The shallot is finer and milder than the onion. It is used mostly raw or barely cooked: vinaigrettes, sauces, beurre blanc, and to flavour a stir-fry without the strong taste of onion.
Firm, dry, with no shoot. The small ones are often milder.
Cut the top, leave the root, cut in half from top to bottom and take the thin skin off. It is smaller than the onion, hold it well with the claw grip.
One minute.
Like the onion: somewhere dry and away from light, several weeks. Cut, in the fridge in a container, two days.
The page "Homemade vinaigrette": a finely diced shallot in it, and it changes everything.
Very easy