I was looking for something to write about. "Cocktail onion" popped into my head. So:
Consider the cocktail onion. It's a paradox. An onion that goes in a drink. It stands apart from fellow onions: small, pickled, jarred. It doesn't taste like an onion. There's very little you can do with them, save put them in a drink, and as we've established, that goes against conventional thinking. The cocktail onion is a condiment without a country.
Here's the thing with the cocktail onion: way back before you and I were born, someone decided to take those poor wretched runts of the onion litter, cast away like club-footed Spartan babies, and raise them up into something that could be loved. Then someone else thought it might be a kick to put one of those in a drink, cherries and olives be damned. At some point someone else pulled a stalk of rhubarb out of the ground, ate it, spat it out in disgust, thought for a moment, took the whole bunch of rhubarb home, chopped it up, dumped a bunch of sugar on it, put it in a pie crust, baked it, and ate the result. This is how civilization advances. One day rhubarb pie, the next the space shuttle.
There was a jar of them in the fridge, and on a whim one night (Beth was out with her friends, the children were a-bed, "Dollhouse" was on the TV, the air was electric with possibilities) I swapped out one of my two standard olives with a cocktail onion. Over the skewered pair went the vodka. The taste was interesting, the briny snap of the olive with the acrid sweetness of the onion. It was as unlikely as the name Elisha Dushku. An onion. Pickled, yes, but still an onion. In a drink. Go figure. A blog post about said cocktail onion. Again, go figure.
