TodayPutting the bloom in the onion at The Shippensburg Fair
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With two lines forming at either end of the food stand, Eric Booz had high hopes for topping last year’s sales at the Shippensburg Fair.
Then again, he wanted to make sure he had enough food to get through Saturday’s final day.
Booz and the other volunteers manned the Newburg-Hopewell Volunteer Fire Co. stand at the Shippensburg Fair Tuesday afternoon, taking orders and frying up anything from green beans to mushrooms to their most popular item — the blooming onion.
Those onions have become so popular that Booz is now known in the area as “the onion guy.”
“I meet some people who only know me from the stand and call me ‘the onion guy,’” Booz said. “At least they like it.”
The stand is one of the largest fund-raisers for the fire company, and Booz estimated that they go through about 3,000 pounds of onions and over 100 cases of popcorn chicken during the week-long event.
“Last year, we went through all of our chicken poppers,” Booz said. “I ordered 131 cases this year. That was the amount that we ran out of last year, so I’m hoping it will last. If not, we might have to get another delivery on Friday. The busiest days are Wednesday, Friday and Saturday. It really all depends on the weather though. If it’s hot or raining, not as many people will show up.”
Though the fire company’s stand is one of the most popular at the fair, coming up with the idea for their particular food items was a last-minute scramble when they first registered the stand.
“We were sort of the last ones to get a stand, so a lot of the ideas for food were already taken,” said Booz, who started working at the stand in 2001 when the fire company first started participating in the fair. “The rule here is that the same thing cannot be done in two different places, so we had to come up with a whole different idea. I don’t know why we decided on blooming onions. I mean, it’d be a lot easier if were selling hoagies instead of being in front of a fryer in the middle of the summer.”
With only a little room to work in, things can get a little hot for the volunteers near the fryer, especially when all five devices are in use.
“When it gets really busy, we’ll have five fryers running with double onions in each,” Booz said, noting that they work in a rotation to let the people working on the fryers time to cool down. “The temperature near the fryers can get up to 110 or 120 degrees.”
The effort is worth it for the company’s customers, who get to enjoy the southern style food.
“The blooming onions are more of a southern style and we wanted to do that up here,” Booz said. “We also have some chicken sandwiches that people can order coleslaw on top, which is a southern style, too. For those who like things hot, we also offer three-alarm chicken that’s really hot.”
The fire company sells fried breaded onions, chicken, mushrooms, cauliflower and green beans as well as their sweet potato fries that they process and fry themselves and their home-brewed teas. The onions with “two eyes” that are not used for the blooming onion is given to the other stands to put on their hamburgers and hoagies.
The stand will stay open until the end of the fair on Saturday.
