Cider-battered onions with fino sherry

To kick off National Vegetarian Week and a week of veggie pairings (don’t groan, carnivores, we’ll be back on meat next week!) here’s a great pairing from Friday night’s underground supper club, Montpelier Basement in Bristol.

You might think cider would be the perfect match with cider-battered onions and of course it would, not least because you’d have an open bottle to hand, but chilled fino sherry - in this case Tio Pepe - is also the biz.

Fino sherry is normally associated with ingredients such as olives, nuts, Spanish ham and cheese but it’s also great with anything fried including croquetas, fritters and goujons.

I particularly liked this simple idea of serving onions in strips like churros. A really unusual and imaginative tapa.