Despite the widespread performance and increasing popularity of the contemporary American bar mitzvah, exceedingly little serious secular study has been devoted to this uniquely tenacious ritual. Perhaps this lack of scholarly attention reflects the negative stereotypes of glitz and chopped liver center pieces, or the sense that this is, after all, a religious event best left to rabbis and Jewish educators.

The latter is the plant that yields the Savanilla rhatany, Krameria triandra, which yields the true officinal root, is not mentioned by Bennet, and appears consequently to be absent from Brazil.

The buttery-tasting cookie was actually made with margarine, but you couldn't tell by tasting it.

Once into the 1990s, thinly drawn egg- and pill-shaped ovals appear everywhere, leaning together, like Modigliani heads or plates seen perspectively in a cupboard.