The Best of Margaret St. Clair

Начало книги

Most of the sense impressions of my childhood were pleasant. The fruit—winey, crisp Jonathan apples, luscious slip-skin purple concord grapes, tomatoes hot from the sun and full of ripe red juice—was the soul food of my childhood. I remember the taste of Mallard ducks—too pretty to kill, with their lovely plumage, but luscious eating—domestic chicken, and wild squirrel. I loved a kind of butterscotch sucker, embossed, improbably, with a duck, and a cool, vanilla-tasting, cream “club soda.”

Things had more flavor then, and there is more than the usual blunting of the senses with age involved in my thinking this. The sophisticated food-handling techniques of the present had not yet been devised. The Sunday fried chicken had, only a few hours earlier, been pecking melon rind in its pen. The food of my childhood tasted better because nobody knew how to make it stay edible—free from gross spoilage—for six months.

Читать дальше →