Viruses vs. superbugs : a solution to the antibiotics crisis?-- Thomas Häusler

I'm Just Here for Dessert -- Caroline Khoo I am the proud owner of a trifle bowl (a gift) which takes up A LOT of space in my cupboard.

My DD and S-in-L took a 'break' to NYC earlier in the year and brought me back a copy of 97 Orchard 'an edible history of 5 immigrant families in one New York Tenement' by Jane Ziegelman. The sort of book you can pop into and out of now and again. I'm only about halfway through but finding out much about the Jewish community in the Lower East Side and how their eating patterns were formed by a mixture of where they had come from in Europe and the American traditions they met once they had crossed the Atlantic. Of course what Ms Ziegelman knows about the actual inhabitants of this neighbourhood has been gleaned from census returns, rate books etc. These people didn't leave memoirs, write notes or recipes and as soon as the husbands got a better paying job they upped sticks and moved to a more prosperous area. So the families were always at the 'bottom of the honest heap' It appears that many of the Jewish community were eager to 'conform' to US working practices, some of them changed their Sabbath to a Sunday and started cooking shell fish and pig/pork, in its many forms. Much info on German/Polish/ Lithuanian bread making, but only a little about the Irish influence, possibly because it was not much different from what was being eaten in England and therefore by the earlier 'settlers' to the City. The only negative thing about the book is the very pale ink used and the close small print. It makes reading for long rather a chore!

With Malice Towards Some - Margaret Halsey ( 1938) One of my favorites .... A professor's wife recounts her impressions on her first trip abroad, at the time of her husband's exchange professorship with a staff member of a Devonshire college. She is all eyes for new sights and this is a readable, entertaining account of places, people, and life around her. Through the pages of her diary the reader shares her experiences:- the house they rent, the neighbors' gossip, teas, dinners, difficulties in adapting herself to what is expected of her, her husband's dry humor and flawless behavior, amusing commentary, honest likes and dislikes, all with skilled and original (sometimes overly so) turn of phrase.