After traveling through time and space from 2000 in West Virginia to 1631 in Germany, the Grantvillers have to find 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. Down-time Germans view potatoes as animal food, unfit for human consumption — until they try their first potato chips. Seeing everyone, including small children, drinking beer instead of water is a big change for the up-timers, just as big a change as seeing people casually drink water and not get sick is for down-timers. But the Grantville Cooking Club proves food is also a bridge, helping up-timers and down-timers work together to create a new cuisine. They also jump-start several 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, before? Greg Ferrara, Linda Bartolli, and Phillip Bartolli are forced to face these questions when the Ring of Fire happens weeks before Tina was scheduled for lifesaving surgery that, like her life-saving medication, is no longer available.

And what do you do when your wife really wants a bagel with cream cheese but they haven't been invented yet?

Published: 1/6/2026