Mentuccia leaf

“I remember my Yorkshire grandmother, when as a small child I asked her if she used herbs, went very tight-lipped and said well there was pennyroyal … She had had a hard life, a brutal husband and too many mouths to feed.”

Pennyroyal is Mentha pulegium, a mint whose Latin name indicates that it was once used to deter fleas and other insect pests. For Gillian Riley’s grandmother, and women since at least the time of Aristophanes, it was probably more useful as an abortifacient. Which was why I saw red when a respected food blogger in Rome referred parenthetically to “mentuccia (pennyroyal)”. But I need to backtrack.

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Coriandoli

Confetti, in Italian, are the sugared almonds given to guests, traditionally at a wedding, when the sugar coating is white, and now extended to pink or blue at a baptism and red at a university graduation. "A quando i confetti" is apparently a cute way of asking when one is going to get married....

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I’m not sure I really know, but ...

TED is the Urban Outfitters of the idea world

Urban Outfitters, in case you didn’t know, is a mostly hip place that sells kinda-sorta retro chic stuff that people who like that sort of thing like. Possibly that’s what Nathan Jurgenson had in mind when h...

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Just spent a fine few hours going through two large boxes of photographs. Some have not seen the light of day for four house moves and at least 12 years.

"But what if I want/need one of them?"

"You don't even know what there is, how could you possibly want/need anything specific."

In best d...

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Just before that bit about "Nor any drop to drink," The Ancient Mariner tells us how the ship's timbers are drying out. For my purposes, those boards could equally well be the boards looking after US farmers. Sure, many of them are facing the worst drought since 1956. But according to NPR's Planet ...

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