Marmee rarely figures in the most pleasurable contemporary discussions or interpretations of “Little Women.” She’s not usually featured in the personality quizzes. There’s no essay devoted to her in “March Sisters,” the wonderful recent essay collection about the novel. It has only been relatively recently that the real-life Marmee’s sharp wit and insight have received sustained critical attention at all (namely in Eve LaPlante’s groundbreaking work on Abigail Alcott’s journals and letters). Yet Marmee is central to the story that Louisa May Alcott wanted to tell. “Little Women” is about four sisters trying to make the leap from girlhood to womanhood. The plot is theirs. But the ending, Alcott was clear, is Marmee’s, because her girls, each in their own way, both love and despise what’s waiting for them at the end. The prospect of becoming a Marmee, “Little Women” tells us, is simultaneously an aspiration and a threat. Marmee is at once far more interesting than many readers may recognize and also a major narrative problem.
In any case, DNA analysis of meat from the 1951 dinner eventually proved it was none of the above. It wasn’t even prehistoric at all. Its DNA matched green sea turtle, a modern and living species. As for the 1901 banquet, well, that couldn’t have been mammoth either. “All stories published in newspapers of this country of a dinner in St. Petersburg where the meat of the Beresovca mammoth was served, are a hundred per cent invention,” the paleontologist I. P. Tolmachoff wrote in the Transactions of the American Philosophical Society back in 1929. As Tolmachoff also wrote, woolly-mammoth meat frozen for tens of thousands of years is “absolutely unpalatable” with “an intolerable putrid smell.” It is not something that belongs on a dinner table. It is certainly not something that belongs in a human mouth.
Which brings us to the true stories of eating—or attempting to eat—frozen mammoth.
In the popular imagination, Italy is a country of ripe tomatoes, fresh pasta, virgin olive oil and other staples of the Mediterranean diet. In practice, increasingly corpulent Italians — and especially Italian children — are united by an insatiable hunger for snack food.
Children eat cookies for breakfast. So do many of their parents. The supermarket aisles are full of breakfast cookies and snacks called merendine, which, generally speaking, are industrialized miniatures of traditional Italian cakes and tarts. It’s all more Hostess than homemade, but, in a country of regional cuisines, it is also the sugary, sticky stuff that binds.