Christmas food

Dear County Agent Guy:

Food is many things: flavors, textures, smells, an excuse to use your fingers to clean a bowl that was used to mix chocolate cake batter.

But food is also memory. It’s a time machine, resurrecting recollections that had shriveled like an orange peel on a scorching summer sidewalk.

Oyster stew does the trick for me. Every Christmastime, my parents would whip up a big kettle of oyster stew. I was the …