Allium cepa Seeds | Southport White Globe Onion
LATIN NAME: Allium cepa
COMMON NAME: Southport White Globe Onion
Plant Profile
Before refrigerated trucks, the harbour village of Southport on the Connecticut shore built a small fortune shipping barrels of dry bulbs to New York City, and the variety that carried its name was a globe-shaped white onion that could sit in a cellar through the winter without spoiling. The ‘Southport White Globe’ was a 19th-century seed-trade achievement: a pungent, solid bulb bred for one job, keeping, rather than for mildness or looks. Growers still raise it because almost no modern supermarket onion stores as long or tastes as sharp once cooked.
The plant forms one large, flattened-globe bulb with a single growing centre, wrapped in several layers of pure white, papery tunic that sheds soil and resists staining. The flesh inside is crisp and pale, ringed with a firm scale structure that holds moisture far better than the soft flesh of a sweet onion. Hollow, grey-green leaves rise in a neat fan, and a stout, swollen false stem sits at the neck. Unlike a multiplier onion, it makes no side cloves; the whole weight goes into one globe.
Yellow storage onions such as ‘Copra’ or ‘Stuttgarter’ cure to a brown skin and a deeper bite, but the Southport white keeps a cleaner, almost glassy appearance and a drier neck that seals tightly after the tops fall. That dry neck is the real secret of its shelf life, because a moist neck is where rot begins. Seed catalogues of the 1880s ranked it among the best white keepers for the northern United States, and it remains a benchmark for home storage trials.
After the tops brown and fold, the bulbs are lifted, cured in air until the neck is fully dry, and stored in a cool, dark, well-ventilated space where they may hold firm for many months. The white globe was the classic cellar onion of the northeastern United States precisely because it asks for so little once cured.
Science & Biotechnology
The alliinase enzyme converts the precursors into thiosulphinate compounds within seconds of cutting, and the principal product is allicin, the molecule behind the hot, eye-watering bite of raw onion. Cooking drives off the volatile sulphur compounds and leaves a sweet, rounded base note, which is why a Southport globe tastes fierce raw yet mellows into a deep savoury backbone in a long braise. The high precursor load is exactly what gives this cultivar its old reputation as a keeper and a soup onion.
Uses & Benefits
The sharpness of a Southport globe is not present in the intact bulb. The flavour lives as stable, odourless precursors called S-alk(en)yl cysteine sulphoxides, held inside the scale cells. The two main ones in a storage onion are isoalliin and methiin, and when a knife cuts the tissue they meet the enzyme alliinase, which was kept apart in a different cell compartment.
Besides sulphur compounds, the scale tissue stores fructans, a chain of fructose sugars that acts as the bulb’s energy reserve through the dormant season. These soluble carbohydrates are what the plant slowly burns while it sits in storage, and they also contribute to the gentle sweetness that emerges after slow cooking. A bulb with a high fructan pool simply lasts longer before it shrivels.
This is a cooking onion first and a raw onion second. Its firm rings hold their shape in stocks, onion soups, and pot roasts, and the dry, papery skin slips off cleanly for pickling whole small globes in spiced vinegar.
In the kitchen garden it sits beside other relied-upon alliums: the common onion, the clustered Dutch shallot, the perennial tree onion, and the slender Welsh onion for cut greens. Garlic chives fill the edge with early summer blooms, and the globe’s sharp cooked note pairs naturally with all of them across a year of soups and braises.
Growing from Seed
The globe wants a deeply worked, fertile, neutral bed with steady moisture and full sun. A crude medium of one part garden loam, one part compost, and one part coarse sand gives the roots room and drains sharply after rain.
Sow the fine black seed in a shallow drill no more than a finger’s depth, pressing the soil firm and keeping the surface evenly moist until the seedlings stand. Thin for airy spacing early so each young plant builds a wide leaf fan.
Begin thinning when the seedlings show their third true leaf, pulling the weakest so the remaining plants stand a hand’s width apart; continue to a final spacing of about ten centimetres once they reach six true leaves and a pencil-thick stem. Transplanting the young bulbs is avoided, because disturbing the root checks bulb size.
Our Take
I keep a short row of ‘Southport White Globe’ every year for the cellar, and the reward is a winter of soups that taste of real onion. For milder fresh eating the Walla Walla Onion Allium cepa var. cepa ‘Walla Walla’ will please more, while the Dutch Shallot Allium cepa (Aggregatum) is the classic clustered neighbour and the Garlic Chives seed Allium tuberosum with the Chives Allium schoenoprasum fill the bed with pollinator blooms.
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