The Gourmets of Grantville

After traveling through time and space from the year 2000 in West Virginia to 1631 in Germany, the town of Grantville faces many challenges. The biggest is finding enough food, medicine, and other supplies to stay alive and healthy while helping their new German neighbors and a constant flow of refugees do the same. Working together, they grow and gather enough food for everyone, but it's not quite what anyone is used to eating. The Germans view potatoes as animal food, unfit for human consumption, and not all the Grantvillers can accept that even small children drink beer instead of water. With the expert advice of the Grantville Cooking Club, up-time and down-time cooking is combined to create a new cuisine and to jump-start more than a few new restaurants and businesses. Meanwhile, regular life continues. How do you keep going when you know that your child, or spouse, will die because life-saving medicine or surgery isn't available in 1631? How do you cope with watching them slowly die from something that was curable in the world you came from? Greg Ferrara, Linda Bartolli, and Phillip Bartolli are forced to face these questions when the Ring of Fire happens weeks before Tina is scheduled for lifesaving surgery that, like her life-saving medication, is no longer available.