The members of the Sacred Heart of Mary Catholic ChurchBook/Movie Discussion Group have invited me to speak this Wednesday, June 11th at 6:30 p.m. If you have the time and are interested in the history of restaurants in Michiana, please come. The church is lovely, located in a beautiful country setting at 51841 Leach Rd, Dowagiac, Michigan. The event itself is next door in the Parish Hall.
Mary’s City of David Vegetarian Cafe in Benton Harbor, which opened in 1931 and closed in 1975, specialized in farm-to-table meals.
Here is the flyer that Terri Moore sent out:
Over the centuries, residents of Michiana have never wanted for superb dining choices. Award-winning author Jane Simon Ammeson will lead us on a culinary road trip through Northern Indiana and Southwestern Michigan.
A cigarette girl at the posh House of David motor lodge and restaurant/nightclub called the Vista Grande
Once a stagecoach stop, The Old Tavern Inn has been open since the time of President Andrew Jackson. Tosi’s is known for its gorgeous starlit garden and gastronomic traditions stretching back almost a century, and The Volcano was amongst the first pizzerias in the country.
One of the earliest hotels in St. Joseph, the Perkins house, built in 1840, stood on the corner of State and Ship Streets. Note the side entrance for the saloon which was, of course, given the times, for men only.
These restaurants and other classic eateries remain part of the thriving local food scene. But the doors of others have long been closed. Some like Mead’s Chicken Nook and Robertson’s Tea Room linger in memories while The Owl Saloon, O. A. Clark’s Lunch Rooms, and Lobster Lounge are long lost to time.
The restaurant is still open at the Barbee, it was a fav of Al Capone. However, when he arrived, all the other guests had to leave.
Jane Simon Ammeson is a food and travel columnist who has authored seventeen books, including Classic Restaurants of Northwest Indiana. Always willing to travel for food, she blogs about her experiences at janeammeson.com.
At one time, the lakeside towns of southwesterern Berrien County had a large Swedish population. The Swedish Coffee Pot was just one of several. Only the Swedish Bakery remains.
In the beginning, perfume in the form of oils belonged to the divine, and rare scents typically sourced from resins were reserved for dedication to the gods. Used in funeral rituals and in cremation with the burning of resinous woods such as cedar, early references trace the use of scents back at least to the Bronze Age.
But their legacy may go even further into the past, writes Élisabeth de Feydeau in her latest book,The Story of Perfume: A Lavishly Illustrated Guide (Laurence King Publishing). Shards of pottery and stone containers dating back to the fourth millennium BCE indicate that the beginnings of perfume most likely originated in Mesopotamia, a land now part of Iran, and traveled east.
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From the sacred to the secular, demand for fragrances grew. Alexander the Great, having seen the perfumed rooms and scented baths in Persia in 331 BCE as he conquered Central Asia, the Middle East and India, established a perfume route, sourcing aromatic plants throughout his empire. Later, the Romans joined in, establishing more routes, and aromatics became part of the lives of the very rich in Ancient Rome.
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“Upper-class men and women bathed frequently in baths fragrant with lavender, rose, jasmine and other perfumes,” writes de Feydeau about their use in Rome. “A lady of the ruling classes would begin her toilet by removing her makeup and applying a beauty balm. She would then gargle with saffron or rose and chew flavored gum as she slid into her jasmine, lavender or rose bath. A slave would then give her an aromatic massage and spray her body with the same perfumed water she had first used as a mouthwash.”
“At banquets, diners ate under mist of extremely rare essences as they ate asparagus dipped in perfumed oils, served in fragrant wooden dishes and drank rose–or myrrh—flavored wines. Between courses, they were sprayed with floral water.”
Indeed, it was the Romans who gave us the word perfume, coming from the Latin expression per furmum, meaning “through the smoke.”
The author, whose other books on the subject include “The Herbarium of Marie Antoinette” and the novel “A Scented Palace: The Secret History of Marie Antoinette’s Perfumer,” earned a Ph.D. in the history of perfume from the University of Paris-Sorbonne. She is currently a cultural adviser to such luxury perfume brands as Dior, Chanel, Lancaster and Guerlain, and her skillset beyond being extremely knowledgeable about the subject is her ability to tell this complicated odyssey of scents understandably and engagingly.
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Lavishly illustrated, de Feydeau’s book is a fascinating history of what we take for granted as we go about our own rituals, spraying wisps of aroma as we start our day, lighting scented candles or dipping diffuser sticks in oil to aromatize our homes. She deftly ties this enjoyable if mundane act back to ancient times, interwoven with culture, tradition and science, taking the story to the famed perfumes of our day, such as Shalimar and Samara by Guerlain, Opium by Yves Saint Laurent and Ambre Sultan by Serge Lutens.
Easy to read, you can flip through the pages, reading pull-out boxes with titles like “Hollywood Icons,” where we learn that Fracas by Piguet (1948) was a favorite of Marlene Dietrich, Madonna, Kim Basinger, Naomi Campbell and Princess Caroline of Monaco. de Feydeau describes Youth Dew, launched in 1953, as the signature scent of such 1950s femme fatales as Joan Crawford, who said she couldn’t live without it.
Reading this book, whether in chunks or page by page, provides a fascinating take on how we’ve arrived at the scents in the bottles on our bathroom shelves.
In 1832, at the height of the Georgia gold rush, gold had been discovered on the banks of the Etowah River on land owned by Alfred Minette. As men flocked to work in the mine and others to supply their needs, a small town arose and Minette named it after his firstborn, a beautiful but frail girl named Juliana who had died years ago in South Carolina.
But now the Civil War was waging and while the men and boys of Juliana were off fighting, Minette forced their wives and children to work in the mines.
Union General Philip Sheridan and his troops were laying waste to all he passed through on his march to the sea and Juliana lay in his path. Destroying the town meant destroying the wealth that helped fuel the Confederate war effort and so three of the town elders, including Minette, formed a plan to save it.
And it worked. Sheridan did stop in Juliana and he and his men decimated the town’s food and livestock supplies but they didn’t discover the mine, nor the women and children trapped in the bottom of the mine when the town’s elders had the entrance dynamited with explosives. Sheridan and his troops tarried and by the time the mine was unsealed, all those insides were dead. When the surviving men returned home from the war, they were told their families had been sent away and they could now work in the lumber mill Minette was building, accept it as God’s will that their families were gone, and start anew.
It was a small sacrifice for the good of all, Minette argued, and that his daughter, Julianna, was pleased with their offering.
More than 160 years later, Billie Hope receives an offer. A former restaurateur, Billie lives in a cramped apartment with her husband and daughter in New York City when she receives an offer to purchase a dream home in historic Juliana for just $100. The offer describes the town as idyllic, and the accompanying photo shows a quaint town square straight out of a storybook as does the link to the professionally done town website. Billie sees it as part of a trend to lure people to help grow stagnant towns with new citizens. Feeling at a dead end in her life and lured by the thought of a pretty house in a lovely small town, she replies.
It’s an offer too good to be true, but desperation often clouds people’s judgment, so it is with Billie and her family who make the move to Juliana.
“A small town,” she thinks. “Our own house. A perfect childhood for Mere and…another restaurant for me.”
Of course, it doesn’t work out that way.
Bestselling author Emily Carpenter, whose other suspense novels include Burying the Honeysuckle Girls and The Weight of Lies, weaves a frightening and compelling tale as we follow Billie and her family move from elation at what they see as a chance for a new and better life and the dawning realization that they may have embarked upon a dangerous and frightening adventure.
An archaeologist who has excavated a Bronze Age palace in Turkey, a medieval Abbey in England, and an Inca site in Chile, Sarah Hawley has created an extensive underground world where fairies abide.
But if you’re thinking Tinkerbell, who sweetly waves her magic wand, think again. The fairies in Hawley’s novel “Servant of Earth,” the first in a trilogy titled “The Shards of Magic,” are amazingly beautiful and as decadent as any French court in the 17th or 18th centuries. Given numerous love affairs, intrigues and pettiness, they’re ruled by a tyrant king who has a penchant for mayhem and murder.
Into this world stumbles Kenna, a human from a nearby village who lives with her single mother, keeps mostly to herself to avoid the jeers of others with one exception– Anya, a pretty villager who has befriended her. When Anya is chosen as one of the women who will travel to the land of the Fae, a perilous trip through bogs and deep dark woods, she accompanies her. But Anya disappears as they make their way, and it is Kenna who arrives at the fairy court, helped by the mysterious dagger she discovered in one of her forays in the forest.
The King orders her dead, but one of his underlings suggests a different fate. Why not make her a handmaiden to Lara, the daughter of Princess Oriana, head of the Earth House in the fairy kingdom?
It is clearly an insult to Princess and her daughter. A human as a handmaiden. But it is impossible to say no. And Kenna, who is very curious and kind, soon learns her way among the many houses and those that rule them. In doing so, she is able to help Lara, who, to become an immortal fairy, must undergo six rigorous and often deadly tasks along with others who are vying for the honor.
Hawley, who also taught archaeology, takes us into a fascinating subterranean world, one where the fairies live in luxurious surroundings, dine on the best food, and busy themselves with endless affairs, alliances and games as their lives unwind in front of them for eternity.
Kenna embarks upon a romantic liaison with one of the fairy princes, but she also befriends the serving women who have been cast out of the brothel where the king likes to spend much of his time. Each of the worlds she connects with pulls her deeper into the dangers of being discovered as a spy, someone who is siding with a brewing rebellion.
But she has a moral compass compelling her to go forward in aiding the revolt against the current regime. At the same time, she is helping Lara accomplish her tasks, though it’s forbidden to do so.
There is danger on all sides and Kenna becomes more and more unsure of who she can trust, including her fairy prince. Spoiler alert: He is no Prince Charming.
“Working as an archaeologist made me think about the details of this world and of the past, and that extends into fantasy worlds where you think about how people are dressing and what it looks like and the political structure and all of that,” said Hawley, explaining how she created the fairy kingdom and all the factions and their interactions. “But it’s also thinking about these characters, their identities, and the stories they tell themselves about their past, because as much as I’m telling the mythology of this world, the characters see the mythology of their own world in a slightly different way.”
Hawley, who is the author of several other books, including “A Witch’s Guide to Fake Dating a Demon” and “A Demon’s Guide to Wooing a Witch,” brings a historic perspective to her tales of a fairy kingdom as well.
“There’s actually very dark stuff about how fairies behave,” she said, recounting a Celtic story about people who play fiddle music for the fairies for a single night, are rewarded with gold, and sent home. “Upon returning to their villages, they find that the gold has turned into leaves. And they realize that hundreds of years have passed since they’d been gone and everyone they love is dead, and then they immediately die.”
Luckily, if you like happy endings, “Servant of Earth” ends on a positive note, though one where we realize that Kenna has many more challenges ahead.
But she’s a tough, wily hero. And so, it’s just a matter of waiting for the next book in the trilogy to come out next year.
“a tense, well-plotted mystery with enough twists and turns to keep the reader engaged . . .”
“Something strange happened when Hazel and Kagan showed up. Ava had begun hearing her father’s voice so clearly that it sounds like he’s crawled inside her head. This isn’t the first time in her life she’s been haunted by his negative commentary. It followed her on the bus when she first escaped and lingered for a few weeks after she settled into life with Sam again. When she was in prison she’d hear her father’s voice late into the night, chastising her for thinking she could outrun her destiny and for being stupid enough to get caught.”
Spoiled and entitled, Hazel Bailey and her brother Kagan Bailey have gone through the millions their mother, Janice, gave them after the death of their abusive father and, resentful that she won’t give them more, have cut off all contact with her. Still, despite their treatment of her, they’re outraged when they learn of their mother’s death and that Perry, their smarmy stepfather has inherited all of Janice’s considerable fortune,
When they learn that Janice was murdered, they’re sure that Perry is the culprit despite his unassailable alibi—he was on a plane at the time of her death. And so, the two, who don’t typically get along, team up together to discover all they can about Perry to prove he’s somehow responsible for her death. Surprisingly, Perry has no internet presence, except for a hazy half photo at a charity event he attended with Janice.
Though the siblings are self-centered, combative, and often compete for the same romantic interest, they also are resourceful and before long discover that Perry is a conman who seduces rich, older women who then disappear or die. Taking it one step further, they trace his daughter, Ava, who long ago separated herself from her father and ask her to join them in their search and revenge mission.
Like Kagan and Hazel, the seductive Ava has her own baggage. Trained from an early age by her father to con people, she’s spent time in prison and has been offered a straight-and-narrow lifestyle. But the idea of helping them regain their fortune and punish her father who murdered her mother and uncle is impossible to resist. And besides, as the siblings neglect to keep in mind, when you’re trained to be a conman or woman, old habits die hard— particularly when there’s a fortune to be had.
As the three chase Perry down the Eastern seaboard, coming up with an elaborate plan to fleece Perry out of the money he conned their mother out of and to keep him from marrying—and killing another wealthy woman—they fail to keep in mind that Perry mayhave a fatal plan to stop them as well.
Elizabeth Keenan and Greg Wands, authors of Trust Issues (Dutton 2025), have previously written three novels under the pen name E.G. Scott including The Woman Inside and The Rule of Three. Besides their books, which have been translated into a dozen languages, they created and co-host the podcast “Imposter House with Liz & Greg,” where they chat with authors and artists about creativity, self-doubt, and about featuring imposter characters in their stories.
In Trust Issues, they’ve written a tense, well-plotted mystery with enough twists and turns to keep the reader engaged as well as hopeful that Perry finally is outsmarted and has to pay for his sins.
Shelf Life 