To cope with the scarcity of affordable beef during the Depression, burger flippers in Mississippi, Alabama, and Tennessee employed the handy practice of “meat extending.”  Rather than toss a mound of pure ground beef or pork on the grill, cooks cut their patties with potato flour.  The result was a surprisingly satisfying burger that was crunchy on the outside and soft on the inside.  Purveyors of the slugburger slung it for five cents, also referred to as a “slug.”  The trick helped the animal-protein supply go further and reduced prices for penny-pinching customers, which was almost everyone.  After the Depression, slugburger fans didn’t abandon the fried sandwich.  Instead, they switched up the recipe.  Rather than use potato flour and animal fat, Southern cooks now rely on soybean meal and vegetable oil to add that crispy, greasy grit.  The slugburger love even extends to an annual festival that’s been thrown in Corinth, Mississippi, since 1987.  https://www.atlasobscura.com/foods/slugburger-mississippi 

Saltville is a town in Smyth and Washington counties in Virginia.  The population was 2,077 at the 2010 census.  Saltville was named for the salt marshes in the area.  Prior to European settlement, these marshes attracted local wildlife.  Excavations at the SV-2 archaeological site in the area have recovered several well preserved skeletons of now extinct species dating back to the last ice age.  Indigenous peoples of varying cultures hunted at the marshes.  The historic Native American people in the area were the Chisca. The Museum of the Middle Appalachians is located in downtown Saltville.  The museum displays exhibits on topics including the geological history of the region, the American Civil War, the company town era of Saltville's history, and the Woodland Indians.   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saltville,_Virginia 

“Tell me where your grandmother came from and I can tell you how many kinds of pie you serve for Thanksgiving,” the food writer Clementine Paddleford surmised in her 1960 book, How America Eats.  Around Boston, she wrote, “four kinds of pie were traditional for this feast occasion—mince, cranberry, pumpkin, and a kind called Marlborough, a glorification of everyday apple.”  A single-crust pie of stewed apples in a custard fragrant with nutmeg, citrus, and sherry, Marlborough pie originated in England as a custard pudding and crossed the Atlantic with early English settlers.  The practice of putting apples in a custard and baking in a pastry base is at least as old as 1660.  An Eater article cites Amy Traverso’s The Apple Lover’s Cookbook, which traces the first iteration of Marlborough pudding to a recipe in The Accomplisht Cook, an English cookbook published that year.  It called for a whopping 24 egg yolks mixed with cinnamon, sugar, salt, melted butter, “some fine minced pippins” (tart apples used in cooking), and minced as well as sliced citron, all poured into a pastry-lined dish.  The recipe was strikingly similar to the Marlborough pudding recipe in the first known American cookbook, published in 1796: Amelia Simmons’s American Cookery.  So, is it a pie or a pudding?  It’s both, says Sarah Ramsey, lead interpreter at Old Sturbridge Village, a living history museum in Sturbridge, Massachusetts, that recreates rural New England of the 1830s.  “Pie and pudding in the 19th century are very interchangeable, depending on how they’re served,” she says.  “Because this is a custard-based dessert, it would technically be considered a pudding.  But because it has a filling that has to be poured into something else—like a pie crust—in order to have it form and cook, it is also a pie.”  Rohini Chaki  https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/what-is-marlborough-pie 

Eons ago, an earthquake along the fault line that runs right through Saltville, Virginia caused the upper layer of the earth's crust to "roll over".  This tremendous upheaval caused the salt deposits that normally lie deep within the earth to come to the surface, burying the newer soil beneath it.  For years, Saltville supplied a large portion of the United States with table salt.  Later, during the Civil War, the Confederacy depended on Saltville for its much-needed supply of salt for preserving its soldiers' food.  Two battles took place in Saltville as Union forces attempted to destroy the salt works and eliminate the south's only significant supply of salt.  On December 20, 1864, Maj. General George Stoneman's troops succeeded in doing just that, dealing a devastating blow to the welfare and morale of the Confederate army.  In just a few short months the war would be over.  https://www.rlrouse.com/saltville-welcome-sign.html  See also the ten largest salt mines in the world at https://americanmineservices.com/top-10-largest-salt-mines-in-the-world/ 

When a loved one died in parts of England, Scotland, or Wales in the 18th and 19th centuries, the family grieved, placed bread on the chest of the deceased, and called for a man to sit in front of the body.  The family of the deceased watched as this man, the local professional sin eater, absorbed the sins of the departed’s soul.  The family who hired the sin eater believed that the bread literally soaked up their loved one’s sins; once it had been eaten, all the misdeeds were passed on to the hired hand.  Natalie Zarrelli  https://obscura392.rssing.com/chan-52185737/all_p199.html 

"Phenotype" refers to an observable trait.  "Pheno" simply means "observe" and comes from the same root as the word "phenomenon".  And so it's an observable type of an organism, and it can refer to anything from a common trait, such as height or hair color, to presence or absence of a disease.  So a phenotype can be directly related to a genotype, but not necessarily.  There's usually not a one-to-one correlation between a genotype and a phenotype.  There are almost always environmental influences, such as what one eats, how much one exercises, how much one smokes, etc.  All of those are environmental influences which will affect the phenotype as well.  Christopher P. Austin, M.D.  https://www.genome.gov/genetics-glossary/Phenotype 

The term “autofiction” was first used by Serge Doubrovsky to describe his novel Fils (1977).  He wrote that autobiography was reserved for “the important people of this world”; by calling his work “autofiction,” he emphasized that it should be read not for instruction but as one would read fiction.  The term has come into vogue to describe contemporary writing, and with the publication of books like Sheila Heti’s Motherhood, Rachel Cusk’s Kudos, and Karl Knausgaard’s Spring, it’s been popping up frequently—in book reviews and think pieces, at readings and on Twitter.  Sometimes “autofiction” is treated as a stable genre category, but often it is derided as an unnecessary and meaningless term.  http://blog.pshares.org/index.php/how-we-read-autofiction/  See also Auto-fiction:  Is it Fiction or Autobiography and Does it Matter? at https://www.redbudwriting.org/blog/auto-fiction-is-it-fiction-or-autobiography-and-does-it-matter

The Queens Museum is dedicated to presenting the highest quality visual arts and educational programming for people in the New York metropolitan area, and particularly for the residents of Queens, a uniquely diverse, ethnic, cultural, and international community.  Link to location and hours at https://queensmuseum.org/about

An ideal Christmas book will thrill both adults and children--John Masefield’s classic The Box of Delights falls into this category--and the very best example is The Dark Is Rising by Susan Cooper.  Originally published in 1973, it is one of those books whose reputation grows year on year:  a heady mix of Arthurian myths, time travel and a boy born to save the world.  “Tonight will be bad . . .  and tomorrow will be beyond imagining” is the line that throws young Will Stanton, last of the Old Ones, headlong into a world of snow and danger, fire and floods, in what is still as satisfying a winter’s tale as can be found.  If you fancy a bit of cosy, traditional crime, Hercule Poirot is a good fit at Christmas, being rotund and mysterious.  In Hercule Poirot’s Christmas, by Agatha Christie, he is summoned to quickly solve a festive murder.  Georgette Heyer’s A Christmas Party is also her usual cracking fun, as a variety of pleasingly loathsome characters may or may not have bumped off an old Scrooge.  When I worked in bookselling, I rarely saw a book that made children happier than The Jolly Christmas Postman by Allan and Janet Ahlberg, with its adorable little letters and postcards sent between nursery rhyme characters that bring a child’s world intensely alive.  Jenny Colgan  https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/dec/21/the-cosiest-comfort-reads-to-curl-up-with-this-christmas 

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 2302  December 23, 2020