Eat on the wild side

Felipe Fernández-Armesto laments the bland American diet

OPOSSUM, anyone? Slice of racoon? Among readers of The Critic, takers for such fare may be as rare as enthusiasts for the works of George Cary Eggleston. His novels in a dialect of the western Ohio region were best-sellers in the late nineteenth century, generating a lot of surprising attempts to translate them into European languages: my Danish isn’t good enough to judge how well the translator rendered, “Put in my best licks,” or, “Things is awful juberous.” Eggleston’s output occupies so conspicuous a shelf in the library of my university that I have been unable to resist it. Slap-up meals of opossum and racoon occur in Jack Shelby, a sprightly saga of a pioneer family in the backwoods of southern Indiana in the 1830s. Because schoolboys were the intended…

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The Critic (Digital) - 1 Issue, November 2023

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