September Peels (2025)
broccoli, short stories, one-pot meals, sleepy playlists; the season is changing, i'm moody!
bonjour, you. if you’re new to The Onion Papers, i’m so happy you’ve come. Peels are a round-up feature at TOP, a writer’s almanac featuring bread, soil, reading and sky updates that comes out on the first Monday of each month. happy reading and clicking,
margaux
O, hi, reader. September was a fragrant whirlwind. The pouring rain swooshed clouds away, warmer days ahead before porcini the size of my actual fist poked their heads around the woods, and plenty of other caps pointed the tips of their nose between open trunks and broken branches. Crackling woods, crocking trees – September lingered inside my bones. In the city, the pavements were crowded with emptied cardboard boxes as Glasgow waved for novelty if not quite studious yet. Freshers drummed in and students walked down Byres Road with tiny cacti in pots and pans in their hands. ‘Who said I needed toes, papa?’ I heard a boy asking his dad, in French, in passing while cycling through the Kelvingrove Park, my fingers bloodless. The air whipping! The spiders webbed across the bushes next to the canal if not at the corner of my ceiling, behind the fridge and on the side of windows, parachuted anywhere and nowhere, still webbing and wet with the rain that didn’t fall but crawled back upstream – dew before a new day. The equinox happened on a Monday, capitalism ever a cheeky teaser in a world where most us workers and carers don’t know of a 9-to-5 week. Autumn is soulful if not foggy – tidal, flying, stretching as the gannets gear up to leave Bass Rock in the Fife for warmer seas. Eiders, shags, cormorants settle in, prompting earthlings to slow down as the land needs resting, frosting, so one builds a nest and knits a few, resourceful blankets of their own—and the year spins onwards. And everyone is talking louder than usual as necks withdraw beneath scarves, ears are tucked underneath hats. Shush, listen, a crunch as the first leaves fall, red.
bread update
Fully inspired by Andrew of Wordloaf, I watched this 30-minute video on Diego Laporal, a baker from Pain Vivan in Caen, France. It is absorbing and fixed my fidgety attention for half an hour, and, like Andrew always, the whole thing has inspired me to knead new doughs. Video is from Fabrice Cottez of Boulangerie Pas a Pas.
For now, I will fetch the starter at the back of the fridge and let things flow with a routine I know:
9:10: levain (70g starter; 70g white flour; 70g water)
12:35: autolyse (300g eight grains flour; 200g wholemeal spelt flour; 300g water)
15:40: incorporate the levain into the autolyse; rest
16:10: knead one
17:30: knead two
19:00: knead three; bench rest
19:30: return the dough to the fridge; proof the bread overnight
6:00am: shape the dough; pre-heat the oven, bench rest; score, bake
reading, listening
Readers of TOP will know, an awful lot of French classics. Madame Bovary, L’éducation sentimentale by Gustave Flaubert; La petite Fadette by George Sand; the correspondences of Gustave Flaubert, and the correspondences of Gustave Flaubert and George Sand. Not all, but some of my thoughts are available in my last newsletter.
In the English language, I was drawn towards short stories. In a fever and reminded that the personal is always political, I read Liadan Ní Chuinn’s Every One Still Here. These stories based during the Troubles in Northern Ireland are some of the greatest explorations of grief I have read.
The Bloody Chamber And Other Stories by Angela Carter completes my 2025 journey through Carter’s bibliography. A collection of fairy tale retellings, it is somehow truly original and, desperately, accurate. If beauty is never far from the beast, the beast keeps beauty close. It is violent at times; luminous, too.
An old, hardback copy of The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro landed on my doorstep as a surprise from a friend. This one read like an unsettling fable, fidgety phantoms to hold close to my chest – one about the pursuit of love.
‘But isn’t it hard, sir,’ Beatrice asked, ‘to see what truly lies in people’s hearts? Appearances deceive so easily.’
’That’s true, good lady, but then we boatmen have seen so many over the years it doesn’t take us long to see beyond deceptions. Besides, when travellers speak of their most cherished memories, it’s impossible for them to disguise the truth. A couple may claim to be bonded by love, but we boatmen may see resentment, anger, even hatred. Or a great barrenness. Sometimes a fear of loneliness and nothing more. Abiding love that has endured the years — that we see only rarely.’
In audio, plenty of “sleep” albums – from Max Richter, also from Max Richter and Louise Fuller and Max Ruisi, from Sigur Rós.
And Square Haunting by Francesca Wade, when music didn’t do the trick. Centred around Mecklenburgh Square, Bloomsbury, and set between the wars, this is the group bibliography of detective novelist Dorothy L. Sayers, modernist poet H.D., classicist Jane Harrison, economic historian Eileen Power and writer Virginia Woolf. As their paths cross, the nonsensical boundaries of social and intellectual scholarships are exposed. I do love parallel studies, and Wade is a talented storyteller.
in the kitchen
it smells of broccoli! Roasted, served with a tahini sauce; purée’d, a drizzle of olive oil and a sprinkle of Aleppo pepper on top; served in a gratin, with butter and broad beans, and anchovies:
in a casserole (that is suitable for the oven), soften some leek with the oil from an anchovies’ tin. Add some sage (chopped) and garlic (grated), plus ½ teaspoon of chilli powder and 1 teaspoon of fennel seeds. Cook gently. Add the juice from half an orange and the anchovies, stirring with a wooden spoon until the filets are reduced to a paste. Add the broccoli and broad beans, swirl and cook for five minutes or so, still gently. Reduce the heat. Add the butter beans + their water, as well as a generous gulp of oat cream. Simmer for a good ten minutes, or until the mixture will have thickened. Add some parmesan, swirl and pre-heat the oven to 180C. Roast until it’s bubbling. You may want to switch to grill for the last three-four-or-so minutes.
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If chaos leads the day, comes the evening and move a stool next to the kitchen counter; sit, stir – one-pot meals, stirring still:
Sage, capers, red onion, paprika, nigella seeds, ras el hanout spice mix. Olive oil, stir. Carrots, chestnut mushrooms, okra, stir and leave to cook. Add some veggie broth and a generous tablespoon (or two) of tomato purée, simmer. One teaspoon of rose harissa, broad beans, plus a handful of wholemeal bulgur fine. Stir, cook, eat.
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Fennel seeds, cumin, paprika, Aleppo pepper, coconut oil. Heat, fry but lightly. Red onion and parsley, stir. Carrots, cavolo nero, chestnut mushrooms, swirl, cook. Stir in some boiling water, melt a mushroom stock cube, and stir in a generous tablespoon of tomato purée and one teaspoon of rose harissa. Simmer until the mixture thickens. With a wooden spoon, dig a crater in the centre, crack an egg and cover the casserole. Reduce the heat, simmer until the egg is cooked to your taste. Grind some black pepper, yolky.
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Feeling fidgety instead? Saffron fish balls will take your mind off those thoughts (still cooked in the one casserole).
Soak a pinch of saffron threads in some warm water for 5 minutes. In a bowl, mix some firm white fish filets (boneless), egg yolk, spring onion, flat parsley and some breadcrumbs. Add the saffron and process to a thick paste. Wet your hands lightly, then make fish balls from the mixture. Put them on a tray and store in the fridge to chill.
In the meantime, prepare a tomato sauce. For this recipe, I like to use a brown onion, some paprika, cayenne pepper, harissa and cumin too.
Once you are happy with the consistence and texture of the tomato sauce, add the fish balls to the tomato sauce. Reduce the heat to a simmer and cook, moving the balls around occasionally. Serve hot.
from The Onion Papers
I read Madame Bovary, again, and the correspondence of Gustave Flaubert & George Sand — et hop, memory is a dreamer, after Emma Bovary and against despair:
memory is a dreamer: after Emma Bovary
I’m in the kitchen, chopping some sage or braiding some rosemary with the thyme from the garden, tying them together in a knot, washing capers off their Mediterranean sea-salt, peeling a carrot or slicing one of the long banana peppers we buy from the one corner shop weekly and, without turning my eyes away from the food, I say something like, ‘Do you r…
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Last bit of summer, island hopping nostalgia too — Hebridean encounters and ferry terminals; ways of seeing, a dispatch from an archipelago called Earth:
dispatch from an archipelago called Earth
As the clock hands touch midway through the day, the coast sinks. The vessel breaches into the open sea, the clouds too thick for the sun to pass on good news, the water as intransigent as the colour of petrol, rolling and rolling against the ferry’s rusty shell. There are yellow warning signs hanging on each one of the heavy-duty doors:
looking ahead (Glasgow, GMT)
We in the northern hemisphere are turning our back to the sun, retrieving as the palette dwindles through shades of umber, resisting here and there as the sky wakes up in pink and the geranium flowers in pink too, one more time, until the clock will reverse backwards on 26 October. The night is long; the ground has a bite, a feast for the caterpillars, every landscape so moody, autumnal; rainy, here and there, unsettled. But the sun will be lifting whenever it will show up, piercing for as many colours as a rainbow can bear; stormy, unpredictable. The kitchen is brothy – ginger and coconut soup variations; gnocchi di polenta, served with a cavolo nero (and pistachio) coat; mushrooms risotto; braised fennel; cauliflower soup, pumpkin soup; thicker the ratatouille, not to say ragù, stubborn, spongy but spoony. Stick those plums (halved) at the bottom of the oven whenever you are roasting something else, and they will preserve well in their juice, for later or as early as tomorrow morning’s porridge. Crab apples excuse the pears. Rosehips blend into oils, velvety on the skin. Cozy, a word to be reclaimed slowly, in a motion of repetitive patterns until a nest is built robust. The moon will be full on the seventh day of the month; Blood Moon, or Hunter’s Moon, you pick your feast. Domesticity is a powerful star to behold, in flux, boiling before it liquifies, mercurial and seasonal. Wishful thinking, with love and rage,
margaux
thank you for reading The Onion Papers. i’m margaux, a writer and cook, and this is my hybrid newsletter. if you enjoy my work, remember to subscribe and/or invite friends to the party as you keep me going.
PS. I write novels too.
