May 2004 ARCHIVES of Andy's Life on
the Farm Shows
May 6th Tasting Askelon
This is Andrew Griffin of Mariquita Farm with Life on the Farm.
Back in the mid sixties Booker T. and the M..G.s had an instrumental
hit on the pop charts they called Green Onions. Why Green Onions? Probably
because the tune was tasty. Why didn't Booker title the piece Scallions?
Probably because he, like most people, wasn't exactly sure what a scallion
is. The word onion comes to us from the Latin unio, meaning unity, and
refers to the successive rings or layers of a mature onion that wrap
around one another to form a whole. A green onion can be an immature
bulbing onion still waving a green tail. The term scallion comes to
us from the name Askalon, an ancient port city famed for its onions
that was situated along the coast of what today is the nation of Israel.
Nowadays scallions are usually understood to be onions that don't bulb
up but divide to form larger tufts of green onions. Shallots are clustering
onions that make little clove-like bulbs and they, too, take their name
from Askalon. Say what you will about having an opera, a museum, a ballet,
or a professional sports team, I say a place has a deeply rooted culture
when it has a fruit or vegetable named after it. Long ago Ascalon had
a culture, an agri-culture, that we can still taste today. Tune in next
time to hear about a fruit named after a community along our own Monterey
Bay coastine.
For KUSP this is Andrew Griffin.
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