shallot--a guest question

Okay, it's not officially a guest question--no one wrote in and asked 'could you research this for me?' But it did come up as a question on another blog, and as I didn't actually know, I thought it would be a good one to look into. I did think I knew more or less what a shallot was, but the reference to something being served on a "bed of shallots" threw me.

A shallot is an onion, right? Some form of it, anyway. How it differs from scallions or leeks, I really have no idea. And why it would be a good idea to serve anything on a bed of onions eludes me. But I'm going to give this all a go...

...So onions and shallots are distantly related, but there are differences. They both come from the genus allium, but those largish single bulbs we generally think of as onions are categorized as allium cepa, while most shallots are classified as either allium oschaninii or allium ascalonium.  Shallots are smaller, and grow in clusters. You could think of them a bit like garlic cloves, except that they don't have that fibrous membrane binding them all togethe, although they are said to have a bit of garlic in their flavor, which is generally milder and sweeter than onion. Onions are harder to grow than shallots, and are propagated through seeds, while shallots are 'vegetatively multiplied'. Meaning, I think, you put a shallot in the ground and it becomes a seed of itself. Or something like that.
Actually, according to wikipedia, it is a form of cloning, the 'offsets' containing the same genetic material as the mother plant. I'm not sure then why all shallots aren't identical, but that is probably another topic.

But now let's throw scallions into the pot. Scallions and shallots are the same thing, except when they aren't. Scallions, at least to this Californian mind, denote green onions. But apparently to an Australian mind, they conjure up the abovementioned shallots. This confusion of identities is partially etymological, because both shallot and scallion go back to the Vulgar Latin escalonia, which basically means, "from Ascalon". Ascalon was a port of the Levant and still exists as the modern day Israeli city Ashkelon. A website that I chanced upon in my travels called Bashelon--Hebrew Language Detective tells more about onions in relation to that ancient city, and even cites a few classical references. It also tells you why the name Ashkelon might sound familiar.

What questions of an alliumal nature remain? Well, I still don't know why anyone in their right mind would serve anything on a bed of shallots.