Branch out, dine in, and save your city.

At face value, this list can help kick down the walls of your New York apartment and let the wider world inside for dinner. With a quick phone call or online order, you can have mole blanco, hand-pulled lamian noodles, Persian beef stew, or kosher lo-mein delivered straight to your door. You could even order a cocktail or egg cream (or both—no one’s judging). On a deeper level, however, this list is far more important: It’s also a step toward saving what makes New York City special.

Some of us at the NYC-based Atlas Obscura were born in the city, while others moved here later. However we arrived, it’s safe to say it’s not the sunset skyline that keeps us here. Nor is it the neon-glow of Times Square or selfies on the Brooklyn Bridge. Our raison d’etre as New Yorkers is something less tangible, less Instagrammable.

We live here to see the breadth of humanity squeezed into five boroughs. To ride the Q train to Brighton Beach, where we can scarf Uzbek-Korean noodles under a TV blaring Eastern European music videos. To take the 7 into Flushing to sit barefoot in the basement of a Hindu temple eating dosas in the midst of monks. To take the J into the Financial District once the tide of commuters has ebbed so we can luxuriate in an underground Russian bathhouse eating pelmeni and borscht in bathrobes.

If we let small, immigrant-owned businesses like these—the lifeblood of this global city—fall victim to the same fate to which so many restaurants around the world seem doomed, the world that is New York City will have measurably withered. It will become a center not of cultural preservation or offbeat obsessions, but one of homogenized franchises, a city without a story.

So, yes, order in and bring some wonder into your home. Try something new and skip doing the dishes while you’re at it. But do so to ensure that the New York City on the other side of this pandemic is still a city for everyone—for Bhutanese snooker players, for basement barflies with Broadway ambitions, for Persian printmakers who dreamed of becoming chefs, for ambassadors, construction workers, and fishermen. A world of people, in a city we call home.

Note: Many of these restaurants have recently expanded their delivery radius, so don't count anything out because it's not in your neighborhood. Double-check via the links and contact information below to make sure your location is eligible for any service. We'll be regularly updating this list with new restaurants and relevant information as they become available.

Luna de Xelajú

Jamaica, Queens

Craving tamales but your roommates are set on pizza? Luna de Xelajú is your spot. This Queens mainstay triples as a Guatemalan eatery dishing up Central American classics, a bakery specializing in sweet breads and biscuits, and a pizzeria offering adventurous slices. Try a traditional, tangy salpicon (shredded beef salad with citrus and cilantro) or pepian (chicken stew with thick Guatemalan tortillas). Your roommates can choose between macaroni and meatball pizza. How to order: Doordash

Lagman House

Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn

Hand-pulled noodle dishes anchor the city's only restaurant featuring Dungan fare, a cuisine that touches on the flavors of Western China, Kyrgyzstan, and historic Muslim recipes. Dishes run from the bitter crunchiness of a pickled carrot salad to the chewy richness of the headline lamian noodles with beef, onion, and cilantro. Pillowy, steamed dumplings called manti are the comfort-food flavor-pouches you never knew you needed. How to order: Postmates, Doordash

David’s Brisket House

Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn

Once a kosher Jewish deli, this neighborhood mainstay on a busy Bed-Stuy thoroughfare is now owned and operated by Yemeni Muslims, though the menu hasn’t changed one bit. The pastrami sandwich on rye with spicy brown mustard is a neighborhood favorite, but the corned beef holds its own as well. Wait until the storefront reopens to attempt the Triple Decker and get your photo on the wall. If you eat it alone in your apartment, no one will believe you. How to order: Doordash, Caviar, Seamless, Grubhub

Brighton Bazaar

Brighton Beach, Brooklyn

Get the best snacks from just about every Eastern European country delivered to your door for the post-Soviet springtime rooftop picnic you deserve. Blocks from Brighton Beach, this expansive grocer carries regional curiosities, from Georgian tarragon soda to Lithuanian rye bread to Russian pine cone preserves. There’s a hot bar with dumplings and noodles and a cold bar with “herring under a fur coat” and the Soviet-Korean morkovcha, with a deli featuring many cold cuts and cheeses you’ve probably never heard of. (Delivery is limited to Brooklyn with a $100 minimum order or $50 if within the Brighton Beach neighborhood.) How to order: Call 718-769-1700

Gottlieb’s Restaurant

Williamsburg, Brooklyn

This 60-year-old Williamsburg Jewish-American deli is one of a handful of Glatt kosher establishments left in the country. It may also be the only one with such a deep selection of Chinese-American options as well. Take your pick of matzo ball soup, chicken lo-mein, knishes, or sesame chicken. Just don’t expect any cheese with it. How to order: Orders2me, Doordash, Postmates

Taste of Persia

Flatiron, Manhattan

There have been a handful of silver linings to the storm cloud that is COVID-19, chief among them the resurgence of milkmen, drive-in movie theaters, and, of course, Japanese cheese-making. Feel free to add Flatiron’s recently shuttered Taste of Persia to the list of coronavirus comebacks: Owner Saeed Pourkay is back in the kitchen, taking weekend orders for delivery. The ash reshteh (bean and noodle soup with mint and yogurt) and gheimeh bademjan (beef stew with lentils and eggplant) that made him an institution are available to order, in addition to new dishes like halim, a Persian oatmeal. How to order: Call 917-592-3467 after viewing the menu on Taste of Persia’s website

Abu’s Homestyle Bakery

Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn

If you somehow have something to celebrate during these dark days, there’s nothing stopping you from ordering an entire red velvet sheet cake for yourself and your quarantine comrades from this bedrock Bed-Stuy establishment. The bakery was founded by Idris Conry (“Abu”), a born-and-raised Brooklynite and former boxer and school-teacher who brought the Nation of Islam–inspired bean pie to the fore in the early 2000s. The pies come in nine, six, and four inches (for those after a more personal celebration). How to order: Postmates, Doordash

Farm.one

Tribeca, Manhattan

In the days before COVID-19, the leafy greens and herbs grown in this underground, hydroponic, vertical farm located deep below Tribeca would be shipped by bicycle to the city’s top restaurants. With restaurants shuttered, they can now be yours at home. Skip the grocery store and still make it haute with their selection of micro arugula, lemon basil, bronze fennel, and much more. How to order: Farm.one’s website

Patent Pending

NoMad, Manhattan

If you’re reading this from the confines of your home, you’re the model citizen New York City needs right now. Keep up the heroics and order the cocktail you deserve from Patent Pending. The bar hides behind a coffee shop on the ground floor of the Radio Wave Building, where Nikola Tesla carried out groundbreaking experiments on radio waves in the late 1800s. Treat yourself to an array of fanciful themed libations like an Emulating Edison (with mulled wine, rum, and bergamot), an Illuminated Manhattan (with campfire whiskey, madeira, and gunpowder tea), or a Flash of Inspiration (with corn mezcal, smoked maple syrup, and grapefruit soda). How to order: Call 212-689-4002 or via direct message on the bar’s Instagram

Lexington Candy Shop

Upper East Side, Manhattan

This Upper East Side relic first opened up shop around the time of the last great pandemic. It’s the oldest family-owned luncheonette in the city and one of the last reminders of how New Yorkers lived before Starbucks. Grab an egg cream, a tuna melt, and a malted milkshake to enjoy a taste of yesteryear. How to order: Delivery.com, Grubhub.com, Seamless.com, Doordash.com

Streecha

East Village, Manhattan

Bring a tiny slice of the Village's Ukrainian community home for dinner with a handful of dishes from Streecha. While it’s typically a dine-in spot for those unwary of wandering into a barely-marked basement, their classic Eastern European fare is now breaking ground with delivery available for those within Manhattan. Orders on offer range from classics like borscht (beef and beet stew), holubtsi (cabbage stuffed with pork and rice simmered in tomato sauce), and varenyky (potato and cheese dumplings). A limited menu is available for next-day delivery. If nothing available today moves you, try again tomorrow. How to order: Call 914-413-9774

La Morada

Mott Haven, Bronx

You may have conquered that sourdough starter you’ve always dreamed of, but it’s no mole blanco. Let La Morada handle that. The Mexican husband-and-wife team that left Oaxaca in 1992 are now the proud owners of Mott Haven’s go-to eatery for rare moles and other Mexican icons like chilaquiles and flautas. The family are unabashed about their undocumented status, and their pro-immigration efforts have brought about a decent share of run-ins with law enforcement. Anti-immigration sentiment hasn’t shut their mouths anymore than COVID-19 has shut their kitchen. How to order: La Morada's website

Govinda’s Vegetarian Lunch

Boerum Hill, Brooklyn

The downtown Brooklyn Hare Krishna temple, along with the basement canteen it shelters, are temporarily closed, but delivery within a small radius around their location is still available for those after a clean and easy vegetarian lunch. Options rotate daily: Be sure to call and ask ahead of time. Typical dishes range from samosas to rajma (kidney bean curry) to kitchari (rice and yellow lentils). The kitchen doesn’t work with alliums like onion or garlic (ingredients known to inflame the passions). All the best for those eating where they work, and working where they sleep. How to order: Call 718-855-6714

Indonesian Food Bazaar

Elmhurst, Queens

There’s no telling how Indonesian émigré Felincia “Fefe” Anggono does it all. Since the pandemic reached our shores, the founder of the Indonesian Food Bazaar has been cooking food for healthcare workers at Elmhurst Hospital, writing lengthy, heartfelt prayers to those affected by COVID-19 from her Facebook page, and still managing to offer delivery to several boroughs. Text her on WhatsApp about her daily offerings, which could be anything from beef rendang (spiced beef and coconut milk stew) to nasi kuning (turmeric yellow rice with coconut milk) to bakso (pork or fish meatballs with noodles). Help her continue to help us all. For Queens, North Brooklyn, and most of Manhattan, the minimum order is $50. For Harlem and the Bronx, the minimum is $100. How to order: Text Fefe on WhatsApp +1-347-615-2003

Do you know of any other extraordinary NYC restaurants or bars we missed? You can join the conversation about this and other stories in the Atlas Obscura Community Forums.

10 were discovered over just the last few months.

“I can see family resemblance in apples the same way you can in people,” says Shaun Shepherd, a botanist at the Temperate Orchard Conservancy outside Portland, Oregon. It’s that kind of familiarity with all of the fruit’s varieties, earned over a lifetime of study, that’s endowed Shepherd with the ability to bring apples back from the dead.

Figuratively speaking, of course. This week, the Temperate Orchard Conservancy (TOC), in partnership with the nonprofit Lost Apple Project, announced that 10 apple varieties previously thought extinct are, in fact, alive and crisp as ever. It was the richest season ever for the Lost Apple Project, which “seeks to identify and preserve heritage apple trees and orchards in the Inland Empire” region of California, according to the project’s Facebook page.

To do that, a small number of volunteer apple foragers—a retired FBI agent among them—consult historical maps, records from 19th-century county fairs, newspapers, and sales ledgers to pinpoint former orchards dating back to the Homestead Act. If they’re lucky, they’ll arrive at these locations to find trees still producing fresh fruit—trees whose coordinates they carefully note before sending the apples off to TOC for analysis. Though the project’s Facebook page specifies Southern California as the area of interest, the Associated Press reported that some of the findings from this most recent haul came from as far away as Idaho and Washington state.

Once the apples arrive at TOC, Shepherd and his colleagues compare them against watercolor paintings commissioned by the United States Department of Agriculture in the 19th and early 20th centuries; they also rely on the descriptions in some canonical texts, such as The Apples of New York, published in 1905. Generally speaking, Shepherd says, the botanists at TOC don’t rely on DNA analysis because correctly identified samples are needed for comparison, and those are not available in most cases.

Shepherd, TOC’s Vice President and Pomologist, says some apples immediately stand out as different, while others are distinguished by far subtler features. They can range, on the one hand, from less than one inch to more than five inches across—a trait that can help the botanists quickly eliminate certain IDs and zero in on others. Other times, they’re splitting hairs over the lengths of stems, the textures of the skins, or—hardest of all—the different tastes. Apple flavor varies, of course, but only so much: “We ran across one several years ago that was minty,” says Shepherd, “which blew our minds.”

Shepherd is careful to concede that his conclusions may never be 100 percent certain, but he’s operating off much more than a cursory glance: This season, out of roughly 160 samples sent by the Lost Apple Project, he identified and thus revived the Gold Ridge apple by isolating “the depression around the calyx.” In fact, some of the 10 varieties recently rediscovered had been sent over by the Lost Apple Project several years earlier—it just took years of research to confidently identify them.

Though TOC will “look at the odd plum,” Shepherd says he focuses on apples for their variety, and the discoveries they invite. “There are old apple trees everywhere, and there are literally thousands of varieties that aren’t known to exist anymore,” he says. He believes that many of them still exist, and are just waiting to be found.

"It is, in a word, quiet."

Deep in Olympic National Park lies one of the least noise-polluted places in the United States, maybe the world. The distant drone of the Hoh River fills the valley, as the piercing song of Swainson’s thrush bounces around 800-year-old Sitka spruce trees, a cathedral-like reverberation. It is home to One Square Inch of Silence, a research project started by nature sound recordist Gordon Hempton to protect and preserve the rare ecosystem from noise pollution. I took Atlas Obscura to this magical place in 2018 for a collaboration with NPR’s All Things Considered. The Hoh Rainforest remains a special, transformative place in part because of the way it forces you to listen, really listen, to the world around. And it highlights some of what we are all experiencing today. The sonic landscape has changed. Even in the biggest, most densely populated cities, amid the uncertainty and suffering of the pandemic, people are beginning to hear something entirely new.

I am a nature sound recordist. Yes, that is a job. I seek out and record sounds that get used in movies, television, video games, and apps. I capture the sounds of factories, mines, farms, and cities around the world, but I specialize in trying to document the pristine, sans-human world. Recording the uninterrupted sounds of nature in our industrialized world is difficult, if not nearly impossible. All you have to do is look at a map of air-traffic patterns to grasp how few places in the world are truly quiet—even in Olympic National Park, a plane flies overhead every 15 to 20 minutes during peak traffic. It’s amazing how much we’ve just grown accustomed to the noise. I work to protect the few remaining “quiet” places through a nonprofit called Quiet Parks International.

Like many people around the world, my professional life has been upended by COVID-19. Each day we see news of the rising death toll, economic turmoil, and social isolation—the new constants of our lives. But there are also moments of connection and grace: people smiling and waving from across the street, check ins with neighbors we may not have spoken to before, expressions of support for healthcare workers, first responders, and other essential workers. It seems like there’s nothing that hasn’t been affected by this crisis, including the way the entire world sounds. It is, in a word, quiet.

Passenger air traffic has declined dramatically, streets are almost empty, and most people are staying home. I live just south of Yellowstone National Park, where the population density is just six people per square mile. Even in this normally quiet place, I’ve noticed an incredible change in my sonic surroundings. On a hike I took last week, I heard two planes in three hours, compared with one every 10 minutes or so under normal circumstances.

In thinking about this change of sound, I reached out via social media to some of my sound recording colleagues around the world to ask them to share with me how their soundscapes have changed. The results are truly astounding. We’ve all seen the pictures of bustling metropolises, newly empty, but the sound of them is more elusive. Large cities and their iconic points of interest are so void of people that we’re hearing them in new ways for the first time, and probably for the last time. I received more than 50 submissions from all over the world, and these are just a few of the soundscapes that stuck out to me. I hope you enjoy this unique experience—use your headphones for the greatest effect. While I’m fascinated by this new quiet that has swept the globe, I’m looking forward to the time when quiet is again hard to find. Stay safe and be well.

Covent Garden, London

Will Cohen

Usually packed with antiques and craft stalls, buzzing with people on holiday looking for something to remember from their trip, the Apple Market is at the center of this iconic shopping, food, and cultural destination. Now it is uncommonly, almost unbelievably, still.

Times Square, New York

Geoff Gersh

Times Square is always full of activity—day and night. Street performers, food vendors, tourists, locals rushing to and from work, automobile traffic. There's always a cacophonous drone emanating from the epicenter of New York City. The lack of those sounds brings to the forefront the many mechanical sounds generated by the buildings in the area.

Grand Central Station, New York

Geoff Gersh

Grand Central rarely is not buzzing. As a major transportation hub in New York City, there is always the sound of commuters arriving or waiting for departing trains, announcements, people transferring from one train line to another, tourists gawking at the grandness of the station, and shoppers wandering through. Now all that's left is an echoing din and announcements reminding us to cover our mouths and keep our distance from others.

Near Subhash Chandra Bose Airport, Kolkata

Dibakar Saha

This ambient sound was recorded from my home near the Kolkata International Airport, in the Indian state of West Bengal. Generally there is a lot air traffic, but now that is gone, along with the traffic and sounds of concentrated human activity—even at 4 p.m.

LAX Airport, Los Angeles

Gerardo González

This recording was taken at LAX airport during morning rush hour. Cars passed by strangely fast, construction crews continued to work, and the few remaining TSA agents were busy with their phones. For the hour I was there recording, nobody asked me to move my car. The vibe was creepy. There was almost no one else there, save a single traveler with a roller bag and someone collecting bottles and cans.

Masks, ventilators, and Zoom recordings may one day be the artifacts of our time.

In early March, as New York City braced for the spread of the novel coronavirus, hand sanitizer began flying off store shelves. That’s when Margi Hofer, museum director at the New-York Historical Society, got an email about it. Rebecca Klassen, the museum’s associate curator of material culture, sent her a note remarking on the scarcity, and how precious it seemed. She wrote, “Purell has become liquid gold,” Hofer remembered. Nervous shoppers were treating the alcohol-based product as a talisman, and the museum staff decided—to help tell the story of the pandemic—that they ought to add a bottle to the collection.

As the virus spreads, many cultural institutions have locked their doors to help slow transmission. Most staff members are working from home, while visitors explore galleries digitally, from a distance. Meanwhile, the pandemic has already claimed more than 10,000 lives in New York City, and killed more than 148,000 people worldwide. It is baldly, undeniably historic—and that means that institutions are hurrying to collect artifacts that tell the story of this scary, scattered time.

It’s a strange moment to be adding to a collection: Future exhibits aren’t necessarily always front of mind for either remote employees or potential donors, all of whom may be caring for sick family members, home-schooling their kids, and trying to stay healthy—and some institutions are also just trying to stay afloat. After the City Reliquary, a community museum in Brooklyn, put its in-person programming on pause, it let go of its only paid employee, says Dave Herman, the museum’s founder. The growing work to collect COVID-19 ephemera is a labor of a dozen or so passionate volunteers. (The museum is migrating paid events online.) The vast majority of the staff of the New-York Historical Society, in Manhattan, is currently remote. The 10 people working on the “History Responds” project—the effort to crowdsource objects relating to seismic events as they play out in real-time—have fanned out to at least three states, and stay in touch through emails and the occasional Zoom meeting. “It’s a very busy effort,” Hofer says. “It just happens, right now, to be very geographically dispersed.”

Collecting during a pandemic means that curators must grapple with both practical challenges and thorny moral questions. Herman would like the City Reliquary to eventually collect face masks, which have become a ubiquitous sight in Brooklyn and all over the world, but, he says, “we certainly don’t want to take masks off of people’s faces right now to make sure they go into an archive.” (Several museums, including the New-York Historical Society, have donated the protective garb that conservators wear, including face masks and latex gloves, to medical staff.) Scouting for artifacts “is not an essential service at this particular moment,” Herman adds. “But when we look back, it will be essential to see how this has affected us.”

The Smithsonian's National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C., currently has a moratorium on bringing in new objects, but curators are already working on their pandemic artifact wish lists, and deciding the order in which they should pursue them. “What do we need to get now, versus what can wait three months, six months, or a year?” says Benjamin Filene, associate director for curatorial affairs.

One early priority is anything ephemeral, Filene says, “that people might throw away or might not think to save.” For the museum’s education curators, that might include screenshots of remote lectures, or school assignments scribbled out at the kitchen table. Meanwhile, the science and health team is scrambling to collect some of the quack “cures” that are being peddled, and the clock is ticking as the Food and Drug Administration cracks down on supplements, toothpastes, and more.

Ventilators and test kits are among the objects that curators will pursue down the line, when the immediate need for them is much less acute. “The last thing we want to do right now is say, ‘There’s a shortage of ventilators; put one aside for us,’” says Lexi Lord, the chair of the division of science and medicine at the National Museum of American History. These objects are currently saving lives—eventually, Filene says, they’ll also help museum visitors think deeply about the intersection of public fears, political maneuvering, and more. For now, the City Reliquary is making do with digital objects, such as cellphone photos of handmade signs and closed-up storefronts—and instead of dispatching people to go out in search of them, the museum relies on images that volunteers snap when they venture outside for groceries or to walk their dogs. Physical objects will come later, Herman hopes. “When it is safe to remove the masks,” he says, “people can think, ‘I don’t need to throw this in the garbage—this got me through a historic moment.’”

Beyond objects, many curators are being careful not to demand too much space in people’s brains right now. In addition to stories of lonely days at home, Hofer’s team at the New-York Historical Society is especially keen to collect stories and objects from essential workers, she says—“the people in the trenches, so to speak”—but those medical professionals, public transit workers, grocery store employees, and others have more pressing concerns. So far, Hofer says, the society’s strategy has involved outreach in “subtle, gentle ways” that won’t compete with the work at hand. She reached out to her own healthcare providers, for example, and just asked them to keep the collecting project in the back of their minds, so they might think to save appropriate objects or signs whenever it occurs to them. Since the collecting effort has been ramping up, some people have also been reaching out directly to the museum, through an object-donation form on the website. The institution’s library has collected many emails, signs, flyers, and other digital objects, Hofer says, but the object collection for COVID-19 is currently mainly “in name only.” Some 100-plus objects, such as handmade masks, are still in the hands of the 50 people who have promised them, she says, until it’s simpler “to make a trip to the post office or safe for us to come pick them up.”

Curators are also grappling with the ways that the pandemic ripples across all aspects of American life. The National Museum of American History is looking at small businesses such as craft breweries, which typically rely on open bars. The science and medicine team is thinking about the way that personal protective equipment (PPE) alters the feeling of intimacy between doctors and patients. Curators are also considering how faith communities are changing their worship services, how community groups such as the Girl Scouts are adapting, what online schooling looks like in underserved districts, and how certain groups, such as black men, are trying to navigate the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s recommendations about wearing masks while worrying about attracting unwarranted attention from police. “These objects can mean different things to different people at the same time,” Filene says.

Down the line, when physical objects do arrive at the museums, staff will have to figure out what new safety measures might be necessary for treating, handling, and storing them. “It seems that medical understanding of this virus is still somewhat evolving,” Hofer says. “We haven’t put any procedures in place yet.” For her, the safety questions are somewhat reminiscent of the aftermath of 9/11, when they were accessioning objects that had been exposed to debris from Ground Zero, including the entire storefront of Chelsea Jeans, which had been shrouded in thick, toxic dust. (In that case, conservators zipped into hazmat suits, and moved racks of dust-coated clothes into a sealed case.) At the National Museum of American History, as at many other institutions, newly arrived objects routinely pass through a processing room to make sure there aren’t any insect stowaways. As for any additional layers of scrutiny for this moment, Filene says, “We haven’t gotten that far yet.”

Because the crisis is still unfolding—there’s still no expert consensus on when the pandemic will abate and when social distancing protocols might loosen—it’s hard to anticipate how people will relate to these masks and other artifacts a few years on, Filene says. Will the fabric coverings be a blip in people’s lives, or a fixture? If they’re in a museum display several years in the future, “Maybe people won’t have thought about them in years, or maybe we’ll be wearing them for 15 months,” Filene adds.

Even before COVID-19, the National Museum of American History was planning an exhibit called “In Sickness and in Health,” slated to open in fall 2021. It charts 240 years of medicine in America, and will open with three disastrous historical outbreaks—the 1793 yellow fever epidemic that ravaged Philadelphia, the 1837 scourge of smallpox that devastated the Mandan tribe in the Great Plains, and when cholera brought San Francisco and Sacramento to their knees in the 1850s. A few months back, Lord and her colleagues were wondering how to frame these moments for future visitors. “We were struggling to try and figure out how to communicate to our audience what it feels like to live in a city which is experiencing an epidemic,” she says.

Urban graveyards still hold the bodies, for instance, of people who lost their lives to the terrible 1918 flu, but it’s easy to forget that, not so very long ago, pandemics and epidemics were not uncommon in the United States. Worry, discomfort, and mourning were woven into the fabric of daily life. For many citizens of 21st-century America—particularly those with reliable access to high-quality healthcare—that reality is sometimes hard to picture. “People in the past seem so different, they wear weird clothes, they use different words than we use, they seem so far away,” says Lord, who believes that the current crisis will collapse the space between past and present. The experience of weathering this pandemic is making that gnawing fear and deep loneliness more vivid. When visitors can roam museums again, she adds, “We think people will walk in with that empathy already.”

Turns out it was hiding in plain sight by the side of a Portuguese road.

During hot, dry summers in southern Portugal, the key ingredient for medieval manuscripts grows by the roadside. It is called folium, or turnsole, and it’s derived from the fruit of Chrozophora tinctoria, a small plant that grows in the region. For centuries, folium was responsible for coloring everything from Bible scenes to, later, the rind of a popular Dutch cheese.

For the better part of the last century, however, the recipe for the vivid blue hue has been lost—until the publication of a new study in the journal Science Advances. While it was long known that Chrozophora tinctoria was the source of the ink’s sole ingredient, how folium was synthesized has eluded modern science. (The plant is not named in old sources, but detailed descriptions of it helped chemists connect the dots.) Relying primarily on a 15th-century guide for making the paints for illuminating manuscripts, a team of Portuguese researchers set about to resurrect folium.

“We've tried to mimic them, reading ancient texts,” says Maria João Melo, a conservation scientist at the New University of Lisbon and coauthor of the study. “Part of our expertise is to make this conversion from what is actually written and sometimes not so clear enough for us, and what they were making.”

Indigo was one of the main sources of blue ink for medieval manuscripts; folium was another. Whatever the source of the ink, it would be soaked onto small linen rectangles, and then shipped to workshops across Europe, to be used for a variety of purposes, from books to clothing.

As medieval manuscripts went out of style (thanks, Gutenberg), so, too, did original ways of extracting folium. Ironically, the ink that was a means of “illuminating” manuscripts went dark and slipped into obscurity.

The old practices had been documented, but were laborious and time-consuming. Melo’s team consulted an exhaustive list of instructions from the 15th century—literally, The book on how to make all the colour paints for illuminating books. But it isn’t exactly a modern cookbook. The manuscript was written in Judeao-Portugeuse, the extinct language used by the Jews of medieval Portugal. Besides translation matters, there’s more than one way to skin a cat, and other sources provided different instructions—and none of them provided a known name for the fruit behind the hue. Luckily, Melo’s source offered a lot of clues.

“It says how the plant looks, how the fruits look … it's very specific, also telling you when where the plant grows, when you can collect it,” says Paula Nabais, a conservation scientist at the New University of Lisbon, and the study’s lead author. “We were able to understand what we needed to do to collect the fruits in the field ourselves, and then prepare the extracts.”

The team ventured into the southern, bleached-white town of Monsaraz to collect the fruit as per the manuscript’s instructions. The hairy plant’s fruit—about the size of a walnut—yielded a blue mixture. Careful not to crush the seeds, which the team realized jeopardized the quality of the ink, they identified the chemical compound that made the mixture, confirming folium’s identity on the molecular scale. It turns out folium is up with anthocyanins—the blue chemicals found in berries.

With luck, Melo says, the recipe behind folium can now be applied by conservators preserving old manuscripts. We’re finally catching up to medieval monks.

“They were able to produce paints that last centuries,” she says. “We don't have such paints now. So this is part of our research—to know as much as possible about this material that was completely lost with the advent of the synthetic dyes.”

Our schedule of new offerings on Zoom, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and more.

Atlas Obscura’s mission has always been to inspire wonder about the incredible world we all share. Now, more than ever, we must stay connected, not only to our sense of wonder, but to each other. Each week, in addition to our Wonder From Home stories and virtual exploration with our atlas of more than 19,000 wondrous places, we’ll now be broadcasting live—on Zoom, Facebook, Instagram, and more—and posting new videos on YouTube. We plan to bring you the unique, curious, and unusual, from our staff and the amazing people who lead our Trips and Experiences.

Here are the wonders you can enjoy from home this week:

Monday, April 20

AO Loves Seattle

Instagram Live, 3 p.m. EDT

To show our appreciation for one of Atlas Obscura’s favorite cities, Shin Yu Pai, from the Atlas Obscura Experiences team, will highlight a fantastic story or unusual place in the city, along with a link to a charity or cause viewers can support.

Tuesday, April 21

Video Premiere: The Tradition of Lenj Building in Iran

YouTube, 9:30 a.m. EDT

This short documentary explores the long tradition of Lenj building in Iran. These large boats are built by hand and largely from memory. As more people leave the occupation behind, a few Lenj builders on the island of Guran continue their laborious tradition for future generations.

AO Loves New York

Instagram Live, 3 p.m. EDT

To show our appreciation for the birthplace of Atlas Obscura, Eric Grundhauser, from the Atlas Obscura Experiences team, will highlight a fantastic story or unusual place in the city each weekday, along with a link to a charity or cause viewers can support.

Music for Stargazing

Facebook Live, 9 p.m. EDT

As the weather begins to get warmer, Atlas Obscura wants to encourage you to get outside and enjoy a starry night from your backyard or balcony. We’ll help set the mood with celestial music performed specifically for Music for Stargazing, and be led by one of our expert astronomers. Sit back and relax as we take in the cosmos.

Wednesday, April 22

Video Premiere: Show & Tell: Escape Into the Fantastical World of Automata

YouTube, 9:30 a.m. EDT

In this episode of Show & Tell, Atlas Obscura co-founder Dylan Thuras talks with Maria and Michael Start, owners of the House of Automata in Forres, Scotland. Watch their collection of mechanical objects come to life and learn about the restoration and history of these intricate animated figures.

AO Loves New York

Instagram Live, 3 p.m. EDT

To show our appreciation for the birthplace of Atlas Obscura, Eric Grundhauser, from the Atlas Obscura Experiences team, will highlight a fantastic story or unusual place in the city each weekday, along with a link to a charity or cause viewers can support.

Nature Obscura: Unusual Nature in Big Cities

$5 | Zoom, 6:30 p.m. EDT
(Click here to RSVP)

From moon snails to slime molds, Kelly Brenner, author of Nature Obscura: A City's Hidden Natural World, will show us how to find unusual nature in big cities.

Thursday, April 23

AO Loves New York

Instagram Live, 3:15 p.m. EDT

To show our appreciation for the birthplace of Atlas Obscura, Eric Grundhauser, from the Atlas Obscura Experiences team, will highlight a fantastic story or unusual place in the city each weekday, along with a link to a charity or cause viewers can support.

Supernatural Cats of Japan

$5 | Zoom, 6 p.m. EDT
(Click here to RSVP)

What's sometimes charming, sometimes gruesome, but always interesting? The supernatural cats of Japan. Join author and folklorist Zack Davisson for a live chat about the spooky felines. He'll illuminate the mysterious realm of kaibyō (supernatural cats) with dozens of ukiyo-e prints from his book, Kaibyō. Cat lovers and Japanophiles alike won't want to miss this in-depth exploration.

Friday, April 24

AO Loves New York

Instagram Live, 3 p.m. EDT

To show our appreciation for the birthplace of Atlas Obscura, Eric Grundhauser, from the Atlas Obscura Experiences team, will highlight a fantastic story or unusual place in the city each weekday, along with a link to a charity or cause viewers can support.

Gastro Obscura: Mixology Zone, Intro to Sugar and Acid in Cocktails

$25 | Zoom, 6:30 p.m. EDT
(Click here to RSVP)

A hands-on introduction to how sugar and acids are balanced in cocktails, with cocktail iconoclasts Don Lee and Dave Arnold.

Strange Sounds & Unusual Instruments

Facebook Live, 9 p.m. EDT

Join Adriana Molello, Atlas Obscura’s music curator, as she explores some of the most unusual instruments and sounds with guest musicians from all over the world. As a professional violinist, Adriana has an affinity for strange instruments. In fact, she trekked to the remote reaches of Romania to hunt down a Stroh violin—a violin without a wooden body that projects its sound through a horn.

Saturday, April 25

Cultivate Your Inner Naturalist

$8 | Zoom, 2 p.m. EDT
(Click here to RSVP)

Join science writer Ruby McConnell as she guides parents and kids through nature journaling to help see big-picture ecological patterns. With ample tips on making field observations, including sketching, writing prompts, nature logs, question lists, and projects, Ruby’s approach will engage even the most urban city kid with little or no outdoor access needed beyond a window.

"Nature is there for you, especially when you need it."

The shores of Lewes, a small town on the Delaware coast, are a haven for horseshoe crabs. On a late summer morning a few years ago, Lynn Alleva Lilley was photographing the light dancing on the beach tide when she noticed a long, dark object pierce the glass-like water. The strange shape roused her from her meditative state. “Then the tail raised, and I realized it was a horseshoe crab swimming on its back,” Alleva Lilley said. “I had never seen that before. I thought maybe it was warming in the sun or was wounded. I just had to follow this creature. It felt like some benevolent force offered it as a gift and a lifeline.”

This curious encounter set the Maryland-based artist on a new mission to better understand these marine creatures. The horseshoe crab is not a crustacean, as its name might suggest, but an arthropod that has crawled on this planet for 450 million years. Its population is declining globally due to habitat destruction and overharvesting by the biomedical industry. (Horseshoe crab blood is used to detect infections.) During the summers of 2016 and 2019, Alleva Lilley followed and photographed horseshoe crabs as they ascended from watery depths to rest and spawn, sometimes by the thousands, along Delaware Bay.

Alleva Lilley’s photo book Deep Time, published by The Eriskay Connection, synthesizes the history, behavior, and unique anatomy of the horseshoe crab in lyrical, contemplative images. Her photographs show the slow, sustained routines of these creatures, as they embrace in mating rituals and burrow in sand, awaiting incoming tides. Atlas Obscura spoke with Alleva Lilley about finding beauty in the endless march of this compelling species.

How does Deep Time merge art and science?

As I began reading about the horseshoe crab, the scientific information became so inspiring. The fact that it has 10 eyes, two of which are sensitive to UV light emitted by the moon and stars to help it navigate at night, is so profound and poetic. It was a revelation and confirmation of the interconnectedness of everything.

I wanted to learn more and signed up for a horseshoe crab workshop for educators, offered by the Delaware National Estuarine Research Reserve and the state of Delaware. Then, wanting to see what the embryos looked like, I met with scientists at the University of Delaware’s College of Earth, Ocean, and Environment in Lewes. They offered me an artist’s residency within their lab and taught me how to use the different microscopes. It’s so different from the way I usually photograph. I also contacted the organizations that gather volunteers to count horseshoe crabs during spawning season, and was able to come along.

How did you know when and where to document the horseshoe crabs?

I researched the highest tides, the full and new moons, and the locations along the Delaware Bay and inlets. This meant that I would go out late to photograph the spawnings during the night high tides, and get up early to photograph the light and water during low tides. It was also weather-dependent. If the water was too cold, or if it was raining and waves were rough, there would be very few or no horseshoe crabs coming to shore to spawn.

In the end, I found myself photographing all the time and sleeping very little. There is so much that was surprising, like how the water color in different spawning locations made the horseshoe crabs look darker or lighter. Or how male horseshoe crabs would mistake my foot for a female and come up to it.

What's it like to witness horseshoe crab spawnings?

You have no idea until you see it! It’s like clockwork when conditions are ideal. Especially at night, with the light from the moon, the atmosphere is magical. About 10 or so minutes before peak high tide, the horseshoe crabs start coming in, a few at first, and usually in pairs with the smaller male attached to the back of the larger female. Then more come in, until thousands have reached the shore with the help of the high tide and small waves. The females begin digging holes to deposit the eggs in the wet sand, and the males release the sperm in patches of foam.

There’s a moment when you realize that these creatures are doing what they've done for millions of years, and it has nothing to do with humans. We don't control it—something else does.

“Deep time” originally referred to the vast time scale required to describe the geological age of theEarth. What does the term mean to you?

From an artist’s perspective, deep time involves the realization that everything is connected to everything. Decentering the human feels important. It takes hours, days, years. It's hard to define intellectually what the time is. Maybe deep time is more of an experience.

How has this experience led to a deeper understanding of the world for you?

I realized that there are so many other worlds in this world. If we just slowed down and took the time to look, then we can experience what Rachel Carson describes as “the sense of wonder.” You then find yourself seeing deeply.

What do you hope readers take away from your project?

To know that nature is there for you, especially when you need it. Like art. If you are open, curious, and don’t try to control it, it will take you on an unimaginable journey. You will know that humans are nature—that we are not separate from animals, plants, trees, insects, or each other.

Have your adventures with the horseshoe crab come to an end?

I don’t think I will ever get tired of seeing the spawnings. This past winter on the beach, there were many broken pieces of horseshoe crab molts that the tides had brought to shore. Something about those scattered pieces was so poignant. Now I find myself just photographing these fragments. When I see one or two horseshoe crabs on the beach in Lewes, I talk to them, say hello, and ask them where they’ve been and what they’ve seen, what they know.

Social distancing might not entirely change the way we talk, but a Mars expedition might do the trick.

Two years ago, on a very, very cold March day in Antarctica, 11 people sat down to go over a list of simple words. Cooed. Food. Queued. Backhoe. It wasn’t free association, but rather the words are considered important markers in a larger effort among linguists to discern what happens to language when a group is separated from rest of the world—specifically, how quickly they begin to develop their own accent. Slowly, imperceptibly, the Antarctica group’s speech changed, as they all began to sound a bit more like one another and less like people on the other six continents.

“You can't hear the differences very well because they are so small,” says Jonathan Harrington, a linguist at the University of Munich and lead author of the study, published in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America. “But you can measure them.”

Linguists know something about how new languages evolve. After subtle accent changes comes the development of dialects, and after dialects, whole new tongues. And isolation is key to the whole process. In 2017, when Harrington got word of a new cohort about to spend four months isolated on the coldest continent for the British Antarctic Survey, he saw an opportunity to map the first step in that phenomenon.

The work in Antarctica was “high risk,” linguistically (and physically, of course) says Harrington, because “I actually wasn’t expecting to find a thing.” But by routinely recording the team saying specific words—known tip-offs for linguists and Harrington’s computer program—the signs of a budding accent emerged.

Much of what defines an accent comes from an individual’s vowel space—think the difference between “chowder” in Boston and New York. In Antarctica, one example was the “ou” sound at the end of “backhoe.” Over time, the team began fronting the end of the word—that is, shaping the sound closer to the front of their mouths.

For accents to develop on an expedited timeline like this, isolation is critical. There is potential for this to be a preview of what is happening in isolated, socially distanced homes and communities around the world.

“If you had a situation which they had in northern Italy,” Harrington says, “where you had villages which were isolated from the rest of the country for a long period of time, then they would actually start to show signs of developing their own accent.”

Harrington says that isolation measures would have to be severe and long-lived for accents to truly develop or stick—not to mention all the online interaction we’re engaging in, which could slow the process. However, there are some places where this could someday be a reality.

“If they ever really decided to colonize another planet, like Mars, we'd be right in there wanting to study that,” he says. “They would develop a Martian accent. Can you imagine that?”

"What 8th grader doesn’t want to look at the weird stuff?"

As the COVID-19 pandemic sweeps the world, many students are finishing the school year around the kitchen table or sprawled on the living room floor. Daily life is bound by four walls, and teachers and parents have the challenge of making the outside world, past and present, feel vivid. Atlas Obscura talked to a handful of teachers about how they’re using our website, books, and videos to stoke kids’ curiosity right now.

Introduce kids to true stories to kindle an interest in nonfiction

Dave Rowe, a media specialist at Nob Hill Elementary School in Sunrise, Florida, finds that his students, who range from pre-K to 5th grade, gravitate toward wacky stories. They’re often especially keen on fictional ones, such as A Series of Unfortunate Events, by Lemony Snicket. “In general, the kids love to check out books like Dog Man, Captain Underpants, and Magic Tree House, but it is much more difficult to get them to read nonfiction,” says Rowe. The exceptions, he says, include compendiums of wondrous facts, such as the Ripley’s Believe It or Not! series—and our own Explorer’s Guide for the World’s Most Adventurous Kid. “I have several copies in my media center and the kids love it,” Rowe adds.

He often screens Atlas Obscura videos, too, such as one featuring our co-founder Dylan Thuras delightedly nerding out over the Lord Howe stick insect, a critter that lives on Ball’s Pyramid, the spiky, rocky remains of a shield volcano more than 400 miles northeast of Sydney. “A short video like that can pique their interest in reading some nonfiction books on subjects like Bugs (595.7 Dewey) or Australia and New Zealand (Dewey 993.1),” Rowe writes in an email. When brain-boggling facts lodge in kids’ minds, he adds, they can be a bridge between goofy fiction and the wonderfully weird real world. “Atlas Obscura is especially good to use because some of the stories seem to be unbelievable,” he says, “but are, in fact, true.”

Get kids’ attention by grossing them out

Sofia Gans, who teaches history to 3rd–12th grade students at Pierrepont School in Westport, Connecticut, knows that her classes perk up at anything a little surprising or strange. (And we have plenty of that, from necropants to chunks of sewer-clogging fatbergs that made it into museums.) “What 8th grader doesn’t want to look at the weird stuff? In all of my classes, I’m always looking for the weird stuff,” she says. “The weirder, the better.”

Liven up academic papers and primary sources

When Gans’s classes started meeting remotely back in March, she was looking for links to send students to jazz up some academic texts her 8th graders were reading about 17th- and 18th-century natural history collections in Amsterdam. One journal article was a little dry, she says, so she also sent the students a 2016 Atlas Obscura story by Lauren Young, “The Bizarre 17th-Century Dioramas Made From Real Human Body Parts.” “The Atlas article was written in a really accessible tone but didn’t dumb anything down,” Gans says. (And Gans appreciated that it had old prints depicting the Dutch anatomist Frederik Ruysch’s macabre tableaux, but no photographs of the surviving specimens, which may have been a little grisly for classroom use.)

The students really dug it, and classroom discussion was rich and thoughtful. “We had a fascinating conversation about treatment of dead bodies after death, and whether it was desecration or not,” Gans says. “Half the class was like, ‘Donating to your body was awesome, and it’s an honor to be displayed that way,’—which is how Ruysch thought of it—and others thought it was a ‘capitalist ploy for likes.’ They associated it with social media, using it for your own status online.”

Use the places database to help expand their horizons or get their bearings

Maybe kids aren’t roaming any farther than the backyard or the park down the block, but the 19,000-plus places in our database can remind them that the world is huge and full of incredible things. James Erb, who teaches 7th- and 8th-grade geography and social studies in Sand Springs, Oklahoma, uses it to challenge his students to find “unique and out-of-the-mainstream” places to focus on for their class projects. Erb isn't teaching any classes right now, but he has turned to Atlas Obscura for several years—both in classes he leads and ones he takes himself. When he was studying for an education degree, which he received in 2018, he trawled through the list of places in Liechtenstein for an assignment that involved making a commercial as if he were a travel agent inviting people to check out the local sights. Gans uses the site for her 3rd graders, too. The listings of places “usually have a nice little description of the importance of the site, and some great pictures,” she says. “And I can click on the little map and show them exactly where we’re looking.”

Even if kids are mostly exploring the couch these days, it’s great to be reminded of the extraordinary places scattered across the world we all share. "The world does not end at the end of the street or the city limits, or even at our state line," Rowe says. "There is a lot of cool stuff out there."

Know of any other creative ways to use the Atlas to help kids learn? You can join the conversation about this and other stories in the Atlas Obscura Community Forums.

In an age of distance, we can still connect in the kitchen to mourn, memorialize, and heal.

According to the latest figures from Johns Hopkins University, more than 170,000 people have died from COVID-19 worldwide. The world is mourning a massive loss of life while also grieving the smaller, yet still significant, loss of our old ways of living. Along with our daily routines, social-distancing restrictions have impacted the ways we mourn. Communities can no longer gather in large groups to support the bereaved at traditional wakes, funerals, or shivas.

While we can’t congregate, we can still cook. Around the world, mourners express empathy and self-care through food. From “feeding” the dead with fried dough in Kyrgyzstan to the sweet solace of Amish funeral pie, we use food to process our own grief and to acknowledge the grief of others. Many of these traditions involve the community stepping in to feed those in mourning. Depending on your local laws, you might still be able to provide this consolation: In the United States, the CDC says there is currently no evidence to suggest that COVID-19 can be transmitted through food. So, provided you follow safety precautions for preparation and drop-off, you can leave your friends that casserole.

But even if you can’t share food, you can still use it as a tool for healing. In a recent article about pandemic-related grief in The Atlantic, John Dickerson wrote, “Many of us are distracted, enraged, scared, or just doing what we can to manage a full plate of immediate worries. But in this period, we should spare a moment for sorrow and grief.” Here are eight dishes that help mourners around the world to heal, reflect, and connect in such moments.

Halva

Recipes and spellings for halva vary across the Middle East, Central Asia, and India. Most versions appear in the form of a sweet, dense confection that’s enjoyed year-round. But in Iran, Turkey, and Armenia, halva is also strongly associated with times of mourning. In a Food52 article, journalist Liana Aghajanian recalls, “At the funerals I attended growing up in Iran, wading through a sea of black outfits with the distinct smell of frankincense in my nose, I’d search through the crowd for my aunts and the glistening, aluminum foil–wrapped treasure they carried on a tray.” Aghajanian, whose family is Armenian, consumed halva as part of a memorial lunch known as hokeh-jash, which translates to “soul-meal.”

On her blog Turmeric and Saffron, Persian chef Azita Mehran describes the process of making and sharing funeral halva as “both therapeutic and somewhat healing.” Like many Persian recipes for halva, Mehran’s version includes rose water, itself a venerated funeral food that is sprinkled over graves.

If you have rose water, try Mehran’s recipe. If you don’t, Aghajanian's recipe for halva requires just sugar, water, flour, and butter. Sometimes the sweetest solace comes in the simplest forms.

Funeral Potatoes

While the origins of Utah’s classic casserole are murky, most sources credit its rise in popularity to a women's organization within the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Known as the Relief Society, one of the group’s chief responsibilities was attending to the needs of the bereaved. This, of course, included their meals.

Mourners found themselves comforted by a corn flake–topped combination of shredded or cubed potatoes, cream of chicken (or mushroom) soup, sour cream, butter, and grated cheddar cheese. It’s still served at post-memorial gatherings and church potlucks today. In her 2012 memoir, The Book of Mormon Girl, Joanna Brooks describes the meal as “heart-stopping, lipid-soaked church-dinner comfort food.” But the ingredients weren’t selected simply because they were hearty and delicious; they were pantry staples. In fact, they’re almost always inside an LDS community-member’s pantry, a holdover from the Church's post-Depression push for maintaining a three-month food supply at all times. As such, funeral potatoes can be prepared at a moment's notice when someone passes away.

While the dish may have been created for times of sorrow, it’s become a point of pride for Utahns. When Salt Lake City hosted the 2002 Winter Olympics, they developed an official commemorative Olympic pin that featured funeral potatoes.

Those looking to wrap themselves in the warm, crispy, cheesy embrace of funeral potatoes can try this recipe from MormonChurch.com.

Koliva

Wheat is a longstanding symbol of both death and everlasting life. In many cultures, the personification of Death holds a scythe for “reaping” souls like wheat at the harvest. But as the fallen grain of a dead plant can generate future crops, Christians believe wheat also represents eternal life. For Orthodox Christians in the Balkans, these dual meanings mingle in a sweet, subtly nutty dish that honors the dead.

When the bereaved arrive at an Orthodox Christian funeral, they come bearing koliva. Particularly prevalent in Greece, the dish is built around unprocessed kernels of wheat, otherwise known as wheat berries. Just preparing the berries makes for a time-consuming tribute, taking two days to soak, cook, drain, and dry the kernels. During this time, relatives are supposed to pray and think of the deceased. To that base, one adds a medley of flavorings that represent the sweetness and abundance of life, including raisins, cinnamon, anise, sesame seeds, pomegranate seeds, ground nuts, and honey. Cooks often add a generous dusting of confectioners’ sugar, then use nuts, Jordan almonds, or dried fruit to form a cross and the initials of the deceased. With a few sprigs of parsley serving as “grass” beneath the cross, the mound evokes the burial site itself.

Despite its sweetness, koliva is a sacred food that’s meant to be eaten solemnly and not for pleasure. In fact, The Washington Post’s recipe notes that its yield of 40 servings is so high because each serving is a mere spoonful that a funeral attendee deposits into a paper bag to respectfully consume after the service. In addition to the funeral, koliva is also prepared for memorials at various intervals after a death, typically after 40 days, six months, and one year.

Mannish Water

Not all mourning rituals are explicitly solemn affairs. In Jamaica, family and friends gather for a Caribbean wake known as the Nine Nights, during which they share stories, dance, play games, and eat. The goal is to encourage the deceased’s spirit, known as a “duppy,” to depart. If the duppy doesn’t leave, it will stay in limbo and become an angry spirit that haunts the living.

The Nine Nights are punctuated by drumming and dancing that offer an energetic contrast to death. This vitality is also conveyed via mannish water, a goat soup with alleged aphrodisiac properties. Recipes vary but generally use a base of a male goat’s head, entrails, and testicles that mingle in a broth of carrots, potatoes, and green bananas. Most cooks add a kick with white rum and some heat courtesy of Scotch bonnet or habanero peppers. At once gamey, savory, and spicy, the soup often gets paired with bammy (a small, cassava-based cake), white “hard-dough” bread, and white rum.

Because of its connection to reproduction and new life, mannish water also appears at celebratory occasions like weddings. If you can track down its ingredients, try this recipe from Jamaican chef Sian Rose. If you can’t get your hands on specific goat parts, Rose says just goat meat will do.

Amish Funeral Pie

While travel restrictions have limited our ability to attend funerals both near and far, journeying great distances to pay respects once dictated the types of food attendees would bring. In the Amish and old-order Mennonite communities of 18th-century Pennsylvania, that meant the spoil-proof sweetness of raisin pie.

The bereaved would be responsible for providing their guests’ meal (which led to the rise of culinary opportunists known as “funeral runners,” who attended services just for a free dinner), but the visitors brought dessert. Raisin pie became a favorite choice, as it traveled well, offered sweet comfort, and used non-seasonal staples. Like funeral potatoes, the pie's filling relied on common pantry items—raisins, sugar, eggs, flour, salt, and lemon—that could be transformed into a treat at a moment’s notice. Also like its Utahn counterpart, the dessert was such a common sight at post-memorial meals that it earned a new moniker: “funeral pie.”

Although it’s easier to make or purchase fresh-fruit pies today, Pennsylvania-based Amish communities still bake their beloved funeral pie. Its ingredients are likely lurking in your cupboard. Try this modern take from Pennsylvania’s York Dispatch.

Ham Salad

Some funeral traditions offer solemn, moving moments of connection. Others can lean more toward frivolous status symbols. In late 19th-century England, ham was one such status symbol. Receiving a stylish service came to be known as being “buried with ham,” as not just anyone could afford such meaty extravagance at their funeral tea.

While ham isn’t quite the display of opulence it once was, it’s still prevalent at British and American funerals in baked and cold-cut forms. In the United States’ Upper Midwest, Mid-Atlantic, and Southeast regions, this culinary tradition evolved into the mayo-based delight known as the ham salad. Though some cooks added in the likes of hard-boiled eggs, celery, or onions, the basic recipe for the “salad” used ground ham, mayonnaise, and pickle relish. Slathered between slices of white bread or atop crackers, the cheap, filling spread rose in prominence at post-Depression American funeral luncheons.

Like funeral potatoes, the ham-salad sandwich was a favorite among church-based aid societies who brought it to year-round potlucks and post-memorial gatherings. Try this recipe from the cookbook for The Ladies' Aid Society of the Evangelical Church of Our Redeemer, based in St. Louis, Missouri.

Lentils, Bread, and Eggs

After returning home from the burial service, Jewish mourners tuck into the seudat havra'ah. According to the Talmud, this “meal of consolation” must be provided for the deceased’s family by friends and neighbors, as the bereaved will be too distracted by their grief to care for themselves. While spreads can vary, several symbolic foods are common. Circular foods—namely, lentils, bagels, and round rolls—represent the cycle of life, which involves not only birth and death, but joy and sadness. Lentils also harken back to the stew Jacob is said to have prepared for his father, Isaac, after the death of his grandfather, Abraham. Eggs, a symbol of new life, typically appear in hard-boiled form, a preparation that doubles as a metaphor for resiliency in the face of tragedy. Both lentils and eggs are also smooth without openings or “mouths,” meant to symbolize the mourners' sorrow rendering them unable to speak.

Anyone wanting a greater challenge than hard-boiling an egg can try food-history blogger Tori Avey’s recipe that attempts to re-create Jacob’s lentil stew.

Borsok

In the Central Asian country of Kyrgyzstan, honoring the dead involves frying balls of dough into puffy nuggets known as borsok (also spelled boorsok or borsook). The bread is a simple mixture of flour, water, salt, sugar, butter, and yeast that sizzles in oil. But the ritual surrounding its preparation is far more important than flavor or flair.

While some foods on this list are meant to nourish the living, the ritual of preparing and eating borsok is meant to honor and “feed” the deceased. Some believe that as women fry the dough in a kazan (a wok-like frying pan), the resulting smoke carries the cooks’ prayers to heaven and appeases the spirits of the dead. According to the BBC, the name for the ritual of cooking and consuming borsok, jyt chygaruu, even means “releasing the smell.”

When the borsok is ready, it’s scattered in puffy piles across a table. After someone recites verses from the Koran, the family prays for the deceased’s well-being in the afterlife. Then, they eat.

You can try to make borsok at home by following this recipe and photo series from a Peace Corps volunteer who recorded her experience making it with her host family in Kyrgyzstan.

Burnt ends at the push of a button!

Frank Norton stands underneath the white pergola that extends over the front of Jones Bar-B-Q, a black mask covering the lower half of his face. It’s a bit before 5 p.m. He’s facing a classic dilemma: “What’s for dinner?”

A few weeks ago, Norton would have been out of luck. The Kansas City BBQ spot, owned by Deborah “Little” Jones and her sister Mary “Shorty” Jones Mosley, has always been a lunch-only affair. Tuesday through Saturday, the counter opens at 11 a.m. Even before they were featured on the third season of “Queer Eye For The Straight Guy,” they often sold out before their stated closing time of 3 p.m.

But now, there’s smoked ham and turkey and beef behind the glass of the vending machine that’s humming beside the shuttered order window. After some debate, Norton settles on rib tips and swipes his credit card. A clamshell package lands with a soft thunk. Norton takes his dinner to go, just as another car pulls up in the parking lot.

“When we got the call that the machine was ready, I thought this couldn’t have come at a better time,” says Jones. “As a small business, we’ve got to try new things and see what happens.”

Although it’s ideal for contactless takeout and delivery amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, the vending machine has been in the works since last winter. Takeout has always been the main focus at Jones, and demand was there. “There’s a bar in the same strip as us, and people would come up wanting something to eat at two in the morning,” Jones says. “I always had to tell them no because we just started cooking.”

Jones knows that barbecue isn’t a convenience food. But, she thought, what if it could be?

“We got a pop vending machine, and I looked at it and thought maybe we could put food in,” Jones says. “The vendor couldn’t believe it when I first asked about putting barbecue in a vending machine.”

Kansas City barbecue, though, was founded on innovation. While the United States’ other major barbecue regions focus on specific cuts—Texas has brisket and ribs, the Carolinas and Memphis dish up heaping portions of pulled pork—Kansas City is where all meats come to be barbecued.

It’s a legacy built on the importance of local stockyards and influx of African-America cooks migrating from the South at the turn of the 20th century, including enterprising pitmasters like Henry Perry, who transformed the scraps and cuts of meats like brisket that nobody else wanted into something delicious.

While Kansas City pitmasters cooked a variety of meats—Perry served possum alongside brisket—the city’s barbecue identity is embodied in burnt ends. The crispy, charred bits of brisket (the tapered ends cook quicker than the middle) were lionized by author Calvin Trillin as “burned edges” nearly 50 years ago.

In that 1972 Playboy article, Trillin commented that the best food in the world was being handed out for free by the countermen at Arthur Bryant’s, a restaurant on the east side of Kansas City with a direct connection back to Perry. Pitmasters soon realized that people would pay for the juicy bites that they once added, free, to the plate alongside a beef sandwich. “Burned edges” became “burnt ends,” and Kansas City got its signature dish. The Jones sisters have built a following on burnt ends over three decades and multiple restaurants.

The burnt ends at Jones Bar-B-Q are one of the seven items available from the vending machine. Alongside chicken wings, turkey, and rib tips, they’re stocked between 5 and 10 a.m. as they come off a smoker sitting next to a big pile of hickory wood. Jones labels each clamshell package with a hand-written description on masking tape. The sandwiches come with a small cup of sauce and sweet barbecue beans, potato salad, or coleslaw. Stacked high inside a soft white bun, the smoky, charred burnt ends are tender, moist, and taste like meat candy.

“You’ve got to try everything once in your life,” Jones says.

Restoring the grounds and its rare, heirloom crops recreated what was effectively the country's first seed bank.

A short downhill walk from Thomas Jefferson’s historic Monticello mansion, there is a two-acre terrace garden carved into the hillside and supported by a massive stone retainer wall. Blessed with panoramic views of the Virginia countryside, it holds more than 330 varieties of more than 70 species of heirloom vegetables, and dozens of herbs. Just below, an eight-acre “fruitery”—a 400-tree orchard and vineyard with berry patches—contains at least 170 historically significant varieties of more than 30 species of fruit.

The result of a massive construction and restoration effort, these grounds replicate the collection of botanical treasures Jefferson assembled from 1770 to 1826—rarities such as 14-inch-long Cow’s Horn okra from Africa and bulbous Purple Calabash tomatoes from Mexico grow alongside Indigenous American, melon-like Green-Striped Cushaw squash and long and carrot-esque China Rose winter radish.

“These gardens were the embodiment of Jefferson’s love affair with culinary plants,” says retired director of gardens and grounds, Peter Hatch, 70, who spent 34 years reconstructing Monticello’s historical horticultural operations.

The third U.S. president’s interest in fruits, vegetables, and spices was obsessive and indulged on a grand scale. From the perspective of ingredients, Hatch calls Jefferson early-America’s foremost culinary connoisseur.

“His devotion to obtaining rare varieties and experimenting with cultivation techniques bordered on religious,” says Hatch. “He dedicated more writing to the subject, about 700 pages, than any other.”

As an evangelical byproduct, Jefferson founded what was arguably the nation’s first seed bank.

“He would hear about a ‘new’ vegetable and have to have it,” says Hatch. If growing experiments proved fruitful, seeds, taste descriptions, and instructions were mailed to “everyone he knew”—including George Washington, James Monroe, and James Madison. The efforts helped introduce then-obscure ingredients such as tomatoes, eggplant, and okra into mainstream usage.

When Hatch arrived at Monticello, Jefferson’s garden had almost entirely disappeared. He made it his mission to restore both its grounds—with a museum’s eye for historic accuracy—and its mission as a seed bank and resource for American farmers. The garden and fruitery now serve as the backbone for the Thomas Jefferson Center for Historic Plants, which sells historical seeds and grafting stock, and offers educational programming centered around heirloom gardening, viticulture, and pomology. Hatch’s successor, Keith Nevison, 36, is transforming the Center’s 650-acre Tufton Farm, which he manages, into a learning and research center for sustainable small-scale farming.

Nevison says the project will allow the Center to “bridge the past, present, and future of a very Jeffersonian form of agriculture.”

The COVID-19 pandemic is validating the statement. The Center usually sells about 92,000 seed packets a year. Orders for 2020 surpassed that number by April 1, says Nevison, “and continue to flood in.”

Getting to this point, says Nevison, has taken tremendous effort and ingenuity. It began with Hatch’s arrival at Monticello in 1977—when neither the terrace garden nor fruitery existed, much less the Thomas Jefferson Center for Historic Plants or Tufton Farm’s educational complex.

Jefferson’s debts forced his family to sell the property when he died in 1826. When the Thomas Jefferson Foundation purchased 650 of its original 5,000 acres in 1923, both house and gardens were, according to the Virginia Historical Society, in practical ruin. Restoration efforts focused on buildings and surrounding landscaping. The Garden Club of Virginia reconstructed flowerbeds, but the contents weren’t historical.

Meanwhile, orchards had been sawed down, berry patches overrun. The terrace garden’s massive stone retainer wall had been looted by the Civilian Conservation Corps; erosion had returned the area to grassy hillside.

Hatch was hired to change all that. Says Gabrielle Rausse, the father of Virginia wine and Monticello’s current director of gardens and grounds, “He was tasked with affecting what quickly became the most meticulous and painstakingly accurate horticultural restoration in U.S. history.”

Hatch had made a name for himself using archaeological evidence and written records to replicate 18th-century gardens at Old Salem in North Carolina. He was part of a new vanguard of preservationists dedicated to bringing historical foodways to life.

Efforts at Monticello began with infrastructure. Hatch pored over Jefferson’s historic journals, garden diaries, correspondence, and landscape drawings. The research guided archaeological digs that pinpointed locations for fence posts, retainer walls, vegetable beds, and fruit trees.

“Jefferson made new [garden-related] drawings and plans constantly,” says Hatch. Many were abandoned, others partially implemented and soon replaced. “He was always adding this, taking away that … It was impossible to tell, exactly, what was where and when.” The digs helped establish the true state of the grounds, but Hatch also added unrealized ambitions of Jefferson’s—like boutique vineyards filled with European wine grapes.

But as Hatch excavated and researched, he wasn’t just looking for records of plants and Jefferson the gardener—he was looking for slave labor and Jefferson the plantation owner, too.

“To me, this was a fundamental aspect of the project,” says Hatch. Whereas Monticello had once essentially avoided the subject, Hatch sought to acknowledge and explore it directly.

“That’s the only way to paint a complete portrait of Jefferson the horticulturist,” he says. “You have to present the realities of slave ownership. And we wanted to build that information into our educational model from the get-go.”

Research revealed that teams of enslaved people had spent years leveling the garden site, building ornate stone walls, and hauling fertile topsoil up the mountain by way of mule and cart. They dug deep trenches to keep cattle out and built a .75-mile-long, 10-foot-high board fence that Jefferson bragged wouldn’t “let even a young hare in.” They installed cisterns to gather water from rooftops and irrigation systems to distribute it. The list goes on.

“Astonishingly, Jefferson insisted on doing much of the actual planting, tending, and harvesting himself,” says Hatch. But he relied on a few trusted, older enslaved men to help, particularly in the fruitery. Some underwent training with top European pomologists and gardeners. All were encouraged to grow their own vegetable gardens and sell produce to the house.

Hatch has written extensively on the subject—both on Monticello’s website and in his 2012 book, A Rich Spot of Earth: Thomas Jefferson’s Revolutionary Garden at Monticello. Today, plaques around the garden and fruitery, as well as tours, commemorate the contributions of those skilled workers, and acknowledge their forced servitude.

With the terrace and fruitery mapped and restored, Hatch began re-collecting plants. Hurdles proved considerable.

“Most of what we know about Jefferson’s collection is found in garden notes and letters,” says Hatch. For instance, Jefferson frequently wrote to leading U.S. horticulturalists requesting seeds for obscure varieties like Leadman’s Dwarf pea, Egyptian onion, and Early York cabbage. Elsewhere, he noted receiving Arikara snap beans, wild salsify, and Pawnee corn gleaned from the Lewis and Clark expedition.

“But Jefferson didn’t always use proper names to refer to vegetables,” says Rausse. A favorite pea might bring a detailed description, but take the name of the farmer that grew it. Appellations for many varieties changed with time, or varied by region. Others simply vanished.

“Peter became like a botanical detective,” says Rausse, who partnered with Hatch in the early 1980s to install vineyards for wine production based on Jefferson’s plans. Hatch spent years collecting and combing through nursery and seed catalogs from the 1700s and 1800s for names and clues. He developed relationships with experts at what is now the National Laboratory for Genetic Resource Preservation in Colorado and the Seed Savers Exchange in Iowa. He consulted with leading plant historians and visited historical gardens and orchards throughout the United States and Europe to compare Jefferson’s drawings to living plants.

Progress came slowly. Some items, like the French Purple artichoke, were easy to obtain. Others proved difficult.

“Jefferson referred to ‘the black plum peach of Georgia,’ but that name had long fallen out of usage,” says Hatch. After tracing early U.S. nursery references through two centuries of catalogs and various name changes, he discovered the peach was now called Indian Red or Blood Cling. He tracked down growers and obtained grafting stock for both. Then he waited for fruits and compared the results to Jefferson’s notes. The closest match was kept.

Hatch’s project was formalized as the Thomas Jefferson Center for Historic Plants in 1986. He began selling seeds and grafting stock, and developing educational offerings, soon thereafter. The Center’s scholarly “Twinleaf Journal” launched in 1990. The additions positioned the Center as an intersection for scientific discussion among plant historians, gardeners, orchardists, and botanists.

Nevison, the Tufton Farm manager, learned of Hatch’s work while studying at the University of Delaware’s prestigious Longwood Graduate Program in Public Horticulture.

“If you’re in this field, you know Peter Hatch,” says Nevison. With the Center, Hatch “created a model for everything a historical garden and nursery could and should be.”

Nevison aims to affect a similar revolution at Tufton. To do it, he’s asking the question: If Jefferson was alive today, what and how would he be farming?

Considering Jefferson’s passions for gastronomical diversity, horticultural experimentation, and ecological conservation, “We think he’d be going bananas over the modern farm-to-table movement,” says Nevison, who came to Tufton in 2018. “He’d almost surely be pushing the envelope of sustainability.”

Rausse and Hatch agree. With thousands of heirloom tomatoes now in circulation alone, they imagine Jefferson growing thousands of obscure varieties of fruits and vegetables. At minimum, seeking to optimize taste would drive experimentation with organic methods.

Nevison envisions Tufton as a regional, modern, educational farming center aligned with those projections. Plans include experimental cider orchards, hopyards and vineyards, groves of nut trees (including newly reintroduced American chestnuts), grain production, free-range, heritage-breed livestock, a food forest, and more.

“We want Tufton to be a go-to resource for beginner and veteran small-scale farmers alike,” says Nevison.

Early phases of development include partnerships with agricultural producers, specialty grocers, and colleges and research institutions. Small-scale farming gurus such as Joel Salatin of Polyface are consulting about best practices for free-range livestock and related research gaps. The Virginia State Beekeepers Association is helping with pollinator gardens and experimental beehives. The Livestock Conservancy is discussing programs aimed at raising endangered breeds of sheep, cows, pigs, and poultry. Virginia Tech and Virginia State University are involved as well.

Support for farmers will take a variety of forms, says Nevison.

He sees Tufton researching and disseminating scientifically validated best practices, developing hands-on learning opportunities, running a community kitchen for processing value-added products, helping with environmental certifications, and offering grant assistance for startups and expansions. Nevison also hopes to expand the Center’s nursery, orchards, and seed bank to include more varieties and conduct economic studies based on demand and market pricing. He wants to host farm dinners with regional chefs, conduct onsite vegetable and fruit tastings, and help connect farmers with restaurants, brewers, vintners, and grocers.

All of that, says Rausse, is a very Jeffersonian endeavor.

“This was a man that lived by the mantra, ‘The greatest service which can be rendered any country is to add a useful plant to its culture,’” he says. “If Jefferson knew we were doing this, I think he would approve, but probably also be quite jealous—he’d want to be out here in the thick of things, getting his hands dirty!”

Who needs stones when you have marshmallows or foam?

The prehistoric archaeological wonder of Stonehenge, in Wiltshire, England, is made of huge hunks of rock—but it doesn’t have to be. The hulking, sandstone sarsens and the slightly-less-enormous bluestones were quarried, lugged, and arranged thousands of years ago, at a monumental scale. Now, the Archaeological Institute of America (AIA) is inviting armchair architects to build miniature versions of Stonehenge and other sites at home. No quarry necessary—but it might help to have some Legos, Play-Doh, or maybe even hunks of cheese.

The competition, which the AIA calls Build Your Own Monument, was supposed to roll out this coming October, to coincide with the 10th anniversary of their International Archaeology Day celebrations. But then COVID-19 started spreading, leaving many people—especially parents and kids—hungry for fun, fiddly projects. Ben Thomas, director of programs at the AIA, says that the team figured, “Why wait for the fall?” Thomas organized the contest with his colleague Meredith Langlitz. “People need something to do,” Thomas says. Why not spend the day wrangling toilet paper tubes into miniature megaliths?

Participants can fashion their little monuments out of anything they want, and then submit a photo to be judged by experts and the public. Stonehenge entries will be assessed by Mike Parker Pearson, a professor of British Later Prehistory at the Institute of Archaeology at University College London, who has led a team of researchers studying the real-life monument for more than 15 years. (The entries are divided into categories, so kids, families, and adults are evaluated separately.) Stonehenge submissions were due on April 17, and voting wraps up on April 23. The deadline for Chichen Itza submissions is April 24, Colosseums are due on May 1, and entrants have until May 8 to build Giza-inspired pyramids.

Pearson and the public will pick favorites from 33 little versions of Stonehenge. Many builders leaned on food—everything from sliced apples and peeled cucumbers to marshmallows and the combination of cheese, granola, and bread. Others stacked recycled boxes or balanced encyclopedias upright. Some interpretations, however charming, are a little vague or general—they include a bunch of vertical objects in a ring, but don’t tackle the details. Other competitors did their homework. “They seem to have looked at current pictures of Stonehenge and they’ve got the right number of stones that are still standing,” Thomas says.

If you’re antsy, bored, or looking for a way to use up your snack scraps, give it a try. Who cares if the real-life site isn’t cheddar-orange? No one will dock you for taking some artistic liberties. “We’re enjoying being able to provide people with distraction, and seeing what they can come up with,” says Thomas, who thinks that the playful competition can help make archaeology feel more accessible and less stuffy or unapproachable. “And if they do a little research about Stonehenge, that’s fantastic.”

It's a ghost town, but it's got a pool.

Driving down Route 322, just minutes from where southern New Jersey meets Philadelphia, you might think you’ve spotted a factory tower or standpipe off the side of the road, one of many postindustrial artifacts that flank America's roadways. But this looming 40-foot tower, a kind of metallic mushroom, is part of a different kind of infrastructure: an abandoned missile launcher dating back to the Cold War, strategically positioned to defend the Philadelphia metropolitan area, with a particularly historic pedigree. And this one can be all yours.

Known as Swedesboro PH-58, the base is one of 14 Nike missile stations once threaded throughout New Jersey, and one of five that were in the state’s “Philadelphia Defense Area” (“PH,” for short). The Philadelphia Inquirer reported that, this month, Woolwich Township has formally requested bids and proposals for the property, which could be developed into restaurants, offices, or a park, among other possibilities. Bids, due in June, can be no lower than $1.8 million.

The United States military introduced the anti-aircraft Nike series in 1953, with the Ajax missile. Launch bases were installed in more than 200 locations throughout the country, as well as within the territory of American allies in Asia and Europe. Following the Soviet Union’s successful 1957 launch of Sputnik 1, however, the military felt a new show of strength was needed, and introduced the Hercules to the series in 1958. According to Encyclopedia Britannica, the Hercules was, in every way, an improvement upon the Ajax: Where the earlier model could rise to 70,000 feet, with a range of 30 miles, at more than twice the speed of sound, the follow-up could reach 150,000 feet with a 75-mile range, at more than three times the speed of sound. Operational between 1957 and 1974, PH-58 was loaded with 30 Ajax and 24 Hercules missiles, according to a Fairleigh Dickinson University database. But since the site was shut down 46 years ago, it's "become an eyesore," writes Woolwich Township Mayor, Vernon R. Marino, in an email.

The tower is the most visible aspect, but there's much more to the abandoned site. Its 33-acre campus is a ghost town of its own, with vaults stretching 30 feet underground, a mess hall, soldiers’ quarters, and a drained swimming pool. Though a small number of these bases have been preserved, like the museum at the Sandy Hook launch site farther north in New Jersey, it’s generally too expensive to restore an entire campus, says James Heinzen, a historian at neighboring Rowan University. The sites are also dangerous, he adds, because the underground missile vaults are covered by big steel doors and in need of some serious cleanup. PH-58 might not get the museum treatment, but it’s not too hard to imagine that the pool or mess hall living on—restored—in whatever the future of the site holds. In an email, Woolwich Township Clerk Jane DiBella writes that a commemorative radar tower may stay put as a reminder of the site's history.

As it happens, PH-58’s location makes the base—and others in the PH zone—especially historically significant. The town of Swedesboro, formerly part of Woolwich Township (which owns the property), is a short drive from Rowan University in Glassboro, New Jersey. In June 1967, when Rowan was known as Glassboro State College, President Lyndon B. Johnson and Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin met there for official talks. (Johnson wanted to meet in Washington, D.C., and Kosygin preferred New York City; Glassboro was the compromise.) Today, Rowan maintains a collection of artifacts from the summit, some of which has been digitized.

Heinzen, who is also the director of Rowan’s Hollybush Institute (named for the campus building where the leaders met), says that while the summit produced no direct agreements, it set “a pattern” for future face-to-face meetings. The town’s name has even seeped into diplomatic parlance, with the “Spirit of Glassboro” signaling a willingness to meet with an adversary in person. The Glassboro Summit was followed by the 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, and the 1972 Strategic Arms Limitation Talks Agreement (SALT I).

The latter led to the shuttering of the Nike bases, if not their complete erasure. While many Nike bases nationwide were converted into housing, PH-58 malingered. Woolwich Township acquired the base from the federal government in 2009 for $828,000, but didn’t want to resell during a recession. Of course, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, economic conditions are not necessarily better right now, but Woolwich Township is already fielding proposals anyway.

Storms, floods, and COVID-19 could threaten one of Kerala's iconic sports.

The racing snake boats of Kerala, India, are nearly half a football field long. Their polished wooden bows rest barely above the water, while their sterns rise up from the surface like the flared head of a cobra. On a broiling Saturday in November 2019, Jiffy Felix stands on the back of his team’s boat, captaining around a hundred oarsmen in the club’s emerald-and-white uniform. Both his hands grip a thick oar that is easily taller than his roughly six-foot frame. From his perch on the stern, his gaze passes over the bow and rests on the finish line, about one kilometer away.

Felix, 42, has spent much of the past three days fretting about prize money. His team—the Mighty Oars, also known as Nediyamukal Cultural Development Centre Boat Club, from the village of Kumarakom in southern Kerala—has taken on considerable debt to get this far. The Mighty Oars are one of nine clubs participating in the first-ever Champions Boat League, a 12-race series that has professionalized snake boat racing through uniforms, logos, standings, and cash prizes. The Mighty Oars need to beat the Coast Dominators to close the season in third place, giving them the cash to pay off some of what they owe.

Almost every year since 1952, the southwest Indian state of Kerala has hosted the Nehru Trophy Boat Race, christened when India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, watched an impromptu contest and had a silver trophy made for the winner. Nehru’s race has traditionally been held in the middle of August, and the Champions Boat League was set to use it as the league’s first competition—until the rains began.

For days, curtains of water hissed through trees, slapped streets, and rattled rooftops. Small boats replaced cars on the flooded roads. The airport in Kochi, one of Kerala’s biggest cities, closed for more than two days. People fled their drowned houses for relief camps. The floods came only a year after the worst flooding in nearly a century, which killed around 400 people and displaced more than a million.

The delay meant that Felix, and a few others who could afford it, had to personally pay for the team’s weeks of food and hotels, not to mention flights home and back again for out-of-state rowers. The league had tried to auction snake boat clubs to wealthy owners before the season, hoping for a long-term investment in the sport and the region—but despite a TV deal broadcasting races online and across the country, few were interested. Felix took out a loan.

The government of Kerala created the series largely to attract more tourists to the unique “backwater” coast, even though catastrophic floods are likely to strike on an almost annual basis, according to climate scientists. This, coupled with sea level rise, threatens not just the league, but also the singular landscape from which snake boats were born.

In 1999, when Unni Karthikeyan was 17, he crowded around a radio with his dad, sister, and cousin, waiting for All India Radio to announce the winner of the Nehru Trophy. The race had been impossibly close. He was rooting for the Kumarakom Town Boat Club, a team he had watched at its first-even practice, in 1998. Back then, people figured they were too new to win.

Then came the announcement: KTBC had won the Nehru Trophy. “It was like a miracle,” says Karthikeyan, who later served as secretary of the club. “I cannot express.” He burst from his house and dashed to the canal where he expected the team to soon drift past. There he waited, ecstatic amid a crowd of supporters, everyone lighting candles to guide their rowers from the lake into the inky channel on their way home.

It’s impossible to separate Kerala’s snake boat races from the waterways that thread through its coast. Around two million years ago, according to John Paul, a retired marine geologist who studied the evolution of Kerala’s coastal plains before he passed away earlier this year, tectonic plates underneath the subcontinent began to rock up and down, changing the flow of rivers and tipping tendrils of the Arabian Sea into land that came to be known as the “backwaters.” Today they form a web of channels unlike anything else in the country.

Several centuries ago, two kingdoms rose along these channels, Purakkad and Kayamkulam. According to naval historians A.P. Greeshmalatha and Victor Rajamanickam, the chief of Purakkad wanted to dominate by controlling the water, so he demanded a vessel that would serve his purpose. What he got was a boat long enough to carry a troupe of soldiers, low enough to slip unseen along the shore, fast enough to startle his enemies, and lithe enough to slither through the water’s serpentine swirls.

Initially, the back of these boats was thought to resemble a bird’s beak, not a cobra’s hood. In Kerala’s native language, Malayalam, the boats are called Chundan vallam, which can be translated as “beak boat,” according to Malavika Binny, a history professor at SRM University in Andhra Pradesh. She says the “beak” morphed into a snake only after a Dutchman saw the vessels and thought they looked like cobras poised to strike.

Though beak boats were undoubtedly vessels of war, Binny says there are references to boat races—vallam kali—that date back to the 15th century. Rather than slaughter each other into extinction, small fiefdoms raced to settle disputes. Their descendants are coastal villages that collectively own racing vessels, which hang upturned and tarp-protected for nine months of the year, until late summer.

When the Champions Boat League race begins, the Mighty Oars lurch forward and speed toward the finish line, their oars flinging so much of Ashtamudi Lake into the air that rowers seem caught between horizontal rainstorms. Water soaks their hair, washes over their eyes, and dribbles into their mouths.

At the middle of the boat, on a platform, coaches stand like conductors, chanting rhythmically and then blowing the same rhythm into plastic yellow horns. The rowers raise their arms in a muscular, circular motion, fists and oars rising toward the sun in unison and then plunging back toward the frothing lake. By the time they cross the finishing posts, so much water has flooded the boat that little waves lap at their ankles, and silver fish dart between their feet.

The Mighty Oars paddle fast enough in Saturday’s preliminary race to make the three-team final, slipping in ahead of the Coast Dominators and assuring them a third-place finish for the year. Yet there isn’t much time to be happy. People have buses and planes to catch, and in two days Felix will be off to Abu Dhabi, where he works every other month on an oil rig. He earns enough there to support his family and pay for a chunk of the team’s expenses.

As a boy, Felix and his friends used to skip school in search of a stretch of water for their boat. When his parents found out he wasn’t studying, Felix’s uncle dragged him to work on a Mumbai oil rig where he was the general manager. “He wanted to change my life,” Felix said. “The boat race, that is no life.”

But the snake boat race never left Felix, and he now spends his days on both sides of the Arabian Sea, the body of water that will define the lives of everyone in coastal Kerala over the next century. Climate change has warmed the Arabian Sea and inflated clouds over the backwaters, and they now suck up enough moisture to dump months’ worth of monsoon showers in days, according to Venu Nair, a meteorologist at the Centre for Earth Research and Environment Management. The sea is also predicted to rise several feet by century’s end, erasing chunks of Alappuzha, a tourist and snake boat hotspot that already floods during high tide, home to about 200,000 people. Around half of Kochi, the state’s commercial capital, is built on reclaimed land and “will be gone by the end of the century” if water keeps rising, said Shadananan Nair, a water resources expert who works with Nair.

The spread of COVID-19 has shown another way that the sport can be precarious: Rowers, team managers, and their families have come to rely on the tourism and investment that snake boats bring to Kerala. Though the virus hasn’t yet altered the league’s plans for its second season, India is currently under lockdown, and sporting events from the U.S. basketball season to the 2020 Olympics have been postponed. This could be the snake boat league’s second major disruption in as many years, which may discourage outside buyers from funding racing clubs in the future.

Meanwhile, Felix’s son and daughter may grow up with a much different relationship to the backwaters, defined not so much by calm inlets where children learn to swim, but by an intimate understanding of water’s upending power, and perhaps by a need to move inland. Felix sounds determined to be the last of his family to race. It’s caused too much money trouble, too many family arguments. “I don’t want our kids also to go this way,” he says. “We have already decided.”

Beat the rush by turning to small, local suppliers—and your neighbors.

In 1944, at the height of World War II, 20 million home gardeners across the United States dug deep to support the war effort. As the country poured the bulk of its resources into the conflict, Americans grew Victory Gardens to bolster the domestic food supply.

Nearly a century later, Jes Walton is trying to bring those gardens back. As the Food Campaigns manager at Green America, an environmental advocacy organization, Walton is one of the people behind Climate Victory Gardens, a campaign to encourage climate-smart home gardening. From its launch, Walton saw a steady trickle of people add their gardens to the campaign’s crowd-sourced map. Social distancing requirements have turned that trickle into a flood, with Walton citing a 60 percent increase in inquiries from 2019.

As many Americans face the prospect of empty grocery store shelves and emptier bank accounts, gardening can provide a sense of stability as well as food security. The newfound interest has created a rush on seeds, with some larger suppliers setting strict limits on new orders. Amidst the frenzy, small seed companies have proven resilient.

The rise of small seed companies is good news for both gardeners and the environment, as these vendors are more likely to specialize in heirloom varieties that are suited to local climates, taste delicious, and can produce seeds that can be saved and shared year after year. From vegetables of the South Asian subcontinent to chile peppers of the world, these small seed companies offer unique produce to grow in your very own quarantine Victory Garden.

Seeds of India

Marlboro, New Jersey

In 2001, J.P. Prasad noticed a trend. Friends and neighbors in his predominantly South Asian community were so hungry for the crops of their homelands that they kept attempting to bring seeds into the United States. “People were trying to smuggle this stuff over and customs wouldn’t allow it,” Prasad says. “I felt there was a definite need to start a company for this.”

So Prasad founded Seeds of India, an online company that offers the seeds to grow dozens of South Asian culinary and medicinal vegetables, flowers, and herbs. From scaly-skinned karela (bitter gourd) to fragrant, sacred tulsi (basil), Prasad’s business features beloved foods that are otherwise difficult to find in the United States. Other unique seeds include gongoora (roselle), a spinach-like leaf that adds a sour touch to South Indian curries, and Indian okra varieties, which are longer and less woody than their American peers.

Thomas Jefferson Center for Historic Plants

Charlottesville, Virginia

Keith Nevison, the nursery and farm manager at Thomas Jefferson’s historic plantation-turned-museum, has had another hectic day at Monticello. The museum shop usually sells 92,000 seed packets a year. In 2020 so far, that’s tripled. “Sales are just going completely bananas,” Nevison says.

The heirloom fruits, vegetables, and flowers Nevison oversees are all inspired by Jefferson’s original gardens, which included European imports and native American plants. “He was always promoting American varieties because there were a lot of folks who wrote about the inferiority of American plants,” says Nevison. (While Monticello’s plants were a wonder, they came at the expense of the hundreds of slaves Jefferson forced to work on his property.)

To provide Jeffersonian plants for the modern garden, Nevison and his team referenced the Founding Father’s extensive botanical writings and coordinated with seed-saving communities to find similar heirlooms. At least one plant in the collection, the Blackberry Lily—a star-like, ruby-red flower—is a descendent of a Monticello original. Others, like the balsam apple, a tropical vine whose orange-red fruits were used to treat wounds, and Queen Anne’s pocket melon, a fragrant variety that noble English ladies once carried as perfume, are similar to the plants noted in Jefferson’s diaries.

San Diego Seed Company

San Diego, California

Brijette Peña wants to create a million urban farmers, and she’s already well on her way. In 2010, she founded San Diego Seed Company, which specializes in plants suited to the hot, dry climate of Southern California, after noticing the lack of seeds specialized for urban gardeners in the region. Now, her offerings include indigenous, desert-adapted tepary beans, juicy little sugar baby watermelons, and classes tailored towards beginning gardeners, which have now moved online.

Peña recommends new gardeners try the Peruvian ground cherry, an Inca-bred perennial tomato relative that she first sampled in Peru’s Sacred Valley. “It’s super tart and sweet, and just an explosion of flavor in your mouth,” she says. The plant produces year-round red berries that are perfect for snacking and making jelly.

Small House Farm

Sanford, Michigan

“To not be able to be with people and share the seeds face to face is unusual for me,” says Ben Cohen, cofounder of Small House Farm in Sanford, Michigan. A farmer and seed saver, Cohen founded the Michigan Seed Library Network and organizes the Central Michigan Seed Swap, which brought together over 700 gardeners in 2019. Now, the uptick in seed orders is keeping him and his family busy. “It brings people comfort to get into the garden,” he says.

While Cohen can’t meet his community in person, each of his seeds reminds him of the person who saved it. The Old Carolina tomato, for example, bears family history in its meaty, red-yellow lobes. “I got the seeds from a young man who found them in his grandma’s freezer in North Carolina,” he says, where they’d sat for at least 50 years.

Now, Cohen is extending the same spirit of community with a new customer service: free shipping on orders of $20 or more. “People need the seeds,” he explains. “We’ve gotta get the seeds to the people.”

Refining Fire Chiles

San Diego, California

“I haven’t met a Native American pepper that I didn’t like,” says Jim Duffy, owner of Refining Fire Chiles. That’s saying a lot, because Duffy, since discovering a passion for salsa-making in 2003, has devoted his life to amassing what he calls the largest pepper plant empire in the United States. His holdings include everything from peppers that are “sweet like sugar” to those so hot they’ll “blow your head off,” he says.

The peppers’ names themselves are a world tour: there’s the Aleppo pepper, a smoky Middle Eastern variety with a bit of a kick; the glossy Iranian Cherry Pepper; and Croatian Elephant ears, “so sweet and so juicy you’d have to wear a bib if you bite into it," Duffy says.

But Duffy values his collection of Native American peppers most of all. He’ll often throw an extra packet of Native pepper seeds into an order, in the hopes that the gardener will take to them. “It’s about loving and learning and finding chiles from all over the world that people have been eating for thousands of years,” he says.

Prairie Road Organic Seed

Fullerton, North Dakota

Theresa Podoll married into her husband Dan's family business in the 1980s, after falling in love with Dan—and his family’s squash. The first time she came to a family meal, they were taste-testing Prairie Road Organic Seed's newly bred Uncle David’s Dakota Dessert Squash. Theresa didn’t think she liked squash at first, but one bite of the gourd’s sweet, nutty flesh changed her mind. “Yep, I married the guy,” she says.

The Podoll family breeds many of their open-source, unpatented seeds, such as the Sweet Dakota Rose watermelon, to suit the shorter growing seasons of northern U.S. climates. Other seeds, like the Arikara Yellow bean, are products of North Dakota's indigenous agriculture. The first non-natives to describe the Arikara people's yellow bean were Lewis and Clark themselves.

Kitazawa Seed Company

Oakland, California

In 1917, Gijiu Kitazawa, a recent immigrant to California, was troubled by the lack of available Asian produce in his new home. Since he had apprenticed for years at a seed company in Japan before coming to the United States, starting his own seed business must have seemed like a no-brainer. The company has survived for more than a century, weathering Japanese internment in the 1940s and a rapidly changing Bay Area today.

Today, the company is experiencing more interest than ever, especially in vegetables such as bitter gourd, a traditional medicinal food. Demand is "phenomenal,” says owner Maya Shiroyama. Gardeners can purchase bitter gourd seeds on Kitazawa’s site, as well as native Asian and Hawaiian seeds such as edible burdock, poha berry, and plump little pickling melons .

Unique Seeds in Your Neighborhood

With many larger companies already out of seeds for the season and smaller companies facing increasing backlogs, it may be difficult to find all the seeds you need commercially. But don’t despair: trade. Sourcing seeds locally, or through snail mail seed exchanges, is a social-distancing-friendly way to support your community while growing your quarantine Victory Garden.

Many local greenhouses are particularly hurting right now, as several states have deemed them non-essential while leaving big-box garden retailers open. Walton, of Green America, suggests calling your local nursery or native plant center to see if they’re still selling seeds or offering curbside plant pickup. If your state has deemed farmers’ markets essential, you can also try scoping out tables selling seed, or ask friendly farmers for tips on saving seed from their non-patented, non-hybrid produce. Walton also recommends calling up your local seed bank or seed library, which may still be sending out seeds by mail.

But it comes to neighborly cooperation, nothing beats a good old-fashioned seed exchange. While many heirloom seed companies have reached capacity, you can source snail-mail heirlooms directly from other gardeners through large online exchanges, local social media, or community gardeners’ clubs. While gathering in person may not be in the cards for a while, a garden growing with our neighbor’s seeds can prove just as nourishing.

You can join the conversation about this and other stories in the Atlas Obscura Community Forums.

Is your imagination as wondrous as reality?

In 1515, German artist Albrecht Dürer drew a rhinoceros. Dürer was influential in the art world at the time, and his piece was shared widely. Prints of it served as the basis for many other artists’ depictions of the animal. But there was one big problem with Dürer’s rhinoceros—he had never actually seen one.

A few months before Dürer sat down to put a rhino on paper, a Portuguese diplomat had returned from a trip with an Indian (or greater one-horned) rhinoceros among his cargo. Word spread quickly about the exotic new animal, and a German man in Lisbon sent a description and a quick sketch back home. Dürer, intrigued, created his own interpretation. The general shape is right, but there are some odd choices among the details: crustacean-like body plates, scaly reptilian legs, a small extra horn stuck to its nape.

This was a relatively common occurrence of the time before photography. Even the most talented artist might struggle with drawing something she’s never seen before, especially on the basis of a few limited details. (Others, like 12-year-old Yincheng Qian, who drew the image at the beginning of this article, seem to be pretty adept at it.)

Now we’re challenging you—or your friends, or your parents, or your kids—to pull a Dürer: Make your best drawing of some wondrous place on Atlas Obscura using only a brief description, with no photos and few details. Below you’ll find descriptions of a few of our favorite places and things in the Atlas. Grab your art supplies or a tablet and draw what you think it looks like without peeking at the real thing.

Once you've made your masterpiece, share it with us in Atlas Obscura’s forums, on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram, or by emailing it to places@atlasobscura.com. We’ll feature some of the most interesting takes in a future article.

Fly Geyser

Gerlach, Nevada

• A collection of multiple cone-shaped formations sitting on top of a tall mound. Each cone is about six feet tall, and the entire mound is around 30 feet in height. Each cone-shaped formation shoots a jet of water out of an opening at its top.
• A kind of algae that flourishes in moist, hot environment covers the mound and makes the surface unusually bright and colorful.
• The geyser sticks out of a large pool of water like an island.

The Hodag

Rhinelander, Wisconsin

• This menacing beast is described as having “the head of a frog, the grinning face of a giant elephant, thick short legs set off by huge claws, the back of a dinosaur, and a long tail with spears at the end.”
• A larger-than-life sculpture of it stands outside a visitor center in Wisconsin. According to local lore, it was 30 inches tall and 7 feet long, and subsisted primarily on a diet of white bulldogs.

Wat Samphran Temple

Khlong Mai, Thailand

• A tall, cylindrical tower, 17 stories high. Its exterior is painted bright pink, and there are a number of small white windows.
• A green dragon with a long, narrow body and spines down its back seems to entwine the tower. Its legs cling to some of the windows, and its head rests on top. The dragon has large white horns and its mouth is open, as if it’s about to breathe fire.

Quasi

Wellington, New Zealand

• A large statue of a hand with a human face that has a blank expression, with one eye brow slightly raised.
• Some of the fingers point down like legs. The hand’s thumb is bent and touches the index finger, like a person putting their hand on their hip.
• The statue stands on the roof of a building.

El Cemi Museum

Jayuya, Puerto Rico

• A building in the shape of a cemi, an important spiritual object among the Taíno, the indigenous people of the Caribbean. Scholars believe that the cemi’s three-part shape was inspired by the Tres Picachos (Three Peaks), a mountain that the Taíno hold sacred.
• The central part is the tallest, and represents a mountain peak, about twice as tall as the other parts.
• At the front, a shorter part represents Coabey, the land of the dead. It has a face carved into it, with two round eyes, a small round nose, and a large, mouth-like opening that holds a door. A decoration with large round beads arches over the head.
• At the back, a low, round part represents the land of the living. Two round eyes match the eye on the front of the building, but there is no mouth or opening.

Blood Falls

Antarctica

• A blood-red waterfall emerging from a massive white glacier, over the rocks at its toe, and into the water.
• Below the glacier lies the ice-covered is the surface of West Lake Bonney.

Swing at the End of the World

Banos, Ecuador

• A small wooden treehouse stands on the edge of a steep slope. Hanging from one of the tree’s branches is a swing made from a wooden plank and two long ropes. It swings out over a forest-filled canyon.
• Beyond the canyon, an active volcano towers above the forest in the distance.

Thor's Well

Yachats, Oregon

• A gaping, seemingly bottomless hole sits along a rocky shoreline of the Pacific Ocean.
• Ocean water spills into the hole and occasionally sprays back out, like a fountain.

Quinta da Regaleira

Sintra, Portugal

• An elaborate palace and gardens fill a massive estate. The palace is decorated with an octagonal tower, and all kinds of turrets, gargoyles, and mystical symbols.
• The ornate gardens are set on a hillside, and include a multitude of fountains, grottoes, statues, caves, and tunnels.
• The grounds also include a chapel, an aquarium built to look as if it naturally emerged from a large boulder, and a well that appears to be an underground tower lined with stairs.

Garden of Cosmic Speculation

Holywood, Scotland

• This garden covers 30 acres filled with lawns, ponds, bridges, sculptures, and buildings inspired by concepts from science and mathematics.
• Some of its features include snail-shaped grass mounds, double helix sculptures, and a water cascade that recounts the story of the universe.
• One of the larger features is a terrace covered in alternating squares of grass and metal that is meant to show how black holes distort space and time.

If you really can't stand the suspense and just want to see what these places actually look like, we've got your back:

• Fly Geyser
• The Hodag
• Wat Samphran Temple
• Quasi
• El Cemi Museum
• Blood Falls
• Swing at the End of the World
• Thor's Well
• Quinta da Regaleira
• Garden of Cosmic Speculation

Of course, they are deep underground and came from 75-ton titanosaurs.

Under normal circumstances, hundreds of people pass through Castelbouc Cave in the south of France each year, many seeking to become more experienced cavers by training in the labyrinthine passageways under the surface. Little do they know that they’ve long been exploring—literally—among the footsteps of giants.

A few years ago, a crew of seven—speleologists and paleontologists, led by guide Louis Baret—crawled through a narrow passageway 100 stories below ground and into a vast karst corridor. There, high above their heads, were seven massive splotches.

“Just above me I [saw] huge circular structures,” says Jean-David Moreau, a paleontologist at the University of Bourgogne and lead author of a recent paper detailing the find, published in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology. “I screamed, ‘Louis, don’t move anymore!’ We were in front of the very first traces of giant herbivorous dinosaurs discovered in a deep natural cavity.”

More than 160 million years ago, stone that now forms the roof of the cave was a part of a route taken by titanosauriforms, some of the largest dinosaurs that lived. One day, a group of the animals trekked across a clay embankment abutting an inland sea, the bed of which now underlies much of France. The dinosaurs’ depressions on the ground remained, and over time, the area was buried under millions of years of sediment. As the land rose and sea level dropped, erosion eventually carved the limestone cave system, including a passage that ran directly under the original dinosaur impressions.

“By looking more closely at these structures, I noticed that they formed alignments and drew repeated patterns,” says Moreau, whose trip was organized by the Association Paléontologique des Hauts Plateaux du Languedoc, a local organization. “[It was] incredible … it didn't take a long time to realize that we had just made a major discovery.”

The tracks Moreau’s team found weren’t flipped upside-down by time and geology, nor had they been made by mysterious spider-dinos.

“The tracks we see on the roof are not footprints,” Moreau says. “They are counterprints." That is, they are convex structures rather than depressions, like a plaster cast of a footprint, except in the stone and only visible from beneath.

Portions of the cave flood during wetter periods, so the dino-track gallery is only accessible during dry spells—and only be cavers experienced and brave enough to get all the way down there without succumbing to claustrophobia.

Fans are finding new ways to celebrate the band during the 45th anniversary of their first arrival there.

There are few foreign bands that whip Japan’s famously stoic audiences into a frenzy the way that English rockers Queen traditionally have. Every April 17 is Queen Day there, with a slate of events to celebrate the day that the band first arrived in the country, back in 1975. This year the global pandemic has changed the celebration of Queen Day, but hasn’t blunted the intensity of Japanese fans’ ardor.

Throughout the spring, across the country there have been a series of one-off exhibitions and attractions to honor the 45th anniversary of the band’s Japanese debut. In-person events for “Queen no Hi,” as the unofficial holiday is known, were understandably canceled, but fans still found a way to celebrate.

On April 17, 1975, Japan Airlines flight 061 from Honolulu touched down at Tokyo’s Haneda International Airport. In the airport, 3,000 fans had packed the arrivals lounge to catch a glimpse of rising superstars, Queen. “April 17 was really the day when the close relationship between Queen and Japan began,” writes music journalist and Queen Day organizer Takayuki Ishizumi in an email.

The semi-official Japan Anniversary Association now recognizes Queen Day, and its festivities have grown over the years, with the largest fittingly held at Haneda Airport’s Sky Hall event space. The first major event, in 2015, sold out, and featured panel discussions with Japanese personnel from the band’s decade of tours in the country, as well as music journalists and Queen tribute acts.

Ishizumi, who has also authored several books on the band, worked with its Japanese label and publisher to organize the celebration at Haneda. “There were events [in Japan] where Queen fans could gather on [Freddie Mercury’s] birthday (September 5) and death day (November 24), but both are in summer and autumn,” Ishizumi explains. The need for a more formal springtime event is just another signal of the depth of the band’s impact there.

“Queen Day is an important occasion for Japanese fans to reaffirm the bond between Queen and Japan,” writes fan Yoko Doi of Tokyo in an email. In 2019, Doi—along with 300 others—marked Queen Day with an outdoor screening of the 2018 film Bohemian Rhapsody, featuring band cosplay and plenty of Moet et Chandon, naturally (see the lyrics to “Killer Queen,” if you’re not an initiate).

This year was marked with simultaneous online viewing parties of Queen concerts and Bohemian Rhapsody, kicked off with a shared toast. Though disappointed, Doi speaks highly of the online events, which were coordinated through a series of hashtags and message boards. “It was good to be able to celebrate with everyone [and] connect with [other fans], even online,” she says.

Even as Queen was still making inroads in its home country of England, especially among critics, the four-piece had developed a devoted following in Japan by the time the band’s first world tour kicked off in 1974. Music journalist Togo Kaoruko, who has long chronicled Queen’s career in Japan, attributes the band’s early success in the country largely to two groups: young female fans enraptured by Queen’s early androgynous, glam-rock aesthetic, and foreign music aficionados—“guitar nerds,” he calls them—impressed by the band’s technical chops.

Ishizumi agrees: “In 1975, 90 percent of the band’s Japanese fan base was teenage girls,” drawn to the members’ good looks and uncommon—for rock musicians—intellect. (Guitarist Brian May was studying astrophysics before the band hit it big, and returned to it to earn his PhD in 2008.) “Musicality was also a big factor,” says Ishizumi. He also notes that the band’s popularity has surged there—“Queen booms”— at various times over the decades.

The effect of the band on Japanese audiences was unmistakable. Performing to a sold-out crowd at the famed Budokan arena on April 19, 1975, frontman Freddie Mercury was obliged, mid-performance, to ask the raucous fans for calm. It was and remains an unusual occurrence in a country where audiences are known to sit politely during rock concerts. The love affair was not one-sided. The band and Mercury, in particular, were similarly captivated.

“All of the band fell in love with Japan,” says Greg Brooks, Queen’s official archivist, in an exclusive interview for this article. “I’ve heard all four band members waxing lyrical about Japan, about its people and culture.” Brooks, who was in Tokyo in January 2020 to open a Queen exhibition and for the release of the Japanese translation of his book on Mercury, notes that all four members even vacationed there when not on tour. Former Mercury assistant Peter Freestone told Lesley-Ann Jones, for her biography of the late singer, that “Things Japanese were an all-consuming passion for [Mercury], whereas everywhere else he stayed in the world was merely a bed for the night."

Mercury filled his London home with artifacts purchased during his frequent, expensive visits to the country. “Freddie in particular was in awe of it,” says Brooks. So famous was his fondness for Japanese ceramics that one museum in far-flung Tochigi Prefecture, visited by Mercury with partner Jim Hutton in 1986, remains something of a pilgrimage for fans.

Today the band now tours as Queen + Adam Lambert (the band and younger singer have collaborated since 2011), and wrapped up a four-date, sold-out tour of Japan in January, featuring an emotional acoustic rendition of the band’s Japanese-language hit “Teo Torriatte.” “They love these guys,” Brooks says. “There is a love for this band here like you’d expect if it was family visiting.”

The 45th anniversary this year marks a special outpouring of this love, including a dedicated exhibition that was scheduled to travel to three cities, and features the largest collection of authentic tour costumes ever put on display, as well as props, original handwritten lyrics to a dozen songs, photographs, and other mementos from the band’s decade of tours in Japan.

Among the more eclectic items on display is a sword gifted by Mercury to the band’s long-time Japanese bodyguard, Hisao Itami, who also made appearances at the exhibit, to the delight of fans who lined up three-deep to enter the exhibit during its initial run.

And among the glittering buildings in Tokyo’s posh Ginza district, in Sony Ginza Park, a multistory indoor/outdoor park/art gallery, Sony Japan offered Queen in the Park, a free interactive art installation that ran through March.

In front, fans posed with a silver and neon statute of Mercury in an iconic pose. Visitors then descended a musical staircase equipped with laser triggers to play the famous stomp-stomp-clap beat from “We Will Rock You.” Time the steps correctly, and a light-and-audio show would activate, playing the song’s opening vocals.

Forty-five years have passed since Queen first set foot in Japan, but time and global uncertainty has not impacted the mutual affinity between band and country.

Known for their food, the city's Chaldean diaspora wants to revive their restaurant scene.

For those who crave steaming bowls of fasoulia with plump beans and tomatoes and spit-kissed kofta skewers scented with allspice and cardamom, Sullaf is a haven.

A Chaldean restaurant, Sullaf specializes in the food of Iraqi Christians whose history dates back to ancient Mesopotamia. It is one of the world’s oldest cuisines, and Sullaf serves the world’s largest Chaldean diaspora, in Detroit, Michigan. But the area where the restaurant is located, known as Chaldean Town, has emptied out. What was once a bustling center for huge numbers of Chaldean immigrants and their families is suddenly a lot quieter.

Yet Sullaf isn’t the last stand of Chaldean food in this city. As Chaldean Town has disappeared, newer Chaldean neighborhoods have appeared in other parts of town. The community—now 160,000 strong, the largest outside of Iraq—has found other ways to exhibit their cuisine, and other places to plant their restaurants.

At a time when the community’s numbers are dwindling in Iraq due to the rise of ISIS and growing sectarian violence against Christians, food has become a way to share Chaldean culture in America. Within Detroit itself, which is home to some 300,000 people of Arab descent, Chaldeans view their food as a way to distinguish themselves, since the media often groups all Arab Americans under one umbrella. Perpetuating their unique culinary heritage is one of the most tangible and accessible means of letting people know that their way of life here is far from disappearing.

“Food is such a huge part of us,” says Paul Jonna, the chief operating officer of the Chaldean Community Foundation. “The preservation of culture is important to any community, and so much of our culture is being surrounded by good food.”

Chaldean Town started developing in earnest in the 1970s and 1980s, when Chaldean immigrants arrived in droves, a result of changes to federal immigration policy and the Iran-Iraq War (Chaldeans have been living in Detroit since as early as the 1920s). The stretch on 7 Mile Road became populated with shops, bakeries, and restaurants specializing in Chaldean food. These restaurants played an important role in Chaldean Town, says Jane Shallal, a Chaldean-American living in Detroit who edited Ma Baseema, a cookbook about Chaldean cuisine, not only as gathering spots for the community, but as monuments to Chaldean culture.

“Chaldean culture is a very hospitable culture,” Shallal says. “Food is that welcoming tool, to get people to bond and become close.” Chaldean Town was a haven not just for Chaldean immigrants, but for all Detroit residents—Chaldean food became one of the city’s more popular cuisines among locals.

In Iraq, Chaldeans have long asserted their heritage by practicing their religion (Christianity) and speaking their language (Aramaic). But in America, Christianity is much more widely practiced, and Aramaic is globally on the verge of extinction. Cooking those distinctive Chaldean dishes, then, feels like an especially powerful declaration of identity. “We feel a strong need to keep our culture going,” Shallal says. Relative to other cultural touchstones, she adds, “our flavors are more distinguishable.”

Chaldean cuisine involves sword-like spears of heavily spiced meats, vast platters of rice, cozy stews of potato, leek, and eggplant seasoned with pepper and lemon and showers of herbs, and tangy, stuffed grape leaves. The format of the dishes share commonalities with that of neighboring countries, Shallal says, but the spicing is distinct.

“You are literally eating ancient recipes,” Jonna says—dishes born of both celebration and survival over centuries, from the days when Mesopotamia was the cradle of civilization. From this part of the world came the very first cookbooks, featuring recipes mostly for stews, etched in clay tablets. These dishes reflected how advanced Mesopotamian society was for its time—they involved making dough, adding spices, and using rendered fat as flavoring. Their land was fertile, supporting diverse produce and livestock, and they were in contact with nearby regions, enabling cross-cultural exchange.

That sense of purpose and community, Shallal says, extended to Chaldean Town. “In Iraq everybody is used to walking around town, so in that neighborhood, the houses were close together and everybody walked,” she says, whether it was to church or to dinner.

Chaldean Town’s restaurants “laid the foundation for people in the community,” she says. But in the ’90s, the area changed as the illegal drug trade soared, along with the crime rate. As the Chaldeans left, so, too, did the restaurants. “People got scared. Businesses couldn't survive.”

Charlie Beaver, who runs a nonprofit and lives in Chaldean Town (he is not of Chaldean descent), says that his Chaldean neighbors regularly tell him stories from when the neighborhood started deteriorating. “People say that 20 years ago you couldn’t walk down the street unless you were strapped,” he says. The empty houses fell into decay, and squatters and drug dealers moved in.

Beaver is a regular at Sullaf, and tries to promote it and the sole other Chaldean storefront still standing: S&J Meats. He created a Facebook page for the butcher shop and updates it himself.

But Joseph Kawa, who runs S&J Meats, is more pessimistic about his future in Chaldean Town. He started the business almost 16 years ago, and 90 percent of his clientele was Chaldean, he says. All the local coffee shops and restaurants bought product from him. Some Chaldeans who have moved across town still come to his shop, but most have stopped visiting.

“It is hard to bring people here because people are not going to drive here for one business or two businesses,” he says. “We are hanging in there, but I don’t know how long we will last.”

In the last few years, much of the Chaldean community has migrated to neighborhoods across town, namely Sterling Heights, 14 miles away. There, restaurant owners who used to have places in Chaldean Town have set up shop, hoping to capture the same success they had in their former locale.

Sahara, now a popular string of Chaldean restaurants, started on the intersection of 9 Mile road and Woodward, not far from Chaldean Town. It quickly grew a cult following—from Chaldeans and non-Chaldeans. People adored dishes such as gurgur, a comforting pot of beef cooked down with onions and bulgur.

“People would come late night and hang out all day, in and out,” says Zeana Attisha, who owns Sahara with her husband, Saad. “We stayed open until 4 in the morning, and it was always very busy.”

Once Chaldeans started migrating away from the area, they eventually shut down the original spot, and looked for other places to locate. After several requests from customers, they opened in Sterling Heights in 2004, which Attisha says emanates the energy of the original.

“It is just as busy,” she says, proudly. “It’s really loud,” and she prefers it that way.

Last year, the Chaldean Community Foundation, the nonprofit arm of the Chaldean American Chamber of Commerce, announced the creation of “Chaldean Town 2.0” in Sterling Heights—a mixed-use development project meant to house Chaldeans and provide spaces for Chaldean businesses. Jonna says a “huge portion” of this development will be dedicated to restaurants.

Those plans will likely be delayed by the COVID-19 pandemic. The Chaldean News reports that the virus has hit the Chaldean community in ways familiar to many cities and groups, with shuttered restaurants, paused developments, and empty store shelves.

Back in 2010, in an effort to codify Chaldean cuisine for contemporary readers and home cooks, Shallal edited a community cookbook of Chaldean recipes from local home cooks called Ma Baseema. The title translates from Aramaic to “how good it is.” Many of the contributors were writing their family recipes down for the first time, she says. The cookbook is a cataloguing of the Chaldean way of life, and a way to share that with others. But Shallal adds that even more essential to these preservation efforts is the continuation of these neighborhood Chaldean restaurants—establishments whose future seems uncertain in light of COVID-19.

“Restaurants are a place of gathering,” she explains. “They play a large role in making sure we stay a close-knit community, and that the rest of the community feels like they are at home. It lets them know that the food is out there for them.”