On September 20, 1944, the New York Times published its "News of Food" column. A new dish was being offered in the United States “for Home Consumption,” the headline read. Reporter Jane Holt went on to describe this exotic new dish: pizza. It's “a pie made from yeast dough and filled with any number of centers," she wrote, "each one containing tomatoes.” It could even be taken home in a custom box.

Holt goes on to describe the pizza-making process to readers who likely had no idea what this entailed. After balls of dough are made, “with the dexterity of a drum major wielding a baton," the baker "picks one up and twirls it around ... the dough grows wider and wider and thinner and thinner.” The stretched dough is filled with “[cheese], mushrooms, anchovies, capers, and so on.” She describes the process of making a calzone, too.

Holt attributes “pizza,” plural "pizze," to southern Italy, especially Naples. But pizza was eaten in New York and other American cities decades before this column was written. What's held to be the first pizza place in New York, Little Italy’s Lombardi’s, was founded in 1905. Pizza had even been mentioned in the newspaper before, in 1940. But in the early 20th century, food with “ethnic” associations was often looked at askance. Anti-Italian sentiment meant Italian food, especially garlic, was given the side-eye. Holt’s detailed, positive description of pizza is an endorsement of an unfamiliar dish, as well as an encouragement. Typical American food at the time was much blander. In the rest of the column, Holt provides a sample menu for readers to make at home: mayonnaise, prunes, and gravy all feature.

Holt doesn’t get it all right, and she clearly comes to pizza as an outsider. Mozzarella, she writes with confidence, is made with goat’s milk (usually it’s cow or buffalo). Pizza, to her surprise, is cooked without a pie tin and moved around with a board. But Jane Holt was ahead of her time in other ways. Her real name was Margot Murphy McConnell, and her "News of Food" was the New York Times’s original food column.

Active during World War II, she wrote on where and how to buy food with shipping routes disturbed and rationing under effect. She advocated solutions such as “salvaged fats” and dehydrated cranberries, and she also turned to different food traditions. In 1945, Holt wrote that meat could be stretched by turning it into stir-fry and fried rice. But such introductions weren’t easy. “I’ve found Americans resist anything new in food,” said Buwei Yang Chao, a female doctor and Chinese cookbook author who Holt interviewed. (Chao’s 1945 book How to Cook and Eat in Chinese introduced the words “stir fry” and “potstickers” into English, as well as the concept of dim sum.)

Holt stopped writing for the Times in 1945, having contributed four years of food writing and recipes. Later, the column she started would introduce another delicacy to Americans: a “bizarre” West Coast innovation, the cheeseburger.

“The sun starts to turn black, land sinks into sea; the bright stars scatter from the sky.”

This, in the medieval Icelandic poem "Völuspá"—the prophecy of the seeress—is how the world ends. “Steam spurts up with what nourishes life, flame flies high against heaven itself.” Gods die, the Earth burns and is reborn, green and beautiful, a new and all-powerful lord ascends.

Dating back to 961, "Vǫluspá" portends the end of the island's pagan pantheon and the rise of Christianity at the turn of the millennium. Its evocation of the volcanic and atmospheric impact of this divine upheaval is detailed, precise, and harrowing. Some scientists and geographers now believe that the account was based on the actual experience of a real-world event—the Eldgjá lava flow, the largest eruption on the island in the past 2,000 years—according to a new report published in the journal Climatic Change.

When Eldgjá erupted, it was a disaster of mythic proportions. More than four cubic miles of lava poured out over Iceland, “enough to cover all of England up to the ankles,” the University of Cambridge notes. Despite the magnitude of the event, no firsthand accounts of the eruption survives, so scientists have had to infer when it took place.

In the new paper, an international team used ice cores from Greenland to date the start of the eruption. They found clear signatures of both this eruption and another volcanic event, the “millennium eruption” of Changbaishan volcano, across the world, on the border of China and North Korea. The Changbaishan eruption has been dated to the year 946. Using that as a marker of time, the team determined that the Eldgjá event began in 939.

With that information, the team went looking for documentary evidence of its effects. They found texts describing a blood-red, weak sun in Ireland, Germany, and Italy, as well as records of hard winters and spring droughts. Tree ring data indicated that the summer that followed was one of the coolest in 1,500 years. All of these phenomena could result from volcanic material ejected into the atmosphere.

But the longest-lasting effect, perhaps, could be Christianity itself. In "Vǫluspá," Icelandic people connected the end of the world with descriptions drawn from their own recent past. “'Vǫluspá' suggests that the eruption acted as a catalyst for the profound cultural change brought about by conversion to Christianity,” the researchers write. With an event that traumatic and fresh in historical memory, following a new god might have seemed a wise choice.

For 10 years, the European Space Agency’s Envisat satellite orbited the Earth every 100 minutes. As it hurtled through space at an altitude of 486 miles, a suite of nine instruments surveilled the planet’s atmosphere, land, sea, and ice caps. Then, in 2012, the school-bus-sized satellite went dark. Six years later it’s still out there, in extraplanetary limbo and doing nothing much at all.

Space is beyond vast and mostly empty, but Earth’s lowest orbits are crowded—and full of trash. In 2013, NASA observed 500,000 pieces of space garbage—20,000 of them larger than a softball—and estimated that there are millions up there, too small to be tracked until they’ve dinged or gashed other satellites or space vehicles. (Moving at a speed of up to 17,500 miles per hour, even something tiny can inflict sizable damage.) Envisat is not the only thing clogging up orbit, but it is one of the biggest and most compelling; Popular Mechanics called it the “Moby Dick of space junk.”

Over the years, there have been many ideas for how to manage space debris, from tangling it in a net to frying it with lasers. NASA is currently at work on a gripping tool inspired by geckos’ feet. Last week, BBC reported that engineers at Airbus are working on a new idea that takes a cue from Ahab: a harpoon that could capture Envisat and other space junk. The weapon would be tethered to a spacecraft, Alastair Wayman, one of the project’s engineers, told BBC, so “all you have to do is sit a distance away, wait for the target to rotate underneath you, and at the right moment fire your harpoon.” Once its tip pierced the object in question, barbs would pop out, holding the debris fast and allowing the spacecraft to haul it away. During initial trials in a lab, where researchers have been using compressed air to hurl the harpoon at metal sheets, the tool has been slicing “like a hot knife through butter,” Wayman said. A miniature version will head up into space next month, and the group RemoveDebris will eject some pieces of junk and then try to recapture them.

Though a space harpoon sounds more like The Wrath of Khan than Apollo 13, the premise might not be so fantastical. John Crassidis, a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at the University of Buffalo and an expert in space debris, says the concept is “neat.” If you “wanna take out a big satellite,” he adds, “it’s probably a great idea.”

Wrangling massive objects in orbit is important because we don't always know when and where they’ll fall back to Earth, and they may not just burn up in the atmosphere. China’s Tiangong-1 space station, for example, is forecast to reenter the atmosphere in the next few weeks, but the potential landing spots span multiple continents. The tumbling structure probably won't cause much damage, but a tethered harpoon might let us guide a descent—into the wide Pacific, say.

But it's not quite so simple. There's a chance the harpoon doesn't go in clean, but actually breaks its target—leaving countless small fragments in orbit instead of one, big, trackable one (like what happened when China purposely exploded one of its old satellites in 2007). And if the launching satellite is tethered to the target, both are going to burn. “That’s losing your satellite to get another satellite,” Crassidis says, and the cost could be significant. Adding to the cost is the fact that you can't really gather more than one piece of trash this way. “You can’t just go up and easily go from one orbit to another to pick up a bunch of objects, because everything’s traveling in different directions” and possibly spinning, says Donald Kessler, a retired astrophysicist who helmed NASA’s Orbital Debris Program Office. Lisa Ruth Rand, a space junk scholar and postdoctoral fellow in history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, sees a sea of legal issues, too. The Outer Space Treaty of 1967 stipulates that no one owns space, but people, companies, and countries do own the objects moving through it. If you’re going to go spearfishing for a satellite, you best hit the right one, and be sure that you have “watertight permission to do so and bring it down,” Rand says.

Even if the harpoon can grab hold of the largest pieces of trash, it won’t do much against the millions of smaller fragments. “There’s not much we can do about those,” Kessler says. “There’s just too many of them. We’ll never sweep them out of there.” Instead of going after these with harpoons, nets, or lasers, Rand advocates a more hands-off approach—especially for the items in low-Earth orbit. This region “is the most crowded, but also the most effectively managed by letting the natural environment do what it does,” Rand says. Orbits degrade, debris falls and incinerates. Rand describes this as “a river of the atmosphere—when we put a piece of debris into the river, it carries it away.”

The best solution for the future is to not introduce any more debris than necessary. The United Nations has issued recommendations for preventing and curtailing space debris, but there are no binding international agreements. “You behave well and want everyone else to behave well,” Rand says. Hammering out a code of conduct—and adhering to it—is especially important as nanosatellites proliferate. These smaller objects don't have much in the way of propulsion, Crassidis says, and they often run their small fuel reserves dry to complete their missions, instead of holding a little back to make sure they can redirect into the atmosphere, where they would burn up.

There’s no celestial garbage truck coming, but the harpoon idea might help in very specific circumstances. So far, it's more theoretical than practical, but “I welcome these new ideas. There’s so many really cool ones out there,” Crassidis says. “We can’t just keep dumping this stuff to our kids and grandkids.”

Daphne the giant blow-up duck had plans of her own on March 11, 2018. She was supposed to be a turn buoy for competitors in the 22nd annual Coogee Jetty to Jetty Swim at Coogee Beach in Perth, Australia. Early in the morning, Peter Marr, event organizer and chairman of Cockburn Masters Swimming Club, put her in the water to prepare, but “but she had other ideas,” he told the BBC. Strong winds pushed her out of his grasp, and within seconds she was off into the Indian Ocean.

The club immediately assembled a search party and published a Facebook post pleading for Daphne’s return, with a modest reward. Valued at about $700, the oversized bath toy was one of the main attractions of the competition. In the game bingo, the number 22 is referred to as "two little ducks." So to honor the competition’s 22nd year, the club ran with the duck-theme, handing out small rubber duckies and putting Daphne at centerstage. Instead, “we had to blow up another turning buoy, a boring green cone—barely an adequate replacement,” Marr added. “The number of kids who expressed their disappointment added to the angst of losing the duck.”

Two days turned into four, then six, with no trace of Daphne. Reported placed her as far as 270 miles to the north, but then, on the seventh day, Toby Gibb, a local man fishing nearby, found her near Rottnest Island, just west of Perth. She was slightly deflated, but Gibb towed her ashore and kept her for safekeeping. He eventually uncovered the duck's rightful owner, and is planning to return her to the swimming club this week. The reward? Marr said it will be "a bottle of vodka," some club gear, and a free pass to next year's competition.

When Francisco de Orellana, a Spanish conquistador, paddled through the Amazon in 1541, he did not find El Dorado, the fabled kingdom of gold he had been looking for. But he did report to have found civilization: large villages and farms sprawled along the rivers, and even massive cities in the distance.

However, when later explorers and missionaries returned to the same spots centuries later, they found nothing but wild tangles of vegetation. Orellana’s reports were dismissed as bogus when scientists chimed in. Large settlements, in the Amazon rainforest? That would be impossible, they said, for the same reason that it’s still impossible to occupy the Amazon today. Although the forests have rich, wild plant life, the soils alone are too poor in nutrients to support long-term cultivation of agricultural crops.

“But what archaeologists have been seeing in the last 30 years is that, quite the contrary—the Amazon has been densely occupied in the past,” says Eduardo Neves, a Brazilian archaeologist.

One surprise has been the discovery of something that is, in some ways, much more valuable than the gold the Spanish had originally been looking for: terra preta de índio, “dark earth of the Indian,” a blend of charcoal and very nutrient-rich earth that is dark in color, and extraordinarily fertile—in stark contrast to the surrounding orange-yellowish, unproductive earth.

Archaeologists believe terra preta was created by slashing and burning parts of the forest, possibly to create space for residential areas, and by smoldering organic waste, like animal bones, feces, and straw. It’s debated whether this was created intentionally to enrich the soil, but regardless, it seemed to be “superdirt” that could have made lost cities possible.

Terra preta is often found together with archaeological remains, like potsherds, says Neves from his office at the University of São Paolo, where he is a professor. The soils are an undeniable trace of an accomplished ancient civilization, he says, before the vast majority were wiped out by diseases the European conquistadors brought with them.

Nobody knows for sure how big these populations were, and where they lived. Many archaeological sites are overgrown with trees, and expeditions are expensive.

But measuring the extent and location of Amazonian dark earths might be one way to find out. Fieldwork has shown that they are widely distributed across the region. But to get a better idea of the extent of them, archaeologists have teamed up with scientists from other disciplines to make use of new technologies.

About 10 years ago, Neves says, an environmental scientist from the University of New Hampshire reached out to him. It was Michael Palace, whose work had focused primarily on using satellite imagery to understand the forest better. He had recently become interested in archaeology as well.

It had occurred to Palace that it might be possible to detect terra preta under the tree canopy by looking at satellite data. “Plants grow on the soil, they use the nutrients, and those soils have different properties,” he explains. “And previous work has shown that this is reflected in the trees’ leaves.”

The idea became the basis of a joint study published in Ecosphere in December 2017, together with colleagues—including another archaeologist, Eduardo Tamanaha, and Crystal McMichael, an ecologist at the University of Amsterdam.

Two of NASA’s satellites fly over the Amazon every day and collect data in the near-infrared range of the light spectrum, Palace says, which makes it possible to detect subtle differences in how light reflects off the trees. This allows scientists to learn things about the forest that are invisible to the human eye, like photosynthetic activity and biomass.

The idea was simple, to ecologists at least. The researchers would focus on a sample of known terra preta sites—251 of them across the Amazon basin—and employ a computer to pick out subtle differences between the canopy above those sites and the canopy outside of them. And, by utilizing a sophisticated computational model, use that acquired data to predict where other terra preta sites across the Amazon might be located.

Given how nutrient-rich terra preta locations are known to be, the team expected the trees above them to be lush, healthy giants towering from the canopy. “We found the exact opposite,” says Palace. The trees were in fact shorter, and the sites appeared to be dominated by palm trees. Were they the descendants of palms planted there by ancient people?

That would make sense, Crystal McMichael explains. “They’re one of the most useful [trees], because so many of their species make fruit, not just for people but to attract animals. If you’re a hunter, you want to attract things like peccary, tapir,” she says, adding that palms also make for good construction material and for thatching houses, too.

But they may also have been cultivated by more recent civilizations who have moved to those areas because the soils were so fertile, McMichael suggests. Regardless, the terra preta has had an undeniable lasting effect on forest structure. “They have persisted for thousands of years and they still carry that same nutrient-enriched capacity and the ability to enrich agriculture,” she says. “It’s kind of cool that people today can benefit from what people 3,000 years ago made.”

In fact, the discovery of terra preta has even spurred a global movement to re-create it, to help enable sustainable agriculture, albeit unsuccessfully, McMichael adds. “As far as a recipe, it’s still a bit of a mystery.”

The team’s model predicts there is an entire stretch of terra preta across the Amazon, notably in the eastern parts and along the major rivers. For Eduardo Tamanaha, this gives us a good idea of the places that were inhabited and managed by ancient peoples.

Tamanaha’s future expeditions will focus on searching for the other sites where the model suggests terra preta may be located. “We are talking about a predictive model. Now we have to go to the field to test it,” he writes in an email from his base in Tefé in the central Amazon. For him, the study offers “the possibility of finding archaeological sites without having to make long—and expensive—expeditions through the Amazon, where everything is very distant.”

McMichael and Palace have shown generally that this modelling approach works in previous research. In northern Michigan, they used the same methodology to predict the extent of food storage pits left behind from hunter-gatherer populations.

The use of satellite data in general to search for archaeological sites is not new, explains Iris Kramer, a researcher at the University of Southampton who was not involved in the study. But using vegetation indices for archaeological purposes is. “I don’t know any studies that have done this in Amazon dark earths,” she says.

Karsten Lambers, an archaeologist at Leiden University who was also not involved in the study, agrees that the approach is innovative. The findings add to a pile of research showing that these manmade soils are widely distributed across the region. “In general, there is mounting evidence that the Amazon basin used to be much more populated in pre-Hispanic times than we thought,” he writes in an email.

For Neves, this means that the Amazon, as uncultivated as we imagine it to be, isn’t actually a wild, pristine forest. “We’re actually seeing a forest in a cultural landscape,” he says.

Neves still does regular field expeditions and has a small Indiana Jones figurine on his desk. Beyond terra preta, there have been more interesting discoveries of manmade structures in the last few decades, like channels, ditches, curious geometric shapes, and mounds of freshwater snail shells, which he believes are the remains of residential structures.

He wonders what else there is to be found in the depths of the emerald forest. “There are huge areas of the Amazon that have never been worked on before,” he says.

But at the same time, he is mindful of the bigger picture. Deforestation has taken a serious toll on the world’s largest rainforest. Hectares have been eroded for soybean plantations and cattle ranching. Brazil has been trying to occupy parts of the Amazon for many years, Neves says, but a lot of the time, it occurs in a very chaotic, unplanned, and unsustainable way.

For him, as Brazil continues to look at ways to occupy unprotected areas, the findings suggest there might be a way to do this more sustainably. “I like to think that this kind of study tells us that there’s room for people to live in the Amazon,” he says. “But we have to find the adequate scale to do it.”

More than 6,400 readers voted in the first round of Mundane Madness, our bracket challenge to celebrate the most wondrous inventions that don't often get their due.

Some of the matchups were nail-biters. Work ground to a halt in the Atlas Obscura newsroom while we bickered over the relative merits of glass and paper. "Microscopes, telescopes!" said Abi Inman, our audience development manager. "Hugely instrumental to our understanding of the universe." Fair point. But then again, "none of those ideas were shared before the printing press spread them on paper," argued Ariel Azoff, our director of destination marketing and tourism partnerships. (Not entirely true—the argument tumbled into cuneiform tablets and parchment—but the printing press leveled up the scale in a big, big way.) In the end, paper edged out glass by just 325 votes.

Voters took the debates to Twitter, too. @DarkWhalberg came to the defense of the foot-measuring Brannock device, the undisputed underdog that "looks the coolest." Some of you championed the simplest of the inventions, which carry fewer potential points of failure. Still others shared charming non sequiturs. Thanks, Northeast Ohio Regional Sewer account, for pointing out that both toilet paper and sewers deserved "#2 seeds." And then there was a visual representation of a finals matchup that, sadly for binder clip fans, is not going to happen:

live feed of binder clip's complete domination of paper pic.twitter.com/WvaoiWtOzb

— austin (@atchambers) March 15, 2018

Here's where things stand after Round 1:

What happens next? "Paper clip vs. paper is the poetic final we want," wrote @TerraChimp. Toilet paper vs. sewer is in the same spirit. It's up to you. Cast your votes below. The final four will duke it out on Monday, March 26.

Conventional wisdom places Middle-earth in New Zealand, where much of The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings trilogies were filmed. But a prankster in Oxfordshire, England, has other ideas. If road signs in Didcot are to be believed, you can reach "Middle Earth," as they write it, by going along the A4130 to Wallingford.

Middle Earth isn't the only place that has sprung up like a fairy toadstool on the town's road signs: Gotham City is en route to Oxford; Neverland is not far from the train station; and Narnia and the Emerald City just past the evocatively named Power Stations A and B. The sign alterations show impressive attention to detail—the vandal has taken care to render them in the typeface Transport Medium, which has been the standard on British road signs since 1963.

Local residents, the BBC reports, are largely delighted with these off-the-map revisions. "If you speak to the majority of people in Didcot they're of the same opinion, it's put Didcot on the map again," mayor Jackie Billington told the broadcaster. Though they may technically be vandalism, the altered signs are likely to stay in place for the time being, she said, while the council addresses the more mundane issue of potholes. In the meantime, the mysterious saboteur remains on the loose—though if they have found the way over the rainbow and into the Emerald City, authorities may be looking for some time.

There are many ways to celebrate the arrival of spring. In the right climate, you can spend time among cloud-like cherry blossoms. You might decorate or eat eggs—in one Bosnian town, there’s an entire spring festival dedicated to scrambled eggs. In Switzerland, they ask a snowman named the Böögg to forecast summer weather. And in some Slavic countries, they burn and drown the goddess of winter.

This goddess, Marzanna, is a pagan figure associated with death, plague, winter, and rebirth. In the spring, her power wanes, and as she dies at the end of winter, a spring goddess is born.

For centuries, it’s been a tradition in Poland and other countries to help this process along.

The tradition of drowning Marzanna begins with building an effigy of straw. In the past, the goddess, wrapped in linen and adorned with beads and ribbons, would be paraded around town in all her finery by the village young people, passing by each house before the procession headed to the river. There, Marzanna would be lit on fire and then thrown into the water. Once she was in the river, no one was allowed to touch her or look back at her body.

"Getting rid of this symbol of winter deadness was considered a dangerous act," writes Beata Wojciechowska, a history professor at Jan Kochanowski University. "The hostile force which was being destroyed could reveal its destructive powers even at that very last moment of its existence." Having gotten rid of the goddess, people needed to leave the scene as quickly as possible, or risk negative consequences.

Once this tradition was linked to the fasting of Lent; today, it's been moved to the spring equinox. It survives as a cheerful activity for schoolchildren: Young kids make Marzanna effigies, some of them small but other still life-sized, which are sacrificed to the water. There have been no reports of the winter goddess extracting her revenge, but you can never be too careful.

From Salvador Dali's collected recipes to Nostradamus's treatise on jam, the world is full of unusual cookbooks. Last week, we asked Gastro Obscura readers to send in their own. We were blown away by the response: 117 of you wrote in with cookbook suggestions, and hundreds more contributed through social media. You told us about (modernized) cookbooks from Ancient Rome, cookbooks lovingly annotated by your grandparents, and cookbooks filled with treasured (but vintage) recipes from another era. Unusual ingredients abounded: bugs, flowers, and Jell-O in every color of the rainbow.

Most of you found your unorthodox cookbook at a yard, church, or estate sale. "I couldn't leave without it," was a common refrain. Other cookbooks were not out of the ordinary, but had a special story. Surprisingly, a number of readers wrote about the same cookbook. Who knew so many of you owned A Thousand Ways To Please a Husband, complete with illustrations and poems? Or the "historical" cookbook that includes Virgin Mary's favorite recipe for creamed spinach? Whether dead serious or tongue-in-cheek, focused on the future or firmly set in the past, it seems the odd and obscure is alive in the kitchen. Here are a collection of our favorites.

The Dracula Cookbook: Authentic Recipes from the Homeland of Count Dracula

I'm attaching a recipe book that I own; I feel it is fairly unusual. I don't think I've ever made anything in it, although I have owned it since the late 1970s. I was a Dracula aficionado for many years. —Sandra Lent, Weymouth, Nova Scotia, Canada

Festive Food Decoration for All Occasions

Can one call this a cookbook? Although the book jacket states, “Even if you can’t cook, this book will tempt you,” many pages make me gag. Check out “Goldfish Swallowing” for one. Yet something about it is compelling, even haunting. My friend found this at a thrift store probably in 2005, and ever since, it has been a treasured possession. I’d be remiss not to mention that there are several racist “recipes.” —Amanda Rybin Koob, Lafayette, Colorado

Liberace Cooks!

I am an unusual cookbook collector! It all started with a book I received called To the King's Taste, which got me interested in learning more about strange cookbooks. About ten years ago, I visited the Liberace Museum in Las Vegas and found out that Liberace had his own cookbook, filled with his favorite recipes. I bought the book as a gift for a friend. But afterwards I wasn't able to find a copy of the book again. Recently, my friend got me the original Liberace Cooks! cookbook that was actually signed by Liberace in 1971. It's so fun! —MJ Dunne

Manifold Destiny: The One! The Only! Guide to Cooking on Your Car Engine

I am writing from Atlantic County Institute of Technology in Mays Landing. We are a technical and career high school, with an Automotive Technology Academy. One of our instructors, Mr. Charles Olinda, donated Manifold Destiny: The One! The Only! Guide to Cooking on Your Car Engine to our library collection, where it remains one of our older (c. 1989) titles. One of my favorite notes in the book says:

"Because the Northeast has the most congested highways in the country, it is very important that you think in terms of time rather than distance when you are car-cooking up this way. Hit I-84 through Hartford at rush hour, and you could do a whole stuffed fish in the space of three exit ramps." —Amy Ojserkis, Mays Landing, New Jersey

Eat It

Eat It by Dana Crumb was illustrated by her husband, the famous artist and satirist R. Crumb. It is classic Crumb, irreverent, unapologetic, and classic 1960s counterculture. Many of the recipes were standard sixties fare, created by Dana Crumb. She was a remarkable woman who went on to do much more in food, bringing her social and community awareness to all she fed. —Lisa Gray Millimet, Camden, Maine

La Cusine est un Jeu d'enfants(Cooking is Child's Play)

I inherited it from my great aunt, who died at the age of 101 and left it to me along with 100 art books. She was born in Russia, but lived for years in Paris, which is perhaps where she got this book. It was published in 1963, with a preface by none other than Jean Cocteau [the famous French writer and filmmaker]! Inside there's even a template for a paper measuring cup you can cut out and tape together. The book looks to me to have been printed lithographically by the esteemed Georges Lang Imprimerie. —Lisa Rosowsky, Boston, Massachusetts

DC Superheroes Super Healthy Cookbook

I am not a comic book fan (full disclosure: I did have Wonder Woman Underoos), but I am a cookbook fan. I picked this one up last week at Goodwill for $1.49. I couldn’t put it down. It is so cheesy and corny, and I’m not talking about the ingredients for the “super” recipes.

We haven’t made anything since I purchased it, but the first thing we will make is “Commissioner Gordon’s Undercover Vegetables.” The copyright is 1981, and it has a lengthy foreword by Dr. Joan Gussow (The New York Times has called her the "matriarch of the eat-locally-think-globally food movement.") Pretty impressive for a superhero cookbook. —Jamie Richmond, Boise, Idaho

Pâté: The New Main Course for the '80s

A friend found a copy of Carol Cutler's 1983 classic on their grandmother's bookshelf, and my wife and I thought it was odd enough to buy ourselves our own copy from a used bookstore. Since we had two copies in our circle of friends, we decided to throw a pot-luck party where everyone made one recipe from the book. We'd tried this concept with other cookbooks, and it had turned out quite well. But an all-pâté dinner party may be one of the worst culinary ideas we have ever had.

None of the dishes were, strictly speaking, bad. It's just that we were serving ourselves plate after plate after plate of dense brown and gray mush. Rustic country pâté. Chicken liver pâté. Vegetable and brown rice terrine. I've forgotten which others, but I think we had at least five. After just a few bites everyone was full. We had mountains of leftovers that nobody could bear to eat or even look at. —Aaron Weber & Megan Sullivan

Cookery in Colour

Cookery in Colour confounds me. There is the page for potato salads, with multi-faceted dishes shot in blurry photos and set in glaring yellow blocks on the page. The page for pressure cookers gives me an explosive headache. The page for pastries and pies has blocks of bright pink, with wallpaper-style patterns in random places. Swirls of red and green do nothing to evoke buttery, delicious pastries. The soups, no, please don't make me have the soups. The chutneys just burst with mismatched color and ingredients, and the "easy party sweets" pages are smeared with the colors of a disconcerting rainbow, suggestive of runny jelly and the after-party mess from a toddler's birthday. —Anna Sublet, Melbourne, Australia

Entertaining with Insects

Entertaining with Insects is from the estate of a friend who passed away a few years ago. I have not tried any of the recipes. —Ron Keillor

Decadent Dinners and Lascivious Lunches: X-Rated Recipes for Sensuous Cooks and their Friends

Prowling through boxes at the Friends of the Library Book Sale, a little gem popped up: Decadent Dinners and Lascivious Lunches. As the title implies, this is not a diet cookbook. Rich in ingredients and calories, it includes drink recipes, decorating tips, and costume ideas. The introductory section is titled "Foreplay." The dedication is to the author's late husband, who succumbed to a heart attack. —Gus Shaver

Cross Creek Cookery

It's a very folksy backwoods cookbook, and has wonderful stories and illustrations. I was particularly fascinated by some of the recipes, although trying them is impossible: The ingredients are either unavailable or off-limits. Except maybe the swamp cabbage, if I could figure out what that was. —Bob Rinker, Lakeland, Florida

The Gourmet's Cannibal Cookbook

With complete details on the best cuts of meat to carve and cook. —Joanne Hoefer

A Thousand Ways To Please a Husband, With Bettina's Best Recipes

I acquired this 1912 gem whilst rummaging around in the basement of my husband's Alberta farmhouse where he grew up. I saved this cookbook from a moldering, damp death and brought it home. Every chapter begins with a cozy story of how the character Bettina has cunning ideas of how to pull off a ladies' luncheon on a dime. She then provides the recipe. I live for those stories. Bettina is a goddess. She never gets out of her apron and mob cap. Bob is lucky indeed. —Kelly Ulrich, Langley, B.C., Canada

This thing is amazing. It’s the story of newlyweds, Bettina and Bob, and their first year of marriage. It has adorable drawings, poems, and stories about Bettina, always ending each chapter with her menu and recipes. Chapters have titles such as “Bettina Has a Porch Party” or “Bob Makes Peanut Fudge.” I’ve used the recipe for codfish balls, which came out fine, although salt cod is a lot harder to come by these days. —Diane Graft, Centreville, Virginia

Some responses have been edited for clarity and readability.

In the library of the Maryland Historical Society, Kara Mae Harris sits at a large table with fragile manuscript pages and her laptop. She taps away, entering recipe after recipe from centuries-old cookbooks, diaries, and handwritten pages into a database of more than 24,000 entries. She’s not a historian or chef, but she has dedicated thousands of hours to preserving Maryland’s unique culinary traditions, and every week, she tests a recipe and puts the history behind it on her blog, Old Line Plate. Harris enjoys uncovering and sharing history that no one else is talking about. Once she realized the vastness of Maryland’s food history—and that almost no one was singularly focused on keeping a record of it—she’d found her new project.

Harris grew up in Maryland outside of Washington, D.C., a place that sometimes loses its identity in an amalgamation of suburbs. She had never contemplated her home state’s culinary identity. “I never thought of Maryland as the South. I didn’t know anyone who did,” she says.

“These books are how I learned Maryland food was even a thing,” Harris adds, as she picks up an issue of the Southern Heritage Cookbook Library. She started reading books like this one since she was interested in cooking, but was surprised when she found recipes from Maryland. She was fascinated by the ephemera and history that the cookbooks offered with each recipe, and she became interested in the foodways of Maryland, a state shaped by its unique geography: on the East Coast, on the line between the North and the South.

“Once I started studying the food, I realized that culinarily, Maryland absolutely is the South,” she says, even though she knows that conflicts with how many people feel about the state.

In 2011, Harris started Old Line Plate (a pun on Maryland’s nickname The Old Line State), and she mostly drew from the cookbook Maryland’s Way, a collection of 18th-century recipes. That led her to more cookbooks available online and recipes in old newspapers, and soon creating a database to keep track of all the recipes took precedence over the blog. Harris loves history, but she also loves data. She believed a database would allow her to more easily analyze trends, trace information, compare and contrast recipes, and then share her findings with anyone who was interested. When she’s not at her full-time job (as a college admissions officer), cooking, or blogging, she goes to the Maryland Historical Society, the Enoch Pratt Free Library, and smaller historical collections in the state to diligently enter recipes into her database.

What she has made should be the envy of most every food historian and librarian. Each recipe entry includes the cookbook it came from, the person who wrote the book, and relevant tags, such as other names for the same recipe or key ingredients. The database is searchable by any of those fields. Harris resurrected the cooking blog in 2015, and has been posting weekly recipes and histories for the last two years, using research from her database.

She recently read that the first appearance of fudge at a Vassar College bake sale (and subsequent popularity across the country) was connected to a recipe derived from Baltimore, Maryland. “After I found out that fudge allegedly is Baltimore-centric, I isolated all of the fudge recipes [in the database], and there are almost 80 of them,” Harris says. She then looked at the recipes and saw that Baltimore fudge (or caramel, as it is called in old cookbooks) is brown-sugar based, like the Vassar recipe, while others had molasses. The database allows her to see the history and lineage of a recipe.

At home, Harris has a long shelf of Maryland cookbooks, and right now one of her goals is to get every pre-1900 cookbook entirety into the database. Eventually, she wants to add the hundreds of published, semi-published, and unpublished Maryland cookbooks. Harris finds this monumental task soothing and affirming. “I’m not super credentialed,” she admits, “but I can immediately open a book and know so much about this person and their economic status and their family and the year that it was made, just by what they are cooking and what type of recipes they are writing down.” This gives her great pleasure.

Harris also values sharing her findings. When she posted a recipe from a community cookbook, she received a request from one of the contributor’s family members for a copy of the book. She then proceeded to scan the entire cookbook. “That’s their food, that’s their recipes,” she says. Harris wants to make sure everyone from Ph.D. students to Maryland residents to chefs have access to these recipes. She’s donated her oldest books to the Maryland Historical Society, and she posts a spreadsheet of her database on her blog. (Although this public version doesn't currently have tags.) In an age when digitization rules, Harris believes that sharing these recipes online will help keep traditions alive.

One of the problems with old cookbooks is that they often lack the storytelling we find today in food blogs and glossy cookbooks. “The cookbooks barely tell you how to make things,” says Harris. They don’t have photos; they don’t list ingredients and steps; they don’t tell you where they got the recipe; they don’t even tell you at what temperature to bake.

When Harris made pickled oysters, a dish that feels very Chesapeake-Bay-meets-Eastern-European-Immigrants, the recipe simply had the ingredients and how to add them together. “I’m going to spend the next days trying to find out what people actually ever did with these,” she says. And that’s one of the benefits of the database and the blog. Harris searches through newspapers and other cookbooks to find out more about when the dish would have been eaten and how we experience food differently today. This enlivens old recipes and history, making them more approachable to modern cooks.

And while many people might open an old cookbook and find the recipes unusual, Harris says that “Weird is relative.” Even dishes such as oyster ice cream or noyau (a liquor made from peach pits) don’t seem that strange to her anymore. “A lot of the stuff people think is weird is just the lost concept of umami in western food. It was totally there, people were using funky oysters and mushroom powder and anchovies, and for some reason just stopped.” She wants to figure out if they are worth making based on modern tastes, and reintroduce her readers to lost foodways they might enjoy.

Even though she wants to preserve Maryland’s food history, Harris doesn’t want to whitewash the state’s history. The cookbooks “weave the legacy of slave-owning culture into Maryland culture, and some of these cookbooks are so nostalgic,” she says. “The beaten biscuits are a good example. They pretty much relied on slave labor to beat air into the dough for thirty minutes,” she says of unleavened Maryland rolls, and she wants to expose that nostalgia rather than perpetuate it. She’s also written about the fetish Baltimore hotels had in the early 1910s with black chefs who could cook Southern meals, and she sees the longing for “plantation” food pop up in 20th century recipes.

Harris has seen chefs and writers make mistakes or just go with the lore of a recipe, but she’s determined to bring rigor to our understanding of Maryland’s foodways. Even though she is soft-spoken, she has forceful opinions about history and Maryland cuisine, and she’s realized many people are just as passionate.

“At first I took it personally, when people would get really mad,” Harris says, about the way she was approaching a recipe or cooking a certain food. She knew, for example, that readers from Maryland might not agree with her on using all types of crab meat for a Maryland crab cake, since “jumbo lump” cakes are all you see on menus today. “I was trying to be diplomatic and say, ‘I appreciate your passion,’ and eventually that became true. I love how particular people are about their way of doing things.”

In the end, that passion for food and history is what keeps Harris going. She had planned to blog for two years, but there are just so many more recipes to try that she doesn’t see an end in sight yet.

Would you like to take a picture with every single USPS mailbox in Seattle? Okay, here's the bad news: Somebody already beat you to it. Now for the good news: That person is David Peterman, and he has thoughtfully documented the entire process on his blog, Mailboxes of Seattle. He finished his quest in mid-February, and his blog is now home to photos of every single blue letter-chomper the city has to offer.

When George Mallory was asked why he decided to climb Mount Everest, he famously answered "Because it's there." Peterman's motivation was similar. "I found all these sites online where you can look up any city, and it'll show you where all the mailboxes are," he says. "I thought, 'Hey, I wonder if anyone's been to every mailbox in Seattle?'"

And so early in 2017, Peterman began his journey. He started by venturing to the four corners of the city: His first photo, at 140th and Lake City Way, features the most northeastern mailbox in town. After he scratched those off his list, he proceeded at random. After all, there are mailboxes everywhere: in suburbs and urban centers; outside bustling restaurants and in abandoned lots.

Peterman, who has lived in Seattle for over 30 years, was surprised at what he learned about his city. "I found neighborhoods I had never heard of," he says. He cites one small neighborhood next to a major freeway, which he has driven by hundreds of times. "I looked on the map, and there was a mailbox," he says. Along with it were several blocks of homes: "People's lives are back here, and I had no idea."

He also found out a lot about mailboxes. For one thing, they make for surprisingly good party conversation. "People will have a favorite mailbox," he says, "or they'll start getting upset because all the mailboxes are disappearing." Peterman's original list contained several dozen boxes that are simply no longer there, victims of the city's construction boom.

For another, they lend themselves quite well to anthropomorphism. On his blog, Peterman assesses each mailbox's personality. One is upset about new development crowding it out. Another, next to a cupola-topped church, is jealous because the building copped his style. Some are on well-trafficked streets, and are probably happy. Others are tucked away and ill-used, and might be sad. "I think they have something to say," he explains.

In mid-February, after about a year of questing, Peterman paid his final mailbox call. Friends joined him, along with several fans he had never met. They took one massive, energetic photograph. (The box was mostly obscured in the process.) And then Peterman collapsed his selfie stick and stamped the project finished.

"That was it," he says. "It had a nice beginning, it had a nice ending, it's done." If you're in Seattle, consider sending a letter—the local mailboxes might be feeling lonely.

Below are a few of our favorite photographs from the Mailboxes of Seattle project.

The day was departing when we arrived at the old, gray church and its graveyard of tilting headstones. Beyond, the forest hid the ruins of a Norman castle along with—we hoped—one of the Wonders of Britain.

A tall, tidy man with a cap appeared, out with his dog for an evening walk, and Andrew Evans, wearing a dark, swinging overcoat, approached him. “Can I ask you … do you live around here? We’re after the Bone Well ...” The man offered no sign of recognition. “It should be a spring under the castle somewhere.”

“A natural spring?” he replied, unfazed by the suggestion of a watery catacomb filled with skeletons. “There’s a track leading down there on the left. It’s a good bit of a mile.”

“Okay,” said Evans. “That sounds like it.”

The path to the spring went through a gate that shut with a clang and past a field populated with the white, fluffy sheep that speckle the British countryside. “It’s on the map so it can’t be too hard to find,” Evans said, pointing out our position on his phone, where the well was labeled in bright blue. “We’ll turn around the bottom of the castle, and then there it is—‘Boney Well.’”

This particular well was known, in the 19th century, for its trick of regurgitating the bones of fish and frogs, and it was the best lead Evans had in his search for another place, described in our much older guide on this trip, a list of “wonders” compiled a millennium ago. On this list, there is “a well from which the bones of birds are constantly thrown up.” Only, it's not entirely clear where this wondrous site could be found. Any well with a connection to small animal bones was worth chasing down.

The track led through the gloaming forest, and Evans’s smile took on an eager edge. “I’m excited to see a new one,” he said. “They’re usually just muddy holes in the ground. But maybe it’ll be spectacular.”

He checked his phone again. “Look out for bones.”

In the second century B.C., the Greek writer Antipater of Sidon catalogued the wonders of the ancient world—the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, the Colossus of Rhodes, the Great Pyramid at Giza—and ever since writers have collected accounts of amazing places. When, sometime between the 9th and 12th centuries, a native son took up the task of listing the Wonders of Britain, he included a lake with 60 islands in it and a fountain of salt, a levitating altar and a shape-shifting royal burial mound—all told, 26 natural phenomena and small miracles.

These wonders were concentrated into two areas of Britain—in the north, toward Scotland, and to the west, in what’s now Wales—places where Celtic tribes still held sway after years of Saxon incursions had eroded their territory. The list’s unknown author came from those lands, probably the Welsh border region, and though he was writing in a time of rising Saxon power, his heart seemed to lie with Celtic traditions that were in danger of disappearing.

This is “Dark Age” history, often overlooked in the rush from the Romans to the Renaissance, with details forgotten or recorded only in legend. The Wonders of Britain, too, have disappeared from memory. According to the manuscript curators at the British Library, “few actual geographic features” known today match the list’s descriptions.

But if the broad outlines of medieval political divisions linger over modern Britain, some of the wonders are still hiding there, too. Evans, a senior lecturer in the geography department at the University of Leeds and self-proclaimed “expert in nothing,” started trying to track them down more than a decade ago. “We get into the rut of drifting through places without really thinking about them,” he said. But finding the site of a medieval wonder can burnish a familiar landscape with a sheen of the strange and mysterious.

Some of the wonders have proven impossible to find; perhaps they never existed in the first place. Others have lost their luster, but, Evans assured me when we first spoke, “Some of them are active and still really spectacular.” The Severn Bore, for example—a rushing, riverine tidal wave that can reach more than nine feet in height—plays a role in four of the wonders and can still be seen.

So it was that a few months later, we were roaming the countryside of England and Wales, hopping fences, tromping through heather, and wandering graveyards, in the hope that, a thousand years on, not all the wonder of the Dark Ages had disappeared. Even in the 21st century, a medieval travel guide, we imagined, might still lead to places with the capacity to amaze.

The trees opened into a clearing, and our path crossed the trickle of water coming from the Boney Well. It was not the hole-in-the-ground variety of well, but a welling up of spring water, little more than a damp channel through the trees. Nothing about the place seemed to justify putting it on a map, modern or medieval, wondrous or mundane.

But, there, among mossy roots, I spotted a spread of gray feathers and a few delicate bones.

“Oh my god,” Evans said, laughing. “That’s conveniently dead in the right place.” He had not expected to find fresh bones at the Boney Well, regardless of how they got there. The list’s description conjured an image of a macabre and magical place, but Evans was searching for a natural wonder, not something from a fairy tale. As fantastic as some of the wonders on the list seemed, they usually had some sort of grounding in reality, or at least in the possible.

The wonders list comes from a medieval text, Historia Brittonum, that was once treated as a reliable account of the history of Britain. It begins with the descendants of Trojan refugees settling on the island and includes one of the earliest known references to King Arthur, along with catalogs of battles between Britons and Saxons and genealogies of forgotten rulers. For centuries, historians and classicists relied on the Historia’s account of the years between the end of the 300s, when the Romans began to lose control of Britain, and the mid-800s, the earliest the Historia could have been written. Now, though, scholars consider these stories more legend than fact.

Like the rest of the Historia, the wonders list, which is tacked on the end of some versions of the manuscript, has parts that can be verified. It includes, for instance, the famous Roman-built baths in Somerset, which draw from the island’s only geothermal spring. But other wonders—the levitating altar, supposedly held up by the will of God, or the returning wooden plank, which floats down the River Severn before reappearing, three days later, in its original place—sound like they belong to the realm of fantasy.

The presence of the surviving wonders creates the tantalizing possibility that even the fantastical, forgotten ones could have scientific explanations and may have left behind clues that could corroborate their existence. “Given that some of the wonders exist, chances are that all of them once existed,” says Evans. At the start of his search, he decided to seek out plausible explanations for each wonder, even the stranger ones. “Your first impression is that someone has drawn together a whole bunch of crazy things, and part of me thought—why would you want to dig down and understand this?” he says. But the list’s unknown author does seem to be trying to explain the unusual phenomena he’d encountered in his travels. “This person is genuinely curious about the world. And, occasionally, the interactions in the natural world do throw up completely weird stuff.”

The Boney Well, for instance, was once more impressive than it first appeared to us. It seemed that the well had been capped: The lay of the land indicated the stream could have once flowed strong and deep here.

As we were leaving, Evans showed me some of the rocks that he had been turning over in the stream. Embedded in them were shell fossils—bones, of a sort. He had a hypothesis. Perhaps the bone well had been churning through a fossil bed and bringing pieces to the surface. If fossils weren’t common in the area and a singular spring kept piling them up, he said, “Then you’d think, ‘How exciting.’”

Evans first encountered the Wonders of Britain while searching old Welsh texts for a name to give his eldest child. His wife comes from a Welsh family, and he’d fallen for Welsh literature at Aberystwyth University while studying geology and geography. His interest in folklore is a sideline: He did graduate work as a glaciologist in Iceland and Antarctica and now focuses on human geography, drawing on computer and social sciences to understand how people relate to each other and their environments.

It’s a good field for people with roving minds, like Evans. He’s had at least a passing interest in cathedrals and castles, literary theory and jazz, film history and British culture, voodoo and still-life drawing. He belonged to a caving club in college and after graduation traveled Europe with friends, seeking out ossuaries and cave paintings. Now he lives on the edge of a moor in Yorkshire and keeps a hippo skull in his office. One morning at breakfast he was reading about the first witchcraft trial in Ireland and mulling how concepts we use to understand the world, such as sin and crime,are not always as timeless as they might seem; someone had to think them up. But that’s why the wonders are worth seeking out—using the medieval list as a guide to natural phenomena means “taking whatever tired, dust-covered metaphors you use for the world and shaking them up,” he says.

We set out that morning across the Welsh countryside with soft sunlight peeking from behind the clouds. This part of the world served as a model for J.R.R. Tolkien’s idyllic Shire; it is William Blake’s "green & pleasant Land” of rolling hills and pastures, which transformed, mid-Wales, into craggier peaks. We drove through a forest where moss padded the road’s center like a carpet and then followed a footpath through the woodland pastures of a nature reserve, under the crooked branches of Cornish Oaks and up a steep slope of prickly green gorse. On the crest of the hill, we reached a trio of Bronze Age cairns, tombs that had once protected dead men and their treasures, rising from the brush low and wide like islands from the sea.

Atop one large cairn, made of rough and irregular rock, Evans began to read aloud. “‘There is another wonderful thing in the region which is called Bucit. There is a mound of stones’—So it mentions the cairn—‘and one stone placed on top has a footprint of a dog on it. … When hunting the porker Troynt, Cabal, who was the dog of the soldier Arthur, stamped his step in the stone, and afterward Arthur gathered together stones … and it is called Carn Cabal.’”

“So,” he said, “we need to find a footprint.” Ideally, an oversized, mythic footprint belonging to King Arthur’s favorite dog, Cabal.

Early Arthurian stories have an otherworldly quality, even stranger than the playful magic of Merlin, which was added to the legend later. Sir Kay fights giant sea-cats and werewolves; he can go nine days and nights underwater without sleeping or breathing. Another companion, Bedwyr, is a handsome, one-handed knight with a magical lance. Arthur has men who can suck up a sea, emit sparks from their feet, level a mountain, speak every language, and hear an ant move from 50 miles away. One, when sad, lets his bottom lip droop below his waist and turns his top lip over his head. Gwenhwyfar, Arthur’s wife, is the daughter of a giant, and gallant, skilled, adulterous Lancelot is nowhere to be found.

During the 12th and 13th centuries these Celtic tales traveled to France, where the older stories disappeared from Arthur’s legend and Lancelot joined the court, now sopped in chivalric romance. Centuries later, 19th-century British antiquarians rediscovered the old Arthur in medieval Welsh manuscripts that, like the Historia, drew from older oral traditions. Carn Cabal is linked to the tale of the hunt for a boar named Troynt (or Twrch Trwyth, Trwyd, Troit, or Terit, depending on whom you ask), who is actually a cursed prince transformed into a wild animal. Culhwch, a cousin of Arthur, falls in love with the daughter of a giant, and to marry her he must complete 40 impossible tasks, including grabbing a pair of scissors, a comb, and a razor stuck to Troynt’s head.

According to the wonders list, Cabal stepped on a stone and left a mark during that chase. That rock was last reported seen in the 1830s or '40s, when Lady Charlotte Guest, a linguist and literary scholar, sent an unnamed gentleman up here to Carngafallt—the Rock of Cafall, a variant of Cabal—in search of it. The mountain matches the place described in the wonder.

Lady Guest’s gentleman found what he thought could be “the identical object referred to” in the wonders list—a hefty rock with an impressive mark, four inches long and two deep, sunk into it. “Some unimaginative geologist may persist in maintaining that this footprint is nothing more than the cavity left by the removal of a rounded pebble,” he wrote. There is truth in that view: When fragments of this conglomerate rock work loose, they leave behind gaps that can resemble a paw print. But according to the gentlemen, “Such an opinion scarcely requires a remark.”

Evans, though trained in geology, is not without imagination. We started looking for the shape of a dog’s footprint and in just a few minutes found a half-dozen candidates. With the “eye of faith,” as Evans puts it, these naturally occurring shapes looked distinctly canine in origin, though none were as large as what Guest’s gentleman described.

That gentleman wrote that a man could “without any great exertion” carry the rock away, and it seems he might have done just that. Now this silent place, populated mostly by migrating birds, is protected from development. But in centuries past the cairns were broken open; any treasure left inside is long gone. A 19th-century gentleman might not have hesitated to remove a wondrous rock.

Or perhaps Guest’s man wanted to test it. The wonders list also stated that, if the stone were moved from its spot, it would reappear atop the cairn the next day. Even if that magic failed, in this lonesome place, no one would have noticed the rock was missing.

“When I started engaging with early Welsh poetry again, one of the things that struck me was how much of British history has been wiped off the school curriculum,” Evans says. On his website, he writes that the Wonders of Britain “act as pins, fastening Britain today to a hidden landscape of dark age mythology.” The giant dog and cursed boar-prince may have been myths, but the cairns and their pockmarked rocks are not. The people who lived here a thousand years ago thought this place was special, as had Bronze Age people thousands of years before that. Without the text to hint at these layers of history, today it would be a pleasant nature reserve, lovely enough but lacking the draw of a graveyard linked with Britain’s legendary king.

By the time Historia Brittonum was written, the Celtic world it described was already fading into obscurity. Y Gdoddin, a medieval poem dated to roughly the same period, describes one of the Britons’ last-ditch efforts, in the seventh century, to oust the Saxons from their lands. Whatever its historical value, “it’s actually about the most British thing that’s ever been written,” says Evans. “They go to Edinburgh and get drunk for a whole year, saying—eventually, we’re going to go kick the Anglo-Saxons out. Then they lose. They lose terribly. The British have this real delight in heroes who fail, and this is the first example of it.”

By the ninth century, Anglo-Saxon influence was creeping over the whole island. Historia Brittonum itself is evidence of that. Some of the text’s main sources are English, not Welsh, and it’s the information that comes from those Anglo-Saxon accounts that’s now considered most reliable. Over time, any corroboration of the history passed down from Welsh sources was lost. Barring a series of surprise discoveries of lost documents, the full facts of those medieval centuries will never be known for sure.

Landscapes can stand up to time better than human records, but some of the wonders have clearly been lost for good. A pond with different species of fish inhabiting each corner is probably filled in. A northern island of swimming birds could refer to a seabird colony, but there’s little clue as to which island it might have been. Another wonder, the miraculous tomb of Arthur’s son, was likely once in the town of Wormelow Tump, but in the 20th century, perhaps even earlier, locals leveled the substantial burial mound. Now the only features there are a gas station, a pub, and a bus stop.

On a rainy morning, Evans and I went to see the forgotten site of Linn Liuan, a whirlpool that sucked in the sea then burped it back up. The wonders list indicates that it was somewhere along the Severn, the longest river in Britain. After searching up and down its banks, Evans had lost hope of finding the whirlpool, until one day in 2006, when he received an email from a stranger, John Nettleship, who had read Evans’s online description of the wonder and had an idea where it could have been.

Nettleship, who died in 2011, had been a strict and short-tempered chemistry teacher, and it’s said that one of his pupils, J.K. Rowling, modeled Severus Snape—Harry Potter’s potions teacher—after him. “He was very dry,” Evans says. “And quietly socially conscious.” Nettleship belonged to a small historical society, and he described strange geographic features known as the Whirlyholes, now-dry pools that, according to local lore, used to empty suddenly of water, leaving behind dangerous sinkholes.

Records didn’t place the pools on the river’s current course, but it was the best lead Evans had found. Nettleship had started interviewing local farmers, and together they searched local libraries and scrutinized old maps, looking for evidence that the Whirlyholes were once on the river. The nearby village of Caerwent used to be on the river's edge; there’s even an old Roman wall there called the “port wall.” With the help of a student, Evans and Nettleship were able to show that the water once reached the Whirlyholes’ location. Locals remembered being warned about the dangers of these pools, which had lingered in a diminished state until the 1970s. Their description of the holes also matched Evans’ hunch about the whirlpool, that it was connected to underground caves that store and release water, making the outflow unpredictable. By 2008, when they published their findings, Evans and Nettleship were convinced they had found the wonder’s most likely location.

Evans had warned me that there was not going to be much to see. The river moved over time, and a Victorian-era infrastructure project had altered the hydrogeology of the area for good. But he led the way down a footpath and through a charming arch to a highway underpass, where horses had gathered to get out of the rain. Pointing out over the field, he indicated a slight indent in the ground, a dip in the landscape that one would be hard-pressed to notice.

“Now, how would you know it was there?” Evans said. “It’s a shallow bit of farmland.” An once-spectacular whirlpool had become a field where sheep could graze safely.

Perhaps the only wonder from the list that maintains a truly exalted status is the famous Roman spa at Bath, which is guarded today by paved streets and international chain stores instead of mud and sheep. Unlike the others, this wonder has an audio guide, which explains that the baths were “hidden for most of the 2,000 years they’ve been here.”

In the baths, ghostly figures of Roman reenactors are projected onto the rooms’ walls. There’s no need to imagine the past here, as one ghost figure rests on a bench or another receives a massage. The natural wonder of the geothermal waters that feed the baths is mentioned only in passing. And the Wonders of Britain make no appearance. It’s as though the medieval period never happened. In the audio guide version of the story, there are only two important moments in its history: when Romans built the baths and when 19th-century archaeologists rediscovered them.

Standing on the 2,000-year-old stones of the Roman baths, however, and dipping a finger into the warm mineral water did transmit a touch of awe. But the experience of standing in Caerwent, looking out from the port wall to see the one-time path of the River Severn and finding the dips of the dried-up Whirlyholes, while not spectacular, had its own power. The wonders list can act as a decoder for the landscape, revealing secrets in a nondescript underpass, a featureless field, an ordinary intersection. These places might seem like they have no history, but once they were remarkable.

Not everyone has the same enthusiasm for tromping around faded footpaths in the English and Welsh countryside that Evans does. He knows that. But he was right when he said that it would all be worth it. On the first night that I met him, before we went to the sites of Carn Cabal, Linn Liuan, or the Bone Well, we went to see the Severn Bore.

A bore is a tidal phenomenon—a flood tide gathers into a wave that rushes up a bay or river, against the current. The shape of the river bed channels the incoming tide along a path that narrows so quickly the water rises into a wave that speeds up the river, as fast as 13 miles per hour on the Severn. These waves can be dramatic, and surfers try to ride them upstream. (In 2006, one rode the bore for 7.6 miles, a world record at the time.) The bore comes only a handful of times each month, as it has for centuries, though rarely with a strength that makes it worth seeing. The most powerful bores usually come around the spring and autumn equinoxes; Evans and I visited in early November, for a bore that was predicted to rate three stars out of five. But the innkeeper at our hotel, who had wished us well on our “boring” adventure, said that the waves are unpredictable. A predicted four-star bore might pass with a whimper, a three-star might roar by like a pack of motorcycles on a mountain highway.

The River Severn winds through the landscape in long S-curves, so it’s possible to see the bore multiple times as it travels upriver. The first place we waited to see it, near Bristol, the river spread wide, and dark mud banks sat low in the water. In the distance, the lights of the city glowed, and the fireworks of Guy Fawkes Night popped now and again across the still water.

After a long while, I heard a roar in the distance, like a muffled airplane engine, growing louder.

“It’s pretty scary, isn’t it?” said Evans. “Like a tsunami.”

We heard the sound of water lapping at the shore grow agitated. Then—an unmistakable, fair-sized wave, cruising across the water.

We raced upriver and within minutes were standing on a bend where a pub was blasting Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’.” The bore approached again, this time as a line drawn across the river, impossibly straight. The wave was taller and faster: Before it, the river was flat, black, and glassy and then, a moment later, three or four feet higher, rough and aggressive. It was like looking at two different landscapes at once, a set of before-and-after photos spliced together.

“Want to see if we can catch it further back?” Evans said.

We were off again, like Arthur’s men chasing the enchanted boar, giddy and intent. We pulled off a road lined with hedges, the river just on the other side, narrower here. Where the road bent away from the river, we found a footpath leading to a break in the trees. Again came a low rumble roiling to a crescendo.

“It’s getting scarier as it gets louder, the waves right on the edge, chopping up against that …” Evans was saying, when the bore rounded the corner, crashed against the curve of land where we had stood, and zoomed upriver. The water rushed up the bank, and we both scrambled back from edge before the surge could pull us in. It felt dangerous, in the dark night, by the muddy, cold river, too close to a wave powerful enough to knock a person down and snatch them away.

This bore would not have come as a surprise to medieval people. Many of the Wonders of Britain were trees, rocks, and springs because those natural features dominated the landscape. Traveling meant spending long stretches on roads that led far from human places, or depending on the rhythms of the river. They would have tracked the tides and known when the bore might visit, even if it was weak when they thought it would strong, roaring when they expected it to be subdued. Like anything wild, it can be studied and better known, but remains in some ways unpredictable. A thousand years after the Wonders of Britain were recorded, they still have the power to surprise. I have never seen anything like it.

You might not know about Regina Anderson, but you've probably heard of many of her friends. On a typical day in 1923 or 1924, Anderson might leave her desk at the 135th Street Branch of the New York Public Library and drop a letter to W.E.B. Du Bois in the mailbox. She may go home to her apartment on St. Nicholas Avenue to check up on her couchsurfer, Zora Neale Hurston. Or she might hit the town with Countee Cullen, and then finish out the night cooking bacon and eggs for Langston Hughes.

Nearly a century after it began, the Harlem Renaissance remains one of the preeminent cultural movements in American history. And although Anderson doesn't show up in many contemporary accounts of the period, she was there the whole time: lending out books, throwing parties, fighting for opportunities of her own, and enabling the spread of ideas that made the era what it was.

"She was that connection," says historian Ethelene Whitmire, author of Regina Anderson Andrews, Harlem Renaissance Librarian, a biography that seeks to restore Anderson to her rightful place in the movement. "And she was there at the key time, when all the big names were arriving in Harlem." As Anderson's life story shows, if you're trying to write a history book, it's best not to forget the librarian.

Anderson never meant to come to Harlem at all. When she moved to New York City at age 21, in 1922, she posted up at a downtown YWCA, and applied for a job at the New York Public Library. As Whitmire details in her book, most libraries at that time had some form of segregation in place. Some cities, including Charleston and Dallas, barred African Americans from public libraries entirely. Others, like Atlanta and New Orleans, had separate branches for black clientele.

At the NYPL, all patrons were welcome at all branches, but when it came to employment, there was a certain amount of de facto segregation based on neighborhood demographics. Eastern European applicants were generally sent to the Webster Library on the Upper East Side, Russian-Jewish ones to the Seward Park Branch on the Lower East Side, and black applicants were habitually referred to the 135th Street Branch, in Harlem.

When Anderson was called in for her interview, she found this out firsthand. "Instead of focusing on her previous library experience"—at various institutions in and around her home city of Chicago—"the administrator was most concerned about her race," Whitmire writes. On her application, Anderson (who had ancestors from Sweden, precolonial America, Madagascar, and India, among other places) had listed herself as "American."

"I always considered myself an American. I don't know what else I could be," she explained to her interviewer. "To us you're not an American," he replied. "You're not white." And so, although Anderson had never been to Harlem, she, too, was sent to the 135th Street Branch.

At that time, the head of the branch was Ernestine Rose, a white woman who was determined to make the space as useful as possible to the neighborhood. "Rose was someone who was thinking outside the box during that time period, in terms of services for African Americans," says Whitmire. "She really wanted to reach out to the community." By the time Anderson started full-time as a junior clerk, in April of 1923, the branch had become a hotspot for many different groups. Over the course of a typical week, the library might host meetings of the local chapter of the NAACP, the Anti-Lynching Crusaders, and a high school boys' club dedicated to the study of black history.

Anderson's new post was eye-opening. As Onita Estes-Hicks put it in the African American National Biography, she quickly realized that "she herself was a victim of an educational system that had disregarded black contributions to America," and set about filling in her own gaps in knowledge. At the same time, she embraced the outreach aspects of her job. She helped to set up weekly talks by Hubert Harrison, a socialist and public intellectual known for his street-corner speeches. She also took over publicity efforts for the North Harlem Community Forum, a weekly lecture series focused on the issues of the day.

The speakers and topics were wide-ranging—one week, radical orator Hubert Harrison talked about Sir Arthur Conan Doyle; another, Margaret Sanger spoke flanked by a police detail, in case she tried to distribute birth control literature—but many of these memorable evenings started thanks to a letter from Anderson. One she wrote in November of 1924, to W.E.B. Du Bois, is typical: it goes over recent highlights of the forum, asks when he will be available to speak there, and then requests an in with one of his friends, so she can send him a similar message.

Meanwhile, as Anderson actively built a network of established names, just being at the library brought her into contact with a number of up-and-comers. A lot of Harlem transplants made visiting the 135th Street Branch a top priority, Whitmire says: "After they got a place to live at the local YWCA or YMCA, they would often head to the library."

When they arrived, Anderson made a point of securing space for them to work on their projects. This is how she met Langston Hughes, Eric Walrond, and Claude McKay. She also brought new books home—sometimes seven or eight a day—skim them, and put together notes, so that she could recommend these authors to her patrons and to each other. "She was reading everything new that was coming through," says Whitmire.

Anderson's work life and home life began to meld further. Soon after she started working at the 135th Street Branch, Anderson moved into a fifth-floor apartment five blocks north at 580 St. Nicholas Avenue with two other young women, Louella Tucker and Ethel Ray (soon to be Ethel Ray Nance), who both worked at Opportunity, a popular African-American magazine. The apartment was swanky, with a great view of the area. The three roommates called it "Dream Haven."

Thanks to the roommates' connections, the people who passed through through Dream Haven made up a "who's-who of the Harlem Renaissance: artists, poets, writers, songwriters, intellectuals, and activists," writes Whitmire. Langston Hughes and Arna Bontemps met there, and struck up a friendship that lasted nearly half a century. The poet Countee Cullen would stop by almost every night and occasionally workshop his poems; when he graduated from college, the roommates took him to his first cabaret, teasing him because he'd written verses about something he hadn't yet experienced.

In 1924, Zora Neale Hurston ended up sleeping on the Dream Haven couch for a while. Another frequent guest was Carl Van Vechten, a white writer and photographer; after he published a controversial book with a racist title based on his experiences there, he was apparently kicked out. Anderson and Ray helped organize the March 21st, 1924 Civic Club dinner that brought dozens of black intellectuals together, and which some say crystallized the Harlem Renaissance. Afterwards, many of the attendees came back to Dream Haven and ate bacon and eggs.

Often, at the end of the month, when the roommates' money was running out from all this hosting, Du Bois—a friend of Nance's father—took them on trips: upstate, or to Coney Island for shrimp cocktail and oysters. "It seemed he enjoyed our adventurousness and spontaneity," Nance recalled. "We were always doing something, having people at the apartment, meeting new people." Anderson, too, found herself inspired by her social circle: she was eventually involved in two different theater groups (both of which, for a time, practiced at the 135th Street Branch), and wrote three plays, under the pen name Ursula Trelling.

Throughout, Anderson kept focused on her job. She would later write that she saw "the use of books as our strongest means of promoting intercultural understanding." When she was invited to the massive eight-day wedding of heiress Mae Walker Robinson, she brought "a set of books" as a present. In 1926, she, too, got married—to Bill Andrews, a lawyer for the NAACP—and her maid of honor was groundbreaking novelist Jessie Fauset.

By this time, Anderson had transferred branches twice, and was now stationed at the Woodstock Branch, in the Bronx, where she was the first African-American librarian. But she felt her career had stalled out: as she moved up in the ranks, there were fewer and fewer jobs that the NYPL seemed willing to give to her, while her white colleagues jumped ahead. "She was very thankful for the opportunity to work at the library, but it also seemed that the library did have some policies that were restricting her in terms of her ability to get promoted," says Whitmire.

After an intervention from her friend W.E.B. Du Bois—"there were lots of letters exchanged" between him and NYPL higher-ups, and he briefly boycotted the branch, Whitmire says—Anderson (now Andrews) eventually got her promotion. In 1938, she advanced again, and became the first ever African-American head of a New York Public Library branch, on 115th Street. She would later head up the Washington Heights branch, where she continued to bring in speakers, encourage community use of the library, and host theatrical groups. Due to the NYPL's strict retirement policy, she left the library in 1966, at age 65, after 40 years there. After spending much of her later life traveling, she passed away in 1993.

In the years since Anderson retired, the 135th Street Branch expanded, and is now known as the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. (It houses many of Anderson's papers and photographs.) Dream Haven is listed as an NYC LGBT Historic Site, thanks to the figures who passed through it. And if you ask someone to name a quintessentially American movement—one characterized by its disparate ideas, figures, and—they very well might mention the Harlem Renaissance.

Whitmire has found Anderson to be a good role model for educators in any time period. "In one of her speeches, she said, 'We must be more than librarians,'" she says. "It's not just about being in libraries, but getting out there." If you do it right, one naturally leads to the other.

The Choctaw people had been in Oklahoma less than two decades before news spread about an all-consuming famine in Ireland. Having been ousted from their ancestral lands in the Mississippi, they were slowly making a new home for themselves, when, on March 23, 1847, members of the struggling tribe were asked to make a donation for those starving strangers, thousands of miles away.

Seventeen years earlier, the Choctaw had been given a terrible choice. They could retain their autonomy if they were prepared to relocate thousands of miles to Oklahoma, or they could remain in their homes and cede their sovereignty to the United States. The 15,000 people who signed the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek and left, walked thousands of miles to get to their destination, with as much as a quarter of their people dying en route. Conditions were bleak: In one 1849 account, a Choctaw man described how, since coming to Oklahoma, they had had “our habitations torn down and burned, our fences destroyed, cattle turned into our fields, and we ourselves have been scourged, manacled, fettered, and otherwise personally abused, until by such treatment some of our best men have died.”

Yet amid it all, in a meeting in the stone and timber Agency Building in Skullyville, Oklahoma, they were asked to dig deep for a group of people they had never met. And, incredibly, they did.

Between 1820 and 1870, around 2.5 million people moved from Ireland to America—more than a third of the U.S. population in 1810. Indeed, the parents of President Andrew Jackson, who had put pressure on the Choctaw people to sign the treaty in 1830, had come from Northern Ireland in 1765. The blight, therefore, received extensive coverage in the American press, as émigrés worried about the friends and family they had left behind. As noted by James M. Farrell, a professor of communications at the University of New Hampshire, in early November 1845, many American papers reported that “a failure of the Irish potato crop”—on which around a third of the country relied—was “now too painfully certain,” with “a famine among the Irish people … apprehended.” Later that year, the Southern Patriot reported, “There is now no part of the country that is not visited by the blight” and "the loss is tremendous."

The tone of coverage grew more frenzied—the next year, the Ohio Statesman warned Americans of “SIX MILLIONS OF HUMAN BEINGS in Ireland and England, are within eight weeks of STARVATION!” Appeals followed. The general public was asked to give donations of money and ship tickets, and relief committees and charitable societies in churches and synagogues alike sprung up to help to support the starving men and women on the other side of the Atlantic.

It’s impossible to know precisely how much was raised, though it’s likely in the hundreds of thousands, with 118 shipments to Ireland valued at around $550,0000 in 19th-century dollars. Donations came from every corner of American society—even from those least able to give. Children in a pauper orphanage in New York raised $2, while inmates on a prison ship at Woolwich, in London, and at Sing Sing Prison also found ways to send money.

But when Major William Armstrong, an American “Choctaw agent” who represented their interests while implementing U.S. policy, approached them for money in 1847, writes the historian Turtle Bunbury,“he must have experienced mixed emotions.” These were people with very little to give, who had been pressured to cede 11 million acres of their land. Many would still have been grieving the family members they had lost along the Trail of Tears: Though the treaty had been signed 17 years earlier, Choctaw people were still making their way to Oklahoma, arriving at their final destination disheveled, filthy, and exhausted.

“Many would have been destitute or ill,” writes historian Anelise Hanson Shrout in the Journal of the Early Republic. “Most would have experienced enormous financial, emotional, and demographic damage as a result of removal. It is difficult to imagine a people less well-positioned to act philanthropically.” Still, Armstrong took out a circular, produced by the “Memphis committee” for Irish relief, and read it aloud to a crowd of some white settlers—“agents, missionaries, traders”—and a large number of Choctaw Native Americans.

Exactly what happened in that meeting is lost to time. But the assembled group managed to put together $170—well over $5,000 in today’s money. Most of this sum came from the Choctaw people. “It was an amazing gesture,” Judy Allen, then-editor of the Choctaw newspaper Bishinik, told the American-Statesman Capitol on the 150th anniversary of the gift. “By today's standards, it might be a million dollars." Bunbury explains it thus: “It is assumed that the Choctaw contributed because they felt immense empathy for the Irish situation, having experienced such similar pain during the Trail of Tears a little over a decade earlier.”

At the time, however, white Americans took the tribe’s generosity not as empathy but as a sign of the success of Christian evangelizing. The 1848 Report of the General Irish Relief Committee notes, on the donation, “The largest part was contributed by the children of the forest, our red brethren of the Choctaw nation. Even those distant men have felt the force of Christian example, and have given their cheerful aid in this good cause, though they are separated from you by many miles of land and an ocean’s breadth.” An editorial in the Arkansas Intelligencer saw it in even simpler terms: “What an agreeable reflection it must give to the Christian and the philanthropist to witness this evidence of civilization and Christian spirit existing among our red neighbours. They are repaying the Christian world a consideration for bringing them out from benighted ignorance and heathen barbarism. Not only by contributing a few dollars, but by affording evidence that the labours of the Christian missionary have not been in vain.”

It would be another five years before the potato famine came to an end. As the Irish people recovered, the Choctaw were drawn into the U.S. Civil War, where they sided with the Confederate States of America, believing that they were promised a state under Indian control if they won. In the century that followed, they continued to struggle with cultural isolation, bullying, underemployment, and an utter lack of political representation. Since the 1970s, however, they have managed to reclaim some of the rights wrested from them in the 19th century, first establishing their own tribal government with a constitution in 1984.

Over the last 170 years, the Irish have remembered this sudden gesture of generosity from distant strangers. Just before St. Patrick’s Day 2018, Taoiseach Leo Varadkar announced an Irish scholarship program for Choctaw youth. As the BBC reported, Varadkar addressed the Choctaw Nation in Oklahoma. "A few years ago, on a visit to Ireland, a representative of the Choctaw Nation called your support for us 'a sacred memory'," he said. "It is that and more. It is a sacred bond, which has joined our peoples together for all time. Your act of kindness has never been, and never will be, forgotten in Ireland."

Fifty-three million years ago, Antarctica wasn’t an unpleasant place for a midwinter sojourn. Back then, its shores and hills were ruffled with palm trees, beeches, and conifers. Winter temperatures hovered near 50 degrees Fahrenheit, so the region wasn’t frost-nipped, even if it was blanketed by near-constant darkness.

Today, of course, the landscape is harsher and notably empty of palms. The trees’ notorious intolerance to chilly conditions makes them useful proxies for estimating historical temperatures. The places fanned by fronds have varied over time. When they turn up in the fossil record, researchers can infer that the region’s temperatures probably once fluctuated within a fairly specific range.

In a new paper published in Nature Scientific Reports, researchers from Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, Brandon University, and the University of Saskatchewan sifted through thousands of data points to untangle the relationship between temperature and distribution of palm trees, and offer hints about where the trees could put down roots in a warming world.

Unsurprisingly, the researchers found that most types of palms are clustered in tropical zones. Most palms flourish in areas with mean annual temperatures between 64 and 82 degrees Fahrenheit, but a few hardy varieties don’t mind damp, cold feet. The Trachycarpus fortunei, or windmill palm, for instance, grows at high altitudes in China. It can withstand temperatures below 35 degrees Fahrenheit, and won’t buckle under the occasional dusting of snow.

The windmill palm is a bit of an outlier, though: In order for most palm trees to flourish, the scientists concluded, the mean temperature of a region’s coldest month can’t dip below 41.36 degrees Fahrenheit. At present, "Washington, D.C. is just a little too cold for palms to successfully propagate in the wild, but ... you can expect range expansion in the coming decades as average winter temperatures warm up," said lead author Tammo Reichgelt in a statement.

In the coming years, more places will cross that temperature threshold: The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, comprised of 1,300 scientists from around the world, estimates that temperatures will climb somewhere between 2.5 and 10 degrees Fahrenheit over the next 100 years. That will probably mean, in turn, that palms will show up in unexpected places.

Some ice cream flavors are popular across the world. Others maintain a small, but loyal following in their place of origin. Even if the fanbase never grows, local pride in regional ingredients can keep unlikely flavors alive. From New England's medicinal berries (once popular in perfumed gum) to Northern California's abundance of fresh garlic, any resource is fair game for consideration.

Whether it's a lack of widespread appeal or a crucial ingredient that doesn't travel well, these flavors and styles are difficult to find outside their homes. You have to go straight to the source. Keep an eye out for these regional favorites on your next (rocky) road trip. A world far more interesting than vanilla exists if you know where to look.

Tigertail

Tigers (and their tails) are native to Asia, but tigertail ice cream is Canadian to its core. After the First Canadian Army helped liberate the Netherlands during the Second World War, some Dutch families immigrated to Canada to begin anew. With them came licorice, which Canadian soda fountains swirled into orange ice cream. Most popular from the 1950s to 1970s, the citrusy, slightly herbal ice cream is now a nostalgic treat for those raised in the Great White North. Elsewhere, the orange-and-black-striped flavor is almost entirely unknown.

Superman

One scoop can make any kid feel like a hero—and any Midwesterner feel like a kid again. But this comically bright delight isn't just a color show; it's three distinct ice cream flavors blended together. A Detroit brewery produced the first-known combination during Prohibition, when beer sales were a little flat. They swirled together a trio of Faygo Red Pop, yellow lemon, and Blue Moon ice creams (the latter of which is a Midwestern mystery flavor that fans liken to everything from Froot Loops to marshmallows). Today, creameries sell the iconic color set in other flavors, but it's still tough to track down outside the Midwest.

Keso

Double the dairy, double the fun. In the Philippines, grocery stores and street vendors sell a blend of sweet cream and cheddar ice cream (sometimes studded with actual shreds of cheese) alongside flavors such as chocolate and vanilla. Millions of Pinoy ice cream fans eat salty-sweet scoops of keso (from the phonetic spelling of the Spanish queso) stuffed inside pillowy bread rolls called pan de sal. Some even liken the tangy, savory balance it creates to a slice of cheesecake.

Dondurma

Reaching for a cone of dondurma may leave you empty-handed.

Turkey's taffy-like ice cream contains salep and mastic—powdered orchid bulbs and pine resin—which render it slow-melting, elastic, and thick enough to cut with a fork and knife. The finished product is so sticky that vendors often make a show out of it, playing tricks on customers using sleights of hand and misdirection to keep the twirling cones just out of reach. Don't be deterred: Good things come to those who wait.

Teaberry

Some remember teaberry's minty spice as an old-fashioned favorite; others think it tastes like a pain reliever made with wintergreen. These crimson berries grow on an evergreen plant native to New England, but taste like neither tea nor berries. Pennsylvanians love them in ice cream, though their shocking pink hue and medicinal flavor is scarcely known outside the Mid-Atlantic. As polarizing as it sounds, the flavor was ubiquitous in the 1960s, appearing in sweets, cure-alls, and gum.

Garlic

The town of Gilroy in Northern California is the self-proclaimed “Garlic Capital of the World.” Stores, farmers' markets, and an annual festival all pay tribute to the fragrant bulb. Despite garlic's almost exclusive presence in savory food, the town doesn't stop at spaghetti dinner. Even their ice cream is laced with it. Fans say the subtle, nutty kick adds a rich and buttery element to a predominantly vanilla base, but critics find the aftertaste disturbing. Other garlic-infused flavors include chocolate, roasted almond, pistachio, and pecan praline.

There should never have been five Sullivan brothers aboard the hulking USS Juneau. In July 1942, the U.S. Navy enacted a policy in the wake of Pearl Harbor that barred brothers from serving on the same ship. It's unclear whether or not the policy was enforced, however. And the Sullivans—Joseph, Francis, Albert, Madison, and George, from Waterloo, Iowa—made their feelings clear: They served together, or they didn’t serve at all. That ultimatum, in the end, came at a terrible cost.

On Friday, November 13, 1942, the USS Juneau was scuppered by a Japanese torpedo during the Battle of Guadalcanal. There were 687 people aboard—all but 100 died in the attack, among them three of the brothers. For the past 76 years, the steel parts of the cruiser have lain untouched at the bottom of the ocean—until last weekend, when a crew funded by the philanthropist and Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen found the wreckage resting on the floor of the South Pacific, about 2.6 miles below the surface.

Of the 100 men who survived the initial attack, 90 more perished after a search for survivors was accidentally delayed by over a week. Some died of exposure; others of dehydration or shark attacks. Survivors reported that Al and George, the youngest and eldest sons, respectively, both survived the torpedo attack: Al drowned the next day, while George, reportedly mad with grief, disappeared over the side of his raft after four or five days and was never seen again.

The discovery is a significant one, said Vice Admiral Rich Brown, from the Naval Surface Forces, in a statement. “The story of the USS Juneau crew and Sullivan brothers epitomize the service and sacrifice of our nation’s greatest generation." In the years after their deaths, the brothers' parents, Tom and Alleta Sullivan, made multiple public appearances to support the war efforts, and two destroyers were named The Sullivans in their honor.

The expedition team members said in a statement that they used sonar technology to identify the wreck, before sending in a remotely operated underwater vehicle, with a camera. The cruiser was off the coast of the Solomon Islands, an archipelago about 1,200 miles due north of Brisbane.

Six years of Allen's undersea exploration have led to the rediscovery of a number of lost wrecks and maritime paraphernalia: with the Royal Navy, the bell of the HMS Hood; the Japanese battleship Musashi; the Italian destroyer RN Artigliere; the USS Indianapolis; the Japanese IJN Yamashiro; and, earlier this month, the aircraft carrier USS Lexington, known as the "Lady Lex." It's an expensive hobby, certainly, and one that relies on the support of wealthy benefactors—especially as fuel costs rise, and fewer expeditions are commissioned. “Funding is getting harder and harder to come by,” David Gallo, director of special projects at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, told Christian Science Monitor in 2015. “It’s very frustrating.”

Among the thousands of glittering glass jars in the Ichthyology collection storeroom at the Florida Museum of Natural History are a few enormous, dusty, ceramic crocks. These vessels are currently empty, but the cryptic numbering and globby drips down their outsides hint at their past scientific purpose. George Burgess, the emeritus Director of the Florida Program for Shark Research, still remembers plunging his hands into their dark depths to retrieve fish specimens preserved in alcohol, though it has been close to 30 years since the containers held anything besides cobwebs. With Burgess’s recent retirement, now there is no one employed at the museum who ever used these once indispensable vessels.

At the turn of the 20th century, natural history museums around the world were growing at a rapid rate. The foundations of their collections were comparative specimens, examples of known plants, animals, and other natural or cultural items that researchers used for identification and study. These included complete animals such as fishes and reptiles best preserved in fluids to maintain their soft tissue. However, what to do when your stingray or iguana was too big to store in a standard glass jar? Resourceful curators looked around their homes and turned to a familiar form: the pickle crock.

These containers were originally produced as fermentation vessels for preserving vegetables, fish, and meat on homesteads of the American Midwest. In the early 20th century, they would have been familiar to many people, who had similar crocks in a corner of their kitchen, full of sauerkraut or other foods. Burgess recalls jars like these in his childhood home on Long Island, New York, where he would sneak down to the cellar, crack open the heavy lid and extract a pickled herring for a snack. When he first saw them in a museum setting, he knew exactly what they were.

In museums, they came to preserve a different kind of pickled fish: scientific specimens in alcohol or formalin. Prior to the 1950s, large glass jars were expensive and fragile. A 10-gallon glass specimen jar would have cost nearly $25 in 1919, the equivalent of $350 today. Metal containers, though more affordable, corroded quickly. Instead, scientists began to extol the virtues of stoneware crocks as economical and practical long-term storage options. In contrast to the glass jar, a 10-gallon crock cost only $5, or the equivalent of $75 today. For much of the 20th century, ceramic crocks were common in storerooms of museums across the United States. Canadian and British museums stored specimens in similar vessels, including large butter churns.

Sturdy fermentation jars were used to preserve whole specimens, but also for “bacterial maceration.” That’s the scientific process of leaving an animal carcass submerged in water and letting the soft tissue rot away.

While Dr. Thomas LaDuke was a graduate student at Michigan State University in the 1980s, he worked in the school’s museum, where one of his jobs was preparing reptile specimens: “I can still remember reaching into that nasty smelling crock to scoop up a handful of muck filled with nice clean monitor lizard bones,” he says. “That is a smell you’ll never forget!”

Pickle crocks filled a need, but imperfectly. They were exceedingly heavy. To slow evaporation, jars had to be sealed with messy mixtures of beeswax, paraffin, and petroleum jelly. Though they were sturdier than glass jars, they were opaque, making it more difficult to quickly identify and monitor contents. Without routine refills of preservation fluid, the animals inside would begin to decay.

Jack Ashby of the Grant Museum of Zoology at University College London described some of their perils: "These jars are pretty horrific. We haven’t opened them for about 10 years,” he says. “The last time I tried, a cloud of black spores exploded in my face, as the fluid had pretty much gone and the otter inside was covered in mold. Since then they’ve always been a problem for another day."

Over the latter half of the 20th century museums have gradually transferred their specimens into improved modern glass jars, steel caskets, or plastic barrels. Now, in all but a few museums, stoneware pickle crocks have disappeared. Some relict jars still linger forgotten on museum shelves, but given space constraints, perhaps not for much longer. At the Florida Museum of Natural History, the century-old crocks are about to make a move, from Ichthyology to the Ceramic Technology Laboratory. There, they’ll be studied as historical specimens in their own right.

Desktop Candle Furnace

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Wax seal kits are a popular gift, and come in super handy when you want to give a letter or bill payment that fancy touch—or, say, pretend you're a character on Game of Thrones.

But by and large, wax seals turn out to be a bit messy and end up as desk drawer clutter after one use. That is, unless you have an attractive desktop wax furnace to make the whole process classier and easier.

A wooden rack designed to hold a wax-pouring spoon over a small votive candle, a candle furnace is the perfect desk accessory to get you sealing letters like you are sending by raven. It not only makes the whole process easier and more attractive, a candle furnace is also an intriguing desk accent that’ll make people wonder when they are going to receive one of your wax-sealed letters.

On February 7, 2016, Storm Imogen rolled in from the English Channel and onto the coast of Southern England. The Met Office, the U.K.’s national weather service, had already issued flood warnings. Ferry operators began to cancel services and the highway authority warned drivers about possible road closures. But photographer Rachael Talibart prepared a little differently. As the storm hit, Talibart set up her camera on Newhaven Beach, East Sussex, and trained her lens on the turbulent sea.

Talibart had spent the winter waiting for the perfect conditions, and finally they'd arrived. She photographed violently churning waves, water whipped by gale-force winds, and giant swells. The images that Storm Imogen helped create marked the beginning of Sirens, a series of big wave photographs that has now been turned into a book. The title of both the book and the images are drawn from myths and legends, particularly the Sirens of Greek mythology who lured sailors to their death.

Talibart has been enchanted by the sea for most of her life. “I grew up by the coast and a large part of my childhood was spent at sea. I used to pass long hours on deck by imagining landscapes and creatures in the waves,” she says. “Later, I studied Homer’s Odyssey and loved all those stories about sea monsters and gods. These influences have come together in Sirens.”

From Storm Imogen, she has Hydra, tumbling crests of crashing water, named after the multi-headed sea serpent from Greek mythology. Kraken, named for the Norwegian sea monster, depicts churning, white-capped seas under thunderous skies. And Mishipeshu Roars, after the Native American sea panther mishipeshu, shows waves surging high across a sea wall and exploding into the air, like two claws reaching toward clouds.

“I like to depict subjects so that they look different from how we may normally see them," Talibart explains. “Using very fast shutter speeds, I have frozen the motion of the waves at a moment that makes them seem to have a character of their own.”

Some of Talibart’s photos include elements of the built environment—a sea wall, a distant lighthouse, a tilting ferry—which emphasize the uncompromising nature of a stormy ocean. These images remind us this is not a domain for humans, something Talibart is conscious of every time she shoots.

“I am wary of the sea’s power. I have retrained myself to shoot with my left eye so I can see the waves coming with my right eye,” she says. “The number of photographers appearing on Newhaven Beach during storms has increased greatly since I started to publish my photographs and some even boast about getting dangerously close to the sea. This is irresponsible. I use a 70-200mm lens and always maintain a safe distance. With practice and vision, it is possible to use composition and point of view to capture the scale of these monstrous waves rather than putting oneself in danger or, worse, encouraging others to do so.”

Talibart also tries to study the restless sea. “Going back to locations repeatedly really helps me improve my photography. After innumerable visits, I know my storm beach very well and I know exactly the right combination of conditions for the shots I want,” she says. “If I see a promising combination of forecast and tide, I’ll get there as early as possible, usually pre-dawn, and shoot until the sea calms or the light fails. Sometimes, I can be on the beach all day.”

Talibart’s dedication has paid off. In addition to the book, her Sirens series has been shortlisted for the 2018 Sony World Photography Awards. Yet she still maintains an essential respect for her turbulent muse. “During the storms that produced my Sirens, the sea was simultaneously beautiful and terrifying; I felt very small and humbled but in a good way,” she says. “Working very much in the tradition of the ‘sublime’ in art, I want to convey the awe and exhilaration of being confronted by the ocean in its most tempestuous moods.”

Atlas Obscura has a selection of images from Sirens.