A Harte Appetite

The '70s have been called the decade that taste forgot. And even if you own a lava lamp, you have to admit there's some truth to the charge.

Perhaps you've heard the story about the lady who on Thanksgiving Day marched into the dining room with a magnificently prepared turkey and then accidentally dropped it on the floor. Without missing a beat, she picked up the bird and headed back to the kitchen. She wiped off the turkey and then returned to the dining room with it and announced, "Here's the other turkey!"

"April is the cruelest month," T.S. Elliot lamented in "The Wasteland" but how could it be when there are so many days dedicated to great food.

"The disparity between a restaurant's price and food quality," claims food critic Bryan Miller, "rises in direct proportion to the size of the pepper mill." That may be so, but the fact remains that pepper, as Plato once observed, "is small in quantity and great in virtue."

Ever been in a sticky situation? We all have. But probably none as sticky as the Great Molasses Flood, sometimes called the Molasses Massacre, which hit Boston in 1919.