At just over 20 square miles, the island of Bermuda is barely a blip in the North Atlantic Ocean. Yet for much of the 1800s, this small British territory boasted an outsized reputation for one unlikely export: onions. In All About Bermuda Onions, Nancy Hutchings Valentine, a prominent Bermudian artist in her lifetime, writes that the island was growing 332,745 pounds of onions by 1844, mostly for foreign export. “Bermudian merchant seamen became known as ‘Onions’ and Bermuda was nicknamed ‘The Onion Patch,’” Valentine writes. Bermuda onions, which flourished in…
