It was so hot on the prairie that 9-year-old Benjamin’s leather chaps stuck to his legs as the horse trotted around on the dry earth. It was the first time he’d worn a genuine cowboy outfit and rode a horse on a real working ranch, so he ignored the flip-flops in his stomach as he bounced along. At lunch he still felt queasy. He drank the ice cold glass of dark red juice his friend’s mother gave him to settle his stomach but it had just the opposite effect. He decided then and there he would be very, very cautious about trying unknown foods in the future and he would never drink currant juice ever again.
Author: Jan Whitaker
A frequent restaurant patron who knows a lot of fascinating things about the history of American restaurants based on years of research, and who is also interested in how people relate to food, what it means to them, and how they form memories about meals in the past.
I started my blog in 2008 (!) and by now have a huge number of posts. The early ones are just as good as the new ones, so look around.
Estella
Late on a steamy summer night Estella’s mother and father went to the shed and took out their spears. Quietly making their way down to the footbridge by the stream, they stopped just below it and stepped into the water. They took turns as one of them held a flashlight while the other deftly wielded the three-pronged implement, bringing out four eels in just a couple of minutes and dropping them into a canvas bag. As they made their way back home, they imagined how delighted little Estella and the other two children would be when mother put tomorrow’s fried eel dinner on the table.
Archaeology of Taste 