Onions

Anyone looking over the hills south of Aalst in the nineteenth century would have seen not wheat or rye, but row upon row of onions — gleaming and round, with green stalks waving in the wind like saluting soldiers. The soil along the Dender was fertile and moist, ideal for crops that loved water. And no crop loved the Aalst clay more than the onion.

Onion farming was no sideline. It was the backbone of the Aalst economy, alongside the hop trade. At the market in the centre of town, the stalls overflowed with onions of every size: small silver onions for pickling, large yellow ones for stews, red ones for salads. The smell of onions hung over the city like an invisible blanket — sharp, earthy, and unmistakable.

There was even an Onion Street, leading to the Onion Field, a vast plot on the edge of town where the onions grew. The street is now called Felix de Hertstraat, and the field is built over with houses. But in the memory of Aalst, the onions are still there.

When exactly the people of Aalst were first called ’onions’ is uncertain. The oldest written reference dates from 1843, in an East Flemish folk song from Dendermonde that pokes fun at the inhabitants of various towns. The people of Aalst are called ’onion peelers’ — folk who spent all day handling onions.

The name had variants: onion farmers, onion guzzlers, onion heads. But in the end the simplest word survived: onions. In 1925, the Van Dale dictionary recorded it as ’one of the newest but certainly the most commonly used nickname’ for the people of Aalst — a name that had displaced all older epithets.

Was it a compliment? No. Was it an insult? Not really. It was above all a statement of fact: Aalst smelled of onions, traded in onions, and ate onions at every meal. Anyone who had a problem with that had better find another town.

The onion fields are gone. The Onion Street has a different name. But the onion lives on in Aalst, more stubborn than any crop. During carnival — the festival that has gripped Aalst since the fifteenth century — wooden miniature onions are thrown from the town hall and the cafés around the Grand Market on Monday evening. It is the onion throw, a tradition that reaffirms the bond between the town and its nickname year after year.

And if you ask someone from Aalst whether they are ashamed of the name, they look at you as though you are mad. ’Ashamed?’ they say. ’The onion is the most honest vegetable there is. Layer upon layer, without secrets. What you see is what you get. If that is not a compliment, I don’t know what is.’

So Aalst wears its nickname like a badge — not on its sleeve but on its heart. And anyone who peels through it, as with a real onion, finds nothing but more layers of the same pride.