CONSIDER THE FORK: A History of How We Cook and Eat by Bee Wilson looks at how cooking and eating technology both reflects and shapes our diet and our culture. The labor intensive recipes of medieval times, which showcased that you had the army of servants required. The different roles of knives, forks, fingers, spoons and sporks. Why medieval spit-roasting is completely different from oven roasting. Why America relies on volume measures in recipes rather than weight (Wilson concludes it’s largely because cups were easier to manage on the frontier than a scale and weight). And the endless parade of naysayers declaring whatever the New Tech is, it will mean the death of cooking. A couple of Wilson’s theories feel speculative, but this is overall excellent.
AFTER DARK (cover by Michael Flanagan) was Manly Wade Wellman’s second Silver John novel, pitting John against the pre-Columbian, pre-human Shonokin, a race who battled Wellman’s earlier hero, John Thunstone. Here they’re scheming to obtain one Appalachian landowner’s property (as in the previous novel, references to Asheville and University of North Carolina read differently now that they’re not just names on a map) because it’s lying across a ley line and they’ll gain great power if the man’s out of the way and they can run a track right through his land. For much of the book, they’re not that different from a human conspiracy — they could be a cult or even Red spies — but the climax is full-on occult wildness.
The weakness of the Thunstone stories was that Thunstone always won too easily — a thrust of his sword-cane with its saint-blessed blade or a puff of pipe tobacco laced with shamanic herbs and the Shonokin (or his other adversaries) fold. By the 1950s when he began writing John’s tales, Wellman had become a much better writer; John works harder to win than Thunstone ever did, though he wields a surprising amount of magic at the climax (after all his experiences, though, perhaps it’s not surprising he’s learned some stuff).
I’ll register one complaint with the book, that Evadare has been virtually Chuck Cunninghamed — as in The Old Gods Waken she’s not with him but there’s no reason given, other than (I presume) Wellman didn’t want to have her tagging along with John. Setting this prior to their love affair would have suited me better.
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