Do you ever wonder where the ingredients in your tamale came from?

Each volume in Reaktion Books' Edible series explores the global history and culture of a type of food. These little books pack in several chapters on various cultural histories around the crop they explore. It is essentially a food memoir and at the end of the each book, recipes are provided.

In Corn: A Global History, by Michael Owen Jones, readers learn it is hard to determine how corn originated, due to its need for humans to cultivate it. Corn cannot grow wild. We also learn that maize is classified based on the grain’s appearance and starch content. The book contains a large section on Indigenous foods based on corn.

In Tomato: A Global History, by Clarissa Hyman, we learn that the word derived from the Nahuatl ‘ tomatl’, a generic term for a globose fruit or berry with seeds and watery flesh sometimes enclosed in a membrane. This ambitious memoir explores the tomato’s migration throughout the New World to the Old World, including Italy. One of my favorite pizzas, the Margherita, was created in 1889 in Naples to honor the Italian queen of the same name. The book investigates tomato cultivation today, including how scientific advances are changing the fruit, while conservation of heirloom varieties continues.

Avocado: A Global History, by Jeff Miller, explores the history and current social media craze of the fruit and describes how it has been grown on every continent except Antarctica. What I found the most intriguing is how avocados are in the laurel family, the oldest group of flowering plants, with the term laurels denoting excellence. Like corn, beans and tomatoes, the avocado's history can be traced back to the ecological conditions of the Neogene period, which created the Mesoamerican land-bridge that joined the continents of North and South America, creating a habitat for these foods to evolve into what we know today.

Beans: A Global History, by Natalie Rachel Morris, explores the staple food’s humble beginnings over 9,000 years ago. The diverse genus includes many different varieties and the food can be used in many forms: dried, frozen or canned. The substantial nutritional benefit of the food led to the people of Tuscany being known as “bean-eaters”. I especially enjoyed the chapter on the lore and literature of beans.

Together, the books are a feast of knowledge. They are best enjoyed before a meal.

Fiber artist Kaylin Francis returns to the Miller Library this month, virtually, with an online exhibit of felted mushrooms. Observing the forest floor with an artist's eye, she works with wool and dye to painstakingly recreate the colorful and varied fungi that are a hallmark of autumn in the Pacific Northwest and other temperate zones worldwide.

Question: Can you identify a plant growing at my mother’s house in Georgia? We would like to know more about it.

Answer: This is Smilax bona-nox. It goes by many evocative names, and even the scientific name had me wondering. Why is the species name "good-night?" It was named by Linnaeus and in his time bona-nox would have served as a euphemistic Latin curse (the way someone might say dadgummit, goldarnit, or flipping heck), possibly uttered after getting ensnared in this viney plant’s thorns. According to Delena Tull, author of Edible and Useful Plants of Texas and the Southwest (1999 ed.), encounters with the curved prickles give rise to common names like catbrier (or catbriar) and blaspheme-vine. Other common names include saw greenbrier (or saw briar) and tramp's trouble. It is also called zarzaparilla (Anglicized to sarsaparilla from the Spanish name which means bramble + little grape vine).

According to the Virginia Native Plant Society, the fruit of Smilax species is valued by birds, bears, foxes, possums, and squirrels. The flowers are nectar and pollen sources for bees and flies, and the leaves host the larvae of caterpillar moths. The Native American Ethnobotany Database lists medicinal uses of this species of Smilax by the Seminole, Choctaw, Houma and Creek tribes. The Choctaw and Houma grind the dried tuberous roots into flour for use in bread and cakes. The Comanche use the leaves as cigarette rolling papers.

About the common name sarsaparilla, you may be familiar with this word as flavoring sometimes used in the beverage known as root beer. A traditional tonic made with the rhizomes was thought to ward off rheumatism. Both Smilax and Sassafras have been used in flavoring root beer, but both contain safrole which might contribute to liver cancer.