It was one of those displays of loyalty that give leaders a queasy feeling in their stomachs, as if they had eaten boiled onions too fast.
It provoked cures galore; to ease the catarrh you boiled onions in milk blackened with pepper; for the congested passages you made a paste of boiled flour and nettles, wrapped it in a rag, and slapped it, sizzling, on the chest".
"In Siberia she wanted to make curtains for the unheated, filthy hut she was living in," Deborah Hautzig said, "so she got gauze from a friend whose father worked in the hospital and dyed the gauze yellow by boiling onion peel".
It's made of things that keep all winter, like corned beef, cabbage and all the great root vegetables -- there's boiling onions in there, parsnips, rutabaga, potatoes, turnips, carrots and beets, which you have to cook separately".
Sun Boiled Onions is at the Percy Miller Gallery, London SE1 (020-7207 4578), until October 21.
And recently Moir has moved into the art world - still under the stage name - first with a book, Sun Boiled Onions, and now with a show at London's britart gallery.
My version of this salad uses dried beans, soaked and then boiled with onion and bay leaves, but canned cranberry beans will help you assemble it quickly.
Other traditional breakfast offerings are Pulut lepa, banana leaf containing boiled fish, onion, chillies and coconut, barbecued and rolled in rice.
On a blanket of Japanese maple leaves, next to a tall cup of spindly enoki mushrooms and a single boiled pearl onion with a red beak of miso, he places a little fried sandwich: two pieces of lotus root filled with house-made fermented tofu.
