GLENNVILLE, Ga.— In springtime, you know you're in Vidalia country without reading the signs. As soon as you leave the piney woods of Fort Stewart, the Army base where American troops trained for the Persian Gulf war, you come upon an amazing sight: row after row of burlap bags stretching across the sandy fields as far as the eye can see, full of onions drying in the Georgia sun.

A local curiosity only 25 years ago, Vidalia onions have joined the ranks of seasonal foods keenly awaited by American consumers. The name is protected by law now, like that of Bresse chickens or Coca-Cola. Vidalias can be grown only in the distinctive soil of 13 contiguous counties between Macon and Savannah in southeast Georgia, plus parts of seven others.

In 1997, the total yield from 15,800 acres was 3.5 million pounds, worth $89 million -- big money in a rural, historically poor area where crossroads hamlets bear names like Daisy, Hopeulikit and Ohoopee.

People have eaten onions since antiquity; according to some historians, the ancient Egyptians worshiped them. Robert J. Courtine, the great French epicure, called the onion ''the truffle of the poor,'' though the rich could hardly do without it, either. It has only one flaw: eaten raw, it upsets delicate digestions, and its pungency lingers unalluringly on the breath.

Jonathan Swift understood the problem perfectly:

There is, in every cook's opinion,

No savory dish without an onion;

But lest your kissing should be spoiled

The onion must be thoroughly boiled.

Not if the onion in question is a Vidalia onion, named for the small town from which the first Vidalias were shipped several decades ago. Squat and thin-skinned, remarkably juicy and pale ivory in color, Vidalias are sweet when raw, sweet when cooked and succulent either way.

Vidalias are to run-of-the-mill onions as foie gras is to chopped liver, although it is the humble yellow or Spanish onion that provides the deep, rich base for a thousand and one down-home stews, braises and sauces.

Bake Vidalias in a covered dish with herbs, olive oil and balsamic vinegar; slice them in an onion, tomato and basil salad; make a raw onion sandwich, or prepare something elaborate, like the Vidalias stuffed with spicy sausage and topped with a cheese sauce that have been a spring tradition for years at Elizabeth Terry's award-winning restaurant in Savannah, Elizabeth on 37th.

Jeff Bubin named his restaurant for them. At Vidalia, in Washington, he goes through 20,000 to 30,000 pounds of sweet onions a year, he said, using them in the marmalade that he puts on every table, in his trademark baked onion recipe, in a dish of shrimp and grits with caramelized onions, and even in an onion and black pepper pound cake. When no Vidalias are available, he brings in sweet onions from farther south, usually from Guatemala or Chile.

''But nothing comes close to Vidalias,'' Mr. Bubin said.

Vidalia onions are grown from yellow Granex or Granex hybrid seed. But this is one case where the environment matters more than the lineage.

William M. Randle, a professor of horticulture at the University of Georgia at Athens, said the sandy, loamy soil found in parts of southeast Georgia has a remarkably low sulfur content. Since sulfur generates pungency in onions (and in their relatives shallots and garlic), low sulfur means sweet onions.

In addition, he said, temperatures hereabouts are ideal -- above freezing during the winter, then hot but not too hot in the spring, when heat is needed for the rapid formation of the underground bulb on the onion plant.

Similar conditions in other parts of the country enable farmers there to grow excellent sweet onions, too. There are Walla Wallas from southeast Washington State, Texas 1015's from South Texas, Mauis from Hawaii, and California Imperials from the Imperial Valley, all produced in smaller quantities than Vidalias.

A Toombs County farmer named Moses Coleman, or so local legend has it, first noticed the exceptional sweetness of Vidalia onions. He began growing them commercially in 1931, but the boom did not begin until years later.

There are now more than 150 onion growers in this region, many of them former tomato farmers who lost their markets in the early 1970's to Florida competitors who benefited from a growing season that started earlier and lasted longer.

AMONG all the producers, Elizabeth Terry and others here say, Delbert Bland deserves the most credit for making the Vidalia onion what it is today.

A lanky, bearded, tobacco-chewing good old boy who is likely to call a visiting Yankee ''hoss'' on first meeting, he graduated from high school in 1974, when the local tomato business was failing. He persuaded his father, Raymond, to try onions. Their first planting, five acres, was a flop: ''bad yield, worse sales.''

But they persisted. Raymond Bland worked in the fields, as he always had; at 71, he still drives a tractor almost every day.

''It broke my heart,'' Delbert Bland recalled, ''to see farmers work hard all year, then take their crops to town and ask the guys with neckties, 'How much will you give me for this?' I didn't want to live that way.''

So the younger Mr. Bland, who is 41, went into sales, much encouraged by a Wall Street Journal article describing Vidalias as ''the caviar of onions.'' He traveled the country, distributing samples, tearing out Yellow Pages entries for supermarkets in city after city, heading back to Glennville and sending off letters (''badly typed at 12 words a minute,'' he says with calculated self-mockery) to buyers for supermarket chains, big and small.

Eventually, in 1983, he took an ad in Southern Living, an eighth of a page, for $2,700. He sold 1,000 10-pound bags for $12.95 apiece, and a career as a direct marketer was born.

Soon Bland Farms was spending $300,000 a year on ads. Inspired by a similar label on Florida grapefruit, Mr. Bland started affixing a small decal to each onion, identifying it as a true Vidalia. He sent 10 pounds of onions to every food editor in the country, reaping a whirlwind of free publicity.

And from a student at Duke University who had been running a modest retail business to help pay his way through school, Delbert Bland bought the rights to a toll-free number (800-VIDALIA, or 800-843-2542) for a bargain price: $20,000.

Raymond Bland was puzzled by the merchandising mumbo jumbo.

''My father never learned to read and write,'' Mr. Bland said. ''He thinks if you're talking on the phone you're not working. So he came to me one day and asked me, 'Son, if you can get a phone number free, what are you spending all that money for?' ''

He soon had his answer.

For the 1998 crop, Bland Farms planted 2,600 acres in onions, more than twice as much as any local competitor and almost a fifth of the entire Georgia crop. Its. packing sheds, which cover seven acres, are the largest of their kind anywhere. At full tilt, Bland Farms can process 30,000 50-pound bags of Vidalias a day.

It is no backwoods enterprise. Planting and harvesting are planned with the help of data from global positioning satellites. Farm bosses communicate with walkie-talkies, and when I visited the Blands in May, the desk of Delbert's wife, Sandra, a snappily dressed former nurse who manages mail-order sales, held a computer and the latest issue of Advertising Age.

Bland Farms onions are sold in all 50 states, in Britain and in military commissaries around the world. The company mails two million catalogues a year, through which it sells not only onions but also baked goods, relishes and salsas and other onion products. In dollar volume, it is second only to the Northwest giant Ore-Ida in supermarket sales of frozen onion rings.

With 125 full-time employees and 1,200 or so seasonal helpers, Bland Farms will gross something in the neighborhood of $30 million in 1998.

I REMEMBERED that this was the Bible Belt as well as Vidalia country when I saw the bumper sticker on the back of Delbert Bland's red Chevy pickup.


Growing top-quality onions, Mr. Bland explained as we climbed in and headed toward some of his nearby fields, is a painstaking process. Seeds are sown by hand in seedbeds in September. Plants are pulled up in November and December, then dropped by hand into predrilled holes, 70,000 to an acre, by workers crawling on all fours.

During the cool months, the onion-to-be forms its rings, and when the first blast of heat hits, sometime in March, the rings begin growing rapidly. Mr. Bland has measured the growth, and he said an onion swells as much as an eighth of an inch every 24 hours during the process called ''bulbing.''

At harvest time, a flat blade is drawn under the onions, cutting them from their roots and forcing them halfway out of the ground. Then they are picked by hand and dropped into burlap coffee-bean and potato bags, which are left in the fields to begin the drying process that makes onions last longer. Back in the sheds, they are dried some more in warm rooms, then hand sorted for size and quality. The best go into foam-lined boxes for mail-order customers, the rest into bags or boxes. Some jumbos are three inches in diameter, but size, in the experts' judgment, has no impact on flavor.

There is only one crop a year, harvested in April, May and June. After that, Mr. Bland said, ''the gnats move in and the onions melt in the heat.''

But technology has extended the season. A colleague of Professor Randle's named Doyle Smittle, now retired, adapted a storage technique that apple growers had used for many years, and Vidalias are now available from April through October. The growers get twice their spring prices in the fall.

The process is known as ''controlled atmosphere.'' Most of the oxygen is extracted from huge, thick-walled rooms and replaced with a mixture containing 92 percent nitrogen at a temperature of 34 degrees and a humidity of 75 percent. Oxygen is what makes onions rot; nitrogen prevents that.

In a control room nearby, an English-made monitoring system, which looks sophisticated enough to monitor a space flight, automatically takes a sample of the air in each room each hour and sounds an alarm if anything is amiss.

Does Delbert mean it, can Delbert possibly mean it, I wonder, when he says: ''I don't eat onions myself. I'd much rather chew tobacco.''


Adapted from Elizabeth on 37th, Savannah, Ga.

Time: 1 hour 15 minutes

6 medium Vidalia onions

4 tablespoons butter, melted

Salt and freshly ground black pepper

1 pound bulk spicy sausage

2 tablespoons minced fresh parsley

1 tablespoon minced fresh sage

3/4 cup grated white Cheddar cheese

1 teaspoon minced fresh orange peel

1 tablespoon extra virgin olive oil

1 teaspoon minced garlic

1 teaspoon minced shallot (optional)

1/4 cup dry white wine or dry vermouth

1 teaspoon minced fresh lemon peel

1 tablespoon lemon juice

1/4 cup heavy cream

6 tablespoons cold unsalted butter, cut into pieces.

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Place a kettle of water on high heat, and bring to a boil. Peel the onions, and cut off 1 inch from each end. Using a sharp-edged spoon, scoop out the centers of the onions to within about 1/2 inch of the bottom. Reserve the centers.

2. Place the onions in a shallow baking dish, drizzle with the melted butter and season with salt and pepper to taste. Add boiling water to the baking dish until it is halfway up the sides of the onions. Cover with a lid or foil, and bake until the onions are tender, about 30 minutes. Carefully transfer the onions from the water to an oiled baking sheet, and set aside.

3. Mince the reserved onion centers. In a medium skillet over high heat, combine the minced onion, sausage, parsley and sage. Saute, stirring well to break up and brown the sausage. Drain and discard the fat. In a mixing bowl, combine the sausage, 1/4 cup of the cheese and orange peel. Spoon this mixture into the cavity of each onion, and sprinkle the onions with the remaining cheese; set aside. Keep the oven hot.

4. Prepare the lemon butter sauce: In a small saucepan, combine the olive oil, garlic, shallot, wine, lemon peel and lemon juice. Bring to a boil and reduce to about 2 tablespoons. Add the cream, and reduce to about 4 tablespoons. Reduce heat to medium. Whisk in the cold unsalted butter one piece at a time, until it is melted and the sauce is thick, about 1 minute. Strain the sauce; keep warm or it will separate. The sauce may be kept warm in a thermos or over a pan of hot water for up to 2 hours before serving.

5. Return the onions to the oven until the cheese is melted, about 5 minutes. To serve, spoon a pool of lemon butter sauce onto each plate, and top with an onion.

Yield: 6 servings.

Photos: VIDALIA ONIONS are harvested once a year in a small corner of the South. Their name is as closely guarded as a wine appellation. (pg. F1); ONION MEN Delbert Bland, right, and his father, Raymond, have 2,600 acres of Vidalias. (Greg Foster for The New York Times)(pg. F10) Map of Georgia showing the location of VIDALIA: VIDALIA COUNTRY is Southeast Georgia. (pg. F10)