Author: Ms. R.

This month, Gastro Obscura is sharing the recipes and stories behind amazing holiday dishes and drinks from around the world in the ongoing series “Home-Cooked Holidays.” In the 19th century, Christmas looked a little different. For holiday fun, revelers in the United States and England scared their friends with ghost stories, told fortunes, and played boisterous party games. One such game, snapdragon, is rarely part of anyone’s Christmas these days. After all, it involves pulling sweets from a puddle……

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They brought them in suitcases and in trunks, tucked into the corners of boats and, later, on airplanes. Seeds that became rapini, cardoons, artichokes, cucuzza squash. Cuttings from knobby grape vines that flourished into backyard arbors. And, above all, bits of stick that grew into fig trees. Starting in the late 1800s, when Italian immigrants poured into U.S. port cities, the Mediterranean trees took root in unexpected places: Astoria, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Bayonne, cities whose cold-weather climates seemed hostile to……

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Historians are going to have their work cut out for them when they try to bring sense to the strange cascade that has been 2020. Every month brought something that seemed more eventful than the last. Then came the monoliths. If—by a force more mystifying than the monoliths themselves—you’re still not familiar with the story, here’s the basic (far from comprehensive) rundown. On November 18, 2020, officers from Utah’s Department of Public Safety were conducting a routine flyover of……

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A little more than 60 Royal Bengal tigers roam Bardia National Park, around one-fourth the total tiger population in Nepal. Together with the adjacent Banke National Park, Bardia forms part of the 860 square mile Tiger Conservation Unit, where visitors have a sporting chance of seeing the usually elusive great cats in the wild. Because it’s more remote than the better known Chitwan National Park, few people visit the less developed Bardia, allowing flora and fauna to flourish. Tigers……

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There is a place in North Carolina where some believe you can make a phone call to those who passed on. In Marshall, just north of Asheville, resides a phone booth that contains a disconnected rotary phone. Visitors enter the booth, dial, and talk to those who they have not forgotten. The concept behind the booth is that words spoken through the phone will be carried into the wind to the other side.  The Wind Phone is a replica……

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In the early 20th century, a mining boom swept through Western Colorado and Eastern Utah in search of vanadium, a valuable element used to reinforce steel. Uravan began as a single mill and quickly boomed once the U.S. Vanadium Corporation discovered rich deposits in the surrounding valley. But vanadium became overshadowed by another element found as a byproduct of its extraction: uranium, which quickly gained value as work on atomic science gripped the world in the 1930s and ’40s…….

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John Eliot was a missionary who came from Cambridge, England to Boston in 1630. His major interest was the conversion of the native population of Massachusetts Bay. This desire led him to translate the Bible and other religious material into the Wampanoag dialect of Native Americans, who inhabited the area they called Nonantum. Eliot preached at Nonantum under the famed Oak and converted several Native Americans to Christianity. This culminated with the 1646 conversion of Chief Waban in his……

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