t remember him consulting a recipe and discovering that the onions required “six to eight minutes until translucent”. Translucent? What did that even mean to an 8-year-old me?

An onion can soften into sweetness. It can collapse almost to nothing. It can remain pale and silky or be pushed through gold towards something deeper, darker, savoury, almost bitter. It can retain bite, become crisp, disappear into a sauce or sit proudly on top of the finished dish. Dad didn’t have that vocabulary. He didn’t need it.

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Mum, meanwhile, had a rather different relationship with the onion. She did her best to avoid chopping the things, to avoid the tears. And this being the 1970s, mankind had apparently decided that the correct response to an onion making you cry was not simply to sharpen your knife or open a window, but to engineer a small domestic contraption with the aesthetic sensibility of an Apollo landing module. Ours had a clear plastic cage. An orange plastic top. A metal plunger loaded with a coiled spring, topped with a pleasingly rounded disc. You imprisoned the offending onion beneath it and pressed. Repeatedly. Down plunged the metal grid.

Splat.

Onion annihilated. Tremendously satisfying. There were other strategies. Chilling them. Freezing them. Grating them. Wearing swimming goggles. Various bits of domestic folklore designed to defeat the invisible enemy rising from the chopping board. I preferred the enemy. I loved the burn.

I remember standing there with tears streaming down my face, eyes stinging, determined to continue. Mum would look over. “Are you all right?” “Yep.” Absolutely fine. Clearly not fine. But there was no chance I was admitting it because I was helping. That mattered. I wasn’t outside the kitchen waiting for food to appear. I was in it. Doing something. Contributing to this mysterious family business of turning raw things into nourishment. The tears were proof of work. So let them run.

And it turns out the onion really is fighting back. Slice through it and you break open compartments that were never meant to meet. Enzymes collide with sulphur chemistry and the onion, quite reasonably, assumes it is under attack. Because it is. One result is the wonderfully named lachrymatory factor: volatile chemistry designed, in effect, to make the animal chewing the plant regret its choices.

Knife + onion = chemistry.

And I still swear onions fought harder when I was a boy. I can’t prove it. There is good evidence that onion pungency varies with variety, genetics, growing conditions and sulphur nutrition. Seemingly plant breeders have deliberately developed milder and even effectively tearless onions in an attempt to deny the new cook the satisfaction of conquering the pain. But whether the ordinary British onion of my childhood was genuinely more belligerent than the one in my kitchen today, I don’t know. Perhaps memory has simply preserved the burn.

I rather hope not. Because the burn meant I was contributing. And perhaps that was the beginning of it. Not my career in food. Certainly not some ghastly childhood-origin story in which the young chef discovers his destiny while contemplating an onion at eight years old. I simply wanted to be near Mum and Dad. Cooking happened to be where they were. And somewhere between Dad carving onions over a pan and Mum deploying spring-loaded weaponry against them, I began paying attention.

Years later, I went away and learned how to do it – professionally. I watched cooks. I watched television. I practised for mad hours. I learned how to hold a knife, sharpen it, make the cuts even, work quickly and safely. I learned the French names for things. I learned technique. And technique matters.

I’m not going to perform that tiresome trick of pretending formal training somehow corrupted the purity of instinct. Training made me better. It smoothed rough edges. Added finesse to things I could already feel but couldn’t necessarily articulate. It introduced discipline, control, repeatability. It gave me other ways of solving problems. For a while, though, I think I lost something.

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I learned how an onion should be chopped. Dad had simply cut the onion he needed to cook. It has taken me much of my working life to understand that these two things don’t have to fight each other. Instinct doesn’t have to lose when technique arrives. Science doesn’t invalidate memory. Classical training doesn’t make inherited knowledge primitive, any more than inherited knowledge makes classical technique pretentious. They are different ways of knowing. The useful question is what you do with them. Because there is no correct way to cook an onion. There is only the question: What do you need this onion to do?

Crisp?

Sweet?

Sharp?

Silky?

Deep?

Clean?

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Do I want it to sit visibly in the finished dish, or quietly disappear into its architecture? That answer determines what happens next. These days I check the onion first. Freshness. Firmness. Peel away the papery skin, discard a tough outer layer if necessary. Remove that wafer-thin membrane which occasionally clings to the flesh and makes the thing slip and slide beneath your fingers. Then cut. And listen. The pan tells you a great deal if you allow it to. A furious sizzle tells me one thing. A gentle hiss another.

Heat + onion = different chemistry. Leave it there.

Time + onion = different again.

One object. Multiple possible selves.

As water leaves, the onion begins to change character. The furious hiss softens. Sweetness emerges. Push the heat and colour follows. Cooks tend to call all of this caramelising, principally because cooks have dinner to get out. Chemists, annoyingly, know it is more complicated. Sugars concentrate and break down; amino compounds react; Maillard chemistry joins the party. Colour deepens, aromas multiply, flavour becomes something the raw onion could never have imagined.

Which is why “fry the onion” in itself is almost useless as an instruction. For how long? To what end? What onion? The pale one softened patiently beneath a cartouche? The quickly sautéed one retaining shape and freshness? The one fried hard enough to colour at its edges? The one taken slowly towards deep brown? The crisp shard? The slippery tangle? The almost invisible pulp holding everything else together?

All onions. All different. And then there is the smell. Onion. Garlic. Ginger. Butter. Ghee. The aromatic base – the foundation of a good hearty curry dish. There is a moment when those assertive ingredients stop behaving like separate individuals and begin becoming something together. Years ago I was cooking with friend Ross Lewis, one of Ireland’s most highly regarded chefs, in his restaurant kitchen when he stopped to remark on precisely that fragrance.

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Ghee, incidentally, is a word best delivered carefully in Ireland. It can start an entirely different conversation.

But Ross noticed the smell. That stayed with me. Not because a Michelin-starred chef had finally given Indian food permission to smell nice. Indian kitchens have managed perfectly well without Michelin’s assistance. It mattered because I respect Ross. He had supported me long before there was any obvious commercial advantage in doing so, encouraging me to create blends for his dishes. I learned from him. And, I like to think, he learned from me too – ingredients, techniques, spices; another vocabulary of flavour passing both ways.

And like plenty of cooks, I carried around that irritating little companion called impostor syndrome. Ross – and another friend, mentor and teacher, Max – helped quieten it. Here were accomplished cooks smelling something I knew intimately and were recognising its beauty. To Ross, a glorious fragrance. To me, home. Mum. Dad. My brothers. Family.

Love. Security. Stability.

Not home in the misty-eyed, sepia-filtered sense. We don’t need a violin section every time somebody fries an onion. Simply familiar. Safe. I knew that smell before I knew how to describe it. Perhaps, thinking about it now, that was the Masaalchi in me long before I had the word for it. Because the onion is not simply in the sauce. It helps create the conditions for the sauce to exist. Cook it one way and it brings sweetness. Another, depth. Work it down and it contributes body and texture. It receives ginger and garlic. Carries spice. Fat moves through it. Water leaves it. Other ingredients arrive. The whole thing changes again. This is architecture.

Classical French cooking developed brilliant systems for constructing and thickening sauces: roux, flour, butter, reduction, emulsification, liaison, beurre manié. Indian cooks confronted many of the same physical problems and found other answers. Onions. Nuts. Seeds. Pulses. Yoghurt. Ground spices. Purées. Reduction. The patient manipulation of fat, water and heat. Not better. Not worse. Different solutions to the same challenge of creating deliciousness.

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And there is no single “Indian answer”, either. That would be nonsense. A subcontinent of communities, climates, faiths, crops, migrations, trade routes, prohibitions and preferences has produced countless cooking systems, frequently disagreeing with one another. Some Indian traditions build upon onion. Others deliberately exclude it, notably Jain cooking and particular Brahmin culinary traditions for reasons bound up with non-violence, purity, spirituality and ideas about what food does to the body and mind.

Later I went looking for what everybody else did with the thing. Whole onions roasted under a snowfall of flaky salt. Layers softened, peeled away, tart farce, a layer folded over, stuffed and returned to the oven. Petals scorched at the edges and dropped into salads and sauces. French, Italian, Persian, Middle Eastern, everybody had found another possible onion. Cuisine isn’t a list of ingredients. It is a set of relationships. This is where I come back to an old word.

Masaalchi.

I first reached for it when I came to Ireland and began my spice company. I wanted a word that suggested what I was doing – milling, blending, combining – an art, a craft rooted in something older than a factory specification. Over the years, my understanding of it has grown.

For me, a Masaalchi notices. That’s where it starts. Not with encyclopaedic spice knowledge. Not secret recipes. Not sacred rules. Certainly not the right to tell everyone else they are doing it wrong. Attention. What is actually happening in front of you? The onion refuses to give one answer. Sharp or sweet. Crisp or soft. Loud or almost invisible. It can announce itself or quietly work in the background, giving depth while something more glamorous takes the applause.

It adapts without surrendering its character. I like that. Perhaps because I’ve spent much of my own life between things. Indian and British. Irish now too. Home and away. Instinct and training. The food I grew up around and the food I later learned professionally. Dad’s knife in his hand and the beautiful discipline of a chopping board.

For a while I thought these things needed reconciling, as though somewhere there existed a correct Arun and my job was to find him. I’m less interested in that now. They are learnings. A Masaalchi learns, understands, then combines those learnings according to purpose. Memory. Technique. Science. Instinct. Experience. Not a hierarchy. A repertoire.

Understand the objective first. Then crack on.

I have become suspicious of certainty in food. Particularly loud certainty. The person insisting there is only one authentic way to make a dish. Don’t get me wrong. I understand the desire for rules. They give us somewhere to start. I respect the classics because there is enormous knowledge buried inside them. But I don’t cook in obedience to them. I cook toward flavour. The chef whose ego reaches the table before dinner. Performative expertise. Performative authenticity. The endless theatre of knowing better. There is confidence. And there is arrogance. They are not the same thing.

Dad was confident enough to hold an onion in one hand and cut towards his fingers because that was how he knew to do it. He wasn’t making a point. He wasn’t rejecting classical knife technique. He was feeding his family. That sort of confidence is quiet. It doesn’t require an audience.

An onion understands something of this too – in the way only a root vegetable can. Nobody has ever brought one to the table beneath a silver cloche and expected a standing ovation. Yet take onion away from countless dishes and something fundamental disappears. The finished thing may not taste obviously of onion. It simply tastes thinner. Less complete. As though somebody quietly removed a supporting wall. There is generosity in ingredients that work like that.

They don’t dominate the conversation. They make the conversation possible. And perhaps that is another part of being a Masaalchi. You don’t feed your own ego. You feed anyone. Everyone. That matters more to me the older I get.

We increasingly talk about food in strange ways. Food as performance. Identity. Content. Optimisation. Protein targets. Superfoods. Hacks. Supplements. Virtue. Sin. Things to eliminate. Things we absolutely must add. Meanwhile, most of the important work food does remains stubbornly ordinary. It feeds people. A pot of dahl can turn pulses, onion, water and spice into something inexpensive, nourishing and deeply pleasurable. Rice stretches it further. Something green. Pickle. Yoghurt. Another person turns up unexpectedly and somehow the pot accommodates them too. That is health as I understand it. Not punishment. Not optimisation. Nourishment. And commune.

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The onion has plenty to recommend it nutritionally too, fibre, fructans, flavonoids such as quercetin; chemistry that scientists continue to pick apart with admirable enthusiasm. Good. I’m interested. But, similarly I don’t want to reduce health merely to an inventory of compounds. Sometimes health is knowing how to turn an inexpensive bag of onions and pulses into something your family actively wants to eat. Sometimes it is another bowl of dahl appearing because somebody unexpected came through the door.

Sometimes your brother is leaving India and you teach him to cook because wherever he is going, he must know how to feed himself. Dad’s sisters understood that. He carried their knowledge to the UK. Some of it reached me without anybody deciding that teaching was taking place. I went on to learn more. Better knives. Formal training. Restaurants. Other chefs. Growers. Suppliers. Books. Science. Factories. Mistakes. Thousands upon thousands of pans. Hours spent, bent double over the pot-wash sink.

After all that learning, perhaps the onion has taught me something wonderfully uncomplicated. There is a calmness in knowing what matters that I find increasingly attractive in a noisy world. Not passivity. Not meekness. I have little appetite for ignorance, bullies or performative nonsense. Quiet confidence does not mean standing quietly while somebody behaves badly. It means knowing where your energy is useful. An onion doesn’t need to shout to change the whole pot. Perhaps neither do we. And yes, I realise we are approaching dangerous territory here.

Another paragraph and I’ll be telling you to live your life like an onion, peeling away your emotional layers while crying therapeutically into a wellness journal. No. No, I won’t. Not at all. It’s an onion. Let’s retain some kind of perspective. But after all these years of cutting them, sweating them, browning them, burning them, tasting them and occasionally still crying over them, I admire their range. Their cousins too.

The onions of India: often smaller, red-purple, sweeter and more insistent. Pyaz in Hindi. And then there is dopiaza – literally “two onions”, or “double onion”, depending on whose version of the story you trust – a whole family of dishes built around the unapologetic abundance of the thing: savoury sweetness grounding the dish in its own moreish self-belief.

The long, gentle sweetness of leek. The fresh green bite of scallion. Shallots and their less fiddly relative, the banana shallot. Garlic, of course, the louder allicin packed family member who walks into the room already halfway through the story. And thyme with onion. Time and onion. Thyme and onion. Perfect. Context matters. Relationships matter. The objective matters. Which is why, when I try to explain what a Masaalchi is, I keep returning to cooking rather than definitions. I could say, ‘someone who understands spice and flavour’. True, but incomplete.

For me, the Masaalchi is interested in what happens between things – when they combine, mingle, change one another. Ingredient and heat. Heat and time. Memory and technique. Science and instinct. One culture and another. Cook and eater. What we inherit and what we go out into the world to learn. Not muddling everything together indiscriminately. Understanding each well enough to know when and how they might best live together. Dad wasn’t giving lessons. He was making dinner.

And this little boy was nearby, paying attention.

I spent years afterwards learning professionally some of what I had already been taught, without anybody calling it teaching. Perhaps that is where my journey towards becoming a Masaalchi really began. Not in a spice mill. Not in cookery school. Not when I started a spice company or first reached for the word to describe what I did, but in a modest kitchen in Scunthorpe. Mum nearby. My brothers somewhere in the orbit of family life. SodaStream on the breakfast bar. Dad with an onion in his left hand. A small knife in his right. Hot oil waiting below.

He cut.

The onion hit the pan.

It hissed.

Dad listened.

He smelled.

And when it was ready, he knew.

Masale Bolte Hain

The spices speak.

Clearly, my recipe for this month could only be one thing…

Two Onions, One Point: Mutton Dopiaza

Deep Brown Gravy and Absolutely No Apology.

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Dopiaza is what happens when the onion gets promoted from supporting actor to leading man. Most North Indian meat curries live somewhere around that familiar onion-tomato equilibrium: sweetness underneath, acidity over the top, masala holding the peace. Bhuna sits comfortably in that middle ground. Dopiaza deliberately tips the scales. Onion, onion and more onion; cooked twice, two ways, until one lot disappears into the gravy and the other stays sweet, glossy and defiantly itself. And if you want to understand the whole curry spectrum, imagine the pendulum swinging the other way: a proper chicken karahi, all tomato, practically no onion. Same spice cupboard. Completely different architecture.

Take about 800g mutton, goat or braising beef, cut into generous curry pieces. Shoulder, neck or chuck are perfect; this is food that likes a little connective tissue and a bit of time. Now brace yourself for the onions: 700–800g of them, four or five decent ones. Slice roughly two-thirds thinly and cut the rest into chunky petals or fat wedges. That second pile is important. Don’t absent-mindedly chuck the whole lot in together.

Heat 3 tablespoons ghee in a heavy casserole until it shimmers. Drop in 1 teaspoon cumin seeds, 4 cloves, 6 black peppercorns, 1 Indian bay leaf, a short piece of cinnamon and one bruised black cardamom pod. Let them crackle, darken and throw their perfume around the kitchen. Add the thinly sliced onions with a good pinch of salt and cook them patiently, properly patiently, until they collapse from white, to blonde, to tobacco-gold. This isn’t garnish. This is your gravy being born.

Stir in 1 heaped tablespoon ginger-garlic paste, then add 1 teaspoon ground coriander, ½ teaspoon turmeric, 1 teaspoon Kashmiri chilli powder, ½ teaspoon roasted ground fennel and a small pinch of ground fenugreek. Keep stirring until the spices lose their dusty edge and become part of the fat. Now add the meat. Turn the heat up and bhuno (slow fry) the life into it: fry, turn, scrape, fry again, letting the meat catch around the edges and the onion masala cling to every crag and corner. Give it ten good minutes. This is not browning for Instagram. This is flavour being welded onto meat.

Remove from the heat. Beat 150g full-fat Greek yoghurt until smooth. Add it a spoonful at a time, stirring between additions so it melts into the masala rather than panicking and splitting. Return to the heat and cook until the ghee begins to glimmer back through the sauce. Season with salt, then add about 300–400ml hot water, enough to come halfway up the meat but nowhere near drowning it. Lid on. Into an oven, 170°C or Gas 3. Let mutton or goat mumble away for around 60–90 minutes, beef perhaps 90 minutes to 2 hours, until a spoon pushed against the meat meets very little argument. Check halfway through and add a splash more hot water if needed, but remember: dopiaza is a clinging curry, not meat soup. Remove from the oven and pop back onto your hob, set to medium-low flame

And now the second onion.

Drop those chunky onion petals into the pot with 2 slit green chillies. Turn the heat up slightly and cook uncovered for another 10–15 minutes. You want them softened and glossed in gravy but still recognisably onion – curved petals with a little bite left in them, sweet against the dark, slow-cooked base beneath. That contrast is the whole trick. One onion has surrendered. The other has merely loosened its tie.

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Finish with 1 teaspoon House Garam Masala, a fistful of chopped coriander and, if the meat is particularly rich, a small squeeze of lime to sharpen the edges. No tomato. Resist it. There is already sweetness, acidity from the yoghurt, spice, meat juice, browned onion and enough savoury depth to make a spoon stand still for a moment before going back in.

Serve with plain basmati, jeera rice or hot chapattis and something cold and uncomplicated on the side. Maybe yoghurt. Maybe sliced cucumber. Maybe a favourite Pilsner. Definitely more raw onion if you fancy completing the joke.

Masala Note: Dopiaza – It’s Not Just “Twice the Onion”

“Do pyaaza” gets translated rather neatly as two onions, which has encouraged generations of menu writers to tell us the dish simply contains double the usual quantity. Lovely story. Not quite the whole story. The smarter explanation is culinary rather than mathematical: onion enters the pot in two acts. The first is cooked down hard into sweetness, body and gravy; the second arrives later and keeps some texture of its own. Same ingredient, two behaviours. That is proper masaalchi thinking – flavour isn’t only what you put in. It’s when, how and what you ask it to become.

And that’s why dopiaza matters. Take the standard onion-and-tomato curry axis and shove it deliberately towards onion. Bhuna occupies the middle ground: onion and tomato, broadly balanced, cooked down until the masala clings. Swing hard towards tomato and you begin wandering into karahi country. Swing towards onion and you land here: brown, sweet, savoury, gently sharp, meat-rich dopiaza.

Not every curry needs a tin of tomatoes.

Sometimes an onion just needs room to speak.

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Arun Kapil, Food Editor of Ars Notoria The Art of the Noteworthy, is a punk food poet and founded and owns a spice company, Green Saffron Spices. He works sustainably direct with partner farms mainly to the west and north of India and some in the south. He works directly from source. He owns total chain of custody, depleting links in the chain, bringing direct line of sight to fields of cultivation. Arun and his partner Olive began by selling one or two sachets a week of bespoke blends with accompanying recipes at a farmers market stall in Mahon Point, Cork. They now sell spices and seasonings to globally based blue chips, onward food processors and are just in the throes of re-launching their brand, based on Modern India meal solutions, sauces, spice blends, naan, condiments and basmati. They started the business boot-strapping from the bottom up, managed with a good deal of jugaard. He considers himself to be a masaalchi and at best a khansama supported by a strong network of Irish, Indian and British agri-experts and businessmen.