![]() ![]() Here are a few of its revelations: The Mystery CondimentĪs late as the 1850s, cruet stands for condiments came with a bottle each for oil and vinegar, a shaker for salt and pepper, and a third shaker for nobody knows what. In short, At Home will give you interesting things to talk about at parties for the next hundred years, or at least until Bryson pens another one. The book touches on everything from dendrochronology to architectural history, with sprawling lemmas that appear to have nothing to do with homes or private life, until they segue tidily into the point at hand. ("Why not pepper and cardamom, say, or salt and cinnamon?" Bryson muses.) Or the tale of how salt and pepper became the condiments found on nearly every table. ![]() ![]() Stuff like a Stone Age village discovered in Scotland – older than the Great Pyramids – that had built-in dressers, storage shelves, plumbing, and even breezeways between houses. Bill Bryson's new book At Home has the subtitle "A Short History of Private Life," but it could be more accurately called "Really Interesting Stuff Nobody Knows." ![]()
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