Book Description
In the course of doing American genealogical studies I stumbled across dozens of fascinating names-- fascinating because they were beautiful or funny or just unusual. Then I found myself wondering who were these people with the names that caught my attention. The next thing I knew I was researching the lives of people named Almond Fudge and Icy Beer and Hartie Bacon. For the most part, they were people who lived in the United States, most of them in the nineteenth century, and came from all walks of life. I came away with an awareness of American history and culture that was never as real in the history books. As an American raised overseas, I found the experience very enlightening. It's a quirky collection because I decided to focus on names related to food and drink and sorted them into categories like a cook book. I could have just as easily gone with another theme, cars for example with people like Otto Mobile, Nice Carr, Carr Chase, etc, but I love food. I found myself trying to imagine recipes in honor of Perfect Crabb, Lemon Lamb, Fancie Fries, Hardy Beets, Olive Stuffing... You get the picture. It would be really interesting to look at recipes from the lifetime of the person for the named dish and bring that to bear on the process. But I haven't gotten further than an experiment with orange flavored barbequed chicken wings for Orange Wing. This is not the usual way biographies are sorted, but it does make for an interesting read.