Cheese and Onion Quiche

The kitchen smells of onions going slowly golden in butter. It's been twenty minutes and they're not done yet. Good. There's no rushing this part. The sweetness only comes with patience, and a cheese and onion quiche is, at its heart, a matter of those two things meeting properly: sweet, melting onions and sharp, salty cheese, held together by a custard that barely sets.

I make this more often than almost anything else. It's the kind of cooking that asks for your attention in small, manageable doses, a bit of pastry rubbing, some onions to stir now and then, a custard to whisk, and then the oven does the rest. It sits happily on a Saturday lunchtime table with a green salad, cuts neatly for a Monday packed lunch, and tastes just as good eaten cold, standing at the kitchen counter, straight from the fridge at eleven o'clock at night. A recipe is a conversation, not a contract, and this one is forgiving. If your pastry cracks, patch it. If your onions colour a little too much, they'll still taste good. We're only making dinner.

Use a mature cheddar, something with a real bite that can stand up to the sweetness of the onions. The cheap stuff melts into nothing and leaves the custard bland. The nutmeg matters too, more than you'd expect. It connects the cheese and the cream in a way that nothing else quite does. I wrote it down in the notebook years ago: onions, cheddar, nutmeg, right. I haven't changed a thing since.