Bear, thanks for the (probable) ref.  It has dawned upon me that I might have read it in 'Brewing mead...' (can't remember that author's name).

Regarding the actual soup....
Thanks a lot for the tip. I will be very careful in the selection of beer as well as cooking until the onion's soft.  I plan to go for a very lightly hopped Bavarian lager if there's no suitable ale to be found.  I will also, before cooking with it, shake out as much CO2 as possible and taste for any nasty flavours hiding behind the CO2.
The group I'm cooking with once tried to make a recipe from Maggie Black's book on medieval cooking, I think it was called 'fish in good sauce' or something similar.  They made the mistake of using a highly hopped porter.  Needless to say the result was, well, a bit on the bitter side and the recipe renamed to 'fish in oh-so-horrible-sauce'.  This was before I joined them and they're still a bit sceptic about using beer/ale in their cooking.

/Angus.

<snip>
>I have only one recommendation for you -- taste-test this before feeding
>it to unsuspecting feasters!  I was once at a feast that went down in
>history as "the feast that had that revolting beer and onion soup".  The
>cook had used a modern mass-produced lager (as far as we could tell),
>the onions were half-raw, and the whole thing was served up tepid.  It
>was nauseating.  It might have been better with a different, better kind
>of ale (or in fact an *ale* rather than a *lager*) so I'd suggest taking
>a few different types of beer/ale/whatever along and make multiple
>batches to see what works.
>
>K.


==
Utinam populus Romanus unam cervicem haberet!
---Caligula

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