Strain the onions and begin peel­ing them right away. Dis­card any bad onions or cut away bruised or dam­aged areas. The onions may sim­ply pop out of the out­er lay­ers when squeezed hard. Try to remove all the thin mem­branes that are found between each lay­er, these can make the vine­gar go cloudy in thejars. You could reach straight for the knife to whip off the brown skins but, for a more precise and easy peel, first soak them for five minutes in a bowl of boiling water and rinse until cool enough to handle. Trim the bare minimum from the tops and bottoms (excess trimming could cause more layers to slip off) and the skins should peel away with ease. Pour the vine­gar into a saucepan and gen­tly heat while adding the sug­ar. Stir until all the sug­ar is dissolved. Top­ping, tail­ing and then plung­ing the onions briefly into hot water will loosen their skins mak­ing them eas­i­er topeel. Gently heat the vinegar and spices for five to ten minutes (don’t let it boil), stirring to dissolve the sugar, then set aside to cool.

Using a jar fun­nel ladle the hot vine­gar into the jars. Clean the rim and then seal each jar as it is filled. Lay the peeled onions out on a large plas­tic or stain­less steel tray and sprin­kle over the salt. Cov­er with a tea tow­el and leave overnight or for 12 hours but nomore. This recipe makes five litres of onions with a lit­tle extra vine­gar to spare. For this recipe I’m using five 1 litre Kil­ner round clip-top jars which have wide mouths for easy filling. The recipe is pret­ty easy to pre­pare, the great­est dif­fi­cul­ties lie with peel­ing the onions but there are labour sav­ing tech­niques to help reduce the workload…But for the best results use good ol’ dirty brown malt vinegar. You’ll need roughly an equal volume of water to weight of onions – ie 100ml vinegar for every 100g of onions. And you also need 40g white sugar per 100g onions.