It's Dog!

When my twenty-year-old son Timothy, now studying culinary arts, was a baby, he hated meat. However, he did like dogs--as pets--so we could induce him to eat a slice of chicken or a small, toddler-sized hamburger, if we told him it was dog.

When Melissa, Bryony's main character, travels back to the Victorian age, she is less dismayed by the vampires she encounters than the unfamilar food that appears on her plate: pickled beef tongue, turtle, boiled calves head, mashed turnips, goose giblet soup, and tea with egg in it.

Perhaps she should might have been more open-minded if she hadn't known what she was eating, if John had, perhaps, renamed certain foods to make them more palatable to modern, adolescent tastes. Then again, it was probably impossible to fool her into believing that mushroom ketchup was exactly the same as tomato ketchup.

Are you adventurous about eating? How do you react to new and strange foods?