Onion sops and other stories

I suffer from Stir The Onions Syndrome.

STOS
I admit it.
If someone is cooking anything – even just a few onions in the pan – I have an irresistible urge to take the spoon away from them and stir.

Even if the onions don’t need any stirring. I often have the spoon before I can think that maybe, just maybe, other grownups are perfectly capable of stirring their own onions. I’ve have done this totally unawares, until I find myself with the spoon, and no memory as to how it got in my hot little hand.
It’s not about the cook. Or the spoon. Or even about those onions, it’s about all onions.
Onions as the base of so much food.
Onions as the root of cooking.
Onions as the prelude smell.

What comes after the onions?

But onion sops.

Not sobs,

from Onion Tears, although I have cried me a river of onion tears,

but sops. Quick sops Biblical backstory – a piece of bread dipped into something

26Jesus answered, He it is, to whom I shall give a sop, when I have dipped it. And when he had dipped the sop, he gave it to Judas Iscariot, the son of Simon. 27And after the sop Satan entered into him. Then said Jesus unto him, That thou doest, do quickly.

King James Bible

You know, like sippets,

Solomon’s Sippets – available in Austrailia

but larger

Sippets?

Yes, sippets. Sippets good.

Like tostes.

Toasting Fork – toasting old school

“A sop of Onions

Take and slice your Onions, & put them in a frying panne with a dish or two of sweete butter, and frie them together, then take a litle faire water and put to it salt and peper, and so frie them together a little more, the boile them in a lyttle Earthern pot, putting to it a lytle water and sweet butter, &c. You may use spinnage in a like manner.

Thomas Dawson. The Second Part of the Good Hus-wives Jewell. Falconwood Press: 1988.p. 7-8.

(Thomas Dawson is soooo cool – how many different ways can YOU spell ‘little’?)

Meanwhile, Last Thursday……

Culinary Insights |  Plimoth Bread Co, Tani Mauriello and Kathleen Wall | 4:00

Join Tani and Kathleen under the Culinary Insights tent on Thursday for a glimpse of all that awaits us this weekend (Sept 25-28) when Plimoth Plantations reveals the renovated and expanded Craft Center and all-new bakery, Plimoth Bread Co! Their program, A Toast to Bread, introduces us to sippets, sops and toasts. Not sure what those are? Come to the market on Thursday and find out!

New Plimoth Bread Co. at Plimoth Plantation Craft Cent.

How do you #icrafthistory?

#iservehistory

Drinking Peasants by Pieter -notice the onions hanging by the fire – Those braids or plats are known as traces. Onion Traces.