The deli round where I work has bagels. One day, quite by accident, I ordered an onion bagel toasted with peanut butter.
How does one do such a thing by accident? Feel free to let your imagination feast on that one.
As I unwrapped the bagel, I saw the impossible combination of flavors and may have actually physically backed away. This physical response may have elongated the time that the smell of that combination took to waft up to my nose, but it may have also sped it up. Something to do with thermo-dynamics and air flow principles, or something. Regardless, the odor of peanut butter cocooned in onion drifted to my nasal receptors. Suddenly, it required further examination.
I sat down. This was an event worthy of a sit.
After unwrapping the bagel fully, I turned it over. It had been bisected twice, first into two bagel shaped halves each with one flat side where they would apply the peanut butter and reassemble it, then again to form two ‘c’ shaped bagel-peanut butter sandwiches. I took the bottom half of one of the c’s and tore it in half, leaving me with an eighth of a bagel. Peanut butter side up, I took a bite.
I was happy with my decision to sit.
What a bite.
The crunch of the onion and the slight oily-ness of the cheap bulk peanut butter made for an amazing textile sensation. Like there was a sea urchin in my mouth but it didn’t hurt because the sea urchin actually a planet with enough gravity to keep an ocean of painter’s putty just deep enough to cover over its spikes, leaving few islands. Also, the urchin was made of a bready substance, not urchin.
The taste could not be explained in the same way.
The bite of the onion set against the backdrop of that peanut buttery curtain was unexpected and amazing. Onion never lost forefront, but at the same time the PB was always a key player. Onion was the snare and PB was the bass drum. There’s nothing I love more than drum solos in my mouth.
Before I knew it, the bagel was no more. All that remained was a crinkled sheet of wax paper with small peaks of escaped PB stuck to its insides. Thus started the first day of the rest of my onion and peanut butter based breakfast life.
