So this seems unlikely, but the Onion Brothers almost had a cookbook published, and it involves some Eastern European communist intrigue!

Well, sort of. One of the brothers knew someone who had a cousin in Berlin. This was back in ’88, shortly before the Berlin Wall came down.

Their cousin worked for the East German Food Publishing Concern (Die OestenDeutschenEssenWieSoPublizionenGezellSchaft or ODPGS), who were doing a series of vegetable cookbooks, but were running out of titles. When she heard the name ZwiebelBrueder (Onion Brothers), she was hooked!

So the Onion Brothers provided her with a lot of recipes, most of which she rejected as being impractical (“1. Kill a goose. 2. Reject bourgeois humor. 3. Sauté one tablespoon of chopped onion in a spoonful of the goose fat….”).

But then the Wall came down, and several months later, the successors of ODPGS, The New East German Food Publishing Concern (Die NeueOestenDeutschenEssenWieSoPublizionenKonzern) or NODPK, cancelled the cookbook. Only a few test editions survive. Some of these have the original illustrations, but most don’t.

And just as Communism was defeated, many of the Onion Brothers’ best recipes were lost. Here is one you might want to try:

BAKED SWEET ONIONS

Ingredients:
4 large sweet onions
Salt and pepper to taste
4 teaspoons butter

Preparation:

Preheat oven to 250 degrees F. Place onions into a baking dish with approximately 1 inch of water. Bake, uncovered, 2 hours or until onions are soft when you squeeze them.

Remove from oven and place onto a cutting board; pull back brown skins and cut them off at the roots. Transfer onto a serving platter and season each with salt, pepper and 1 teaspoon butter.

Makes 4 servings.

-R