Category: snacks

Marmalade and Eggs for Cycling Legs

 
illustration of bicyclist from Wheels of Chance

A “girdle around the earth” Thomas Gaskell Allen and William Sachtleben set out to describe the day after they graduated from Washington University. For three years they peddled their bicycles from “Normandy to Paris,” across “the lowlands of western France to Bordeaux,” straining over the Lesser Alps to Marseilles and “along the Riviera into Italy.” Even the seductive climes of the Mediterranean could not waylay them on their journey; after wintering in Athens, they stowed their bikes aboard a sailboat headed for Constantinople.

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New York Luncheonettes: No-Frills Dining in the Gilded Age

girl at soda fountain

One problem confronting early twentieth-century New Yorkers was where to find a flea dip to go with a proper dish of ground beef. The Canine Luncheonette, one of the Gilded Age’s more charming innovations, supplied the remedy. To those four-legged companions of women who would disappear into the shops on Fifth Avenue the establishment offered comfort and refection. There pooches could dine in grand style and could even steal a nap. (Longer reposes, however, had to take place down the street at the doggie hotel, whose appurtenances naturally included a savory bone for gnawing.)

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Rinktum Ditty: An Arizona Logger’s Treat

mooney falls, havasu canyon, arizona

In the 1917 travel guide Arizona, the Wonderland author George Wharton James writes that the “casual traveler, riding through Arizona on a railway train, oftentimes passes through the most romantic and fascinating regions” whose charms, because they are of a scrubby, subtle variety, tend to go unappreciated. Yet “no one with an eye for beauty could regard the town of Williams in this light,” James maintains. Situated 6780 feet above sea level and covered in vanilla-scented pines, Williams, Arizona enjoys “a wonderful outlook over the great prehistoric inland sea to the very rim of the Grand Canyon.” Indeed, nature “has done much to make the town attractive,” James concludes.

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