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That said, I also like Pudlowski’s idea of adding a glass of the local white for a little extra acidity – just make sure you reduce it completely, because sprinkling a little flour over the top doesn’t seem to do the trick for me, (Although any dry white will do, if you use riesling or pinot gris, the rest of the bottle would be a good pairing at the table). As ever with onions, patience will be rewarded with enough butter, they don’t need more than the occasional stir, but the flavour, as well as the texture, is well worth the effort deep and almost winey. The other recipe, from Gilles Pudlowski’s Alsace Tradition, fries the onions for just three minutes, which does wilt them, but certainly doesn’t soften them to anything near the satiny ribbons I end up with after an hour of patient evaporation on the stove for Simon Hopkinson’s recipe. Jane Grigson suggests blanching onions in water for seven minutes, which is a disaster. More summery than Lancashire butter pie and less antisocial than pickled onion Space Raiders, this is a great, vegetarian-friendly centrepiece for a spring lunch, though, frankly, I’d snap it up at just about any time of day, or indeed year. Though it’s by no means the only onion pastry in the French repertoire – Provençal pissaladière and Flemish flamiche spring to mind, but there are no doubt others – it’s my new favourite. I’m not too proud to admit I was wrong: thanks to the alchemy that occurs when this most common, yet least lauded of vegetables is given time to fulfil its potential in the flavour department, this is a dish that’s far more than the sum of its parts. When I first came across it, in an Alsatian restaurant perched rather incongruously on the side of an Alp, I thought an onion tart sounded rather dull. Described by chef Simon Hopkinson as “a classic amongst tarts”, this deliciously sweet recipe from Alsace-Lorraine is somewhere between a quiche and a flammkuchen, a tangle of buttery, slow-cooked onions barely held together by a rich egg custard.