The Half-Onion Principle

In 1987, in a poorly-lit kitchen in Albany, NY, a man named Dr. Marcellus Thorne stared into his refrigerator at 9:47 PM on a Tuesday. He had: a half-onion, two eggs, half a sleeve of saltines, and an unmarked jar of beige liquid. Outside, it was 38°F and raining.

Thorne would later write: “The fridge is not a pantry. It is a crime scene. Every ingredient is a witness. Every leftover is a clue.”

He cooked something. Nobody knows exactly what. But that night the field of Culinary Forensics was born.