The Food of a Younger Land: A Portrait of American Food--Before the National Highway System, Before Chain Restaurants, and Before Frozen Food, When the Nation's Food Was Seasonal

Many years ago I remember seeing a movie about some WWII soldiers assigned to a bomber plane (I think it was "Memphis Belle"). As they're approaching the limit of bombing runs when they'll be discharged they're discussing what they'll do when they get home. One says he's going to open a chain of restaurants across the country and each will have the same name, same menu, and same food. Another says it's a dumb idea, because no one will want to eat the same food they can get at home. He replies, somewhat sheepishly, "sure they will, it's comforting," while everyone laughs. I always thought that was an interesting insight into the nation prior to WWII, and while most histories usually focus on a prominent person or event, they don't often give a very good idea of what it was like for regular people who lived those times. That's one thing that sets this book apart.

During the Great Depression FDR came up with a number of "make-work" projects to keep people employed (as opposed to simply giving welfare). Projects such as the WPA and the CCC gave people the satisfaction of *earning* a living while hopefully providing a service to the community (every time I visit a National Park and see the buildings and trails I think of the CCC - which is how my grandparents met, incidentally). The usefulness and value of these projects could be debated endlessly, but one in particular was called "America Eats" and kept some writers from starving. They were sent out around America to report on the various foods and eating customs that existed in this broad and diverse land. This was in the days before interstate freeways, restaurant chains, refrigerator-freezers, and the low-quality fast food we all live on. Different regions still had very distinct foods and customs, and there wasn't as much uniformity in what we eat across the nation. The war ended this project before it was completed but Mark Kurlansky has dipped into those old archived reports to give us a look at what mealtimes were like and what regular people ate.

In addition to discussing the differences between clam chowder in New York and Boston, he also includes a number of recipes, many of which are in the same summary form they were submitted to the main office prior to any editing or "writing." Where the writer was identifiable he gives a short history on him or her. We recently visited New Mexico and it was interesting to read the account of the meals that were eaten in the field by farmers and their families. One chapter I found especially amusing was called "A Los Angeles Sandwich Called a Taco" which gave all the ways a tortilla could be used, such as burritos, taquitos, chalupas, etc. But the book is filled with interesting tidbits and notes - everything from Choctaw indian foods to slang used in New York luncheonettes - and whether you read it cover to cover or simply pick through it, I think it will certainly be entertaining.

Oh, how they ate!

Long ago, up to just after WWII, the United States was a land of regions. New England was separate and distinct from the South, for example, and the Plains States very different than those two. Culture and cuisine were influenced by local likes and dislikes, mores and folkways. Likewise, refrigerated railway cars and to a far lesser extent weren't nearly as widely used today, so many of the fruits and vegetables we take for granted in grocery stores anywhere in the country today simply weren't as widely available back then.

In short, there was a culinary America before McDonald's and what people ate and why they ate it varied widely across our great land.

During the 1930s, the federal government struggled to put people to work during the Great Depression. One of the make-work outfits was the Federal Writer's Project, called by poet W. H. Auden "one of the noblest and most absurd undertakings ever attempted by any state". Unemployed writers were hired to write.

Mark Kurlansky, who has written utterly enthralling histories of salt and the cod fish, went through the archives of the FWP project on what America ate ("America Eats"). It was the successor to the highly successful series of FWP guidebooks to the various regions of the United States. Kurlansky provides a thorough and informative history of the FWP as an introduction to the book. Some of the best known writers in America were on the government payroll during those dark days.

"America Eats" was never completed. WWII put everyone to work and budgets for the FWP disappeared.

Kurlansky has created an anthology of many of the articles from "America Eats". The quality of the writing goes from dreadful to superb. Many of the articles include recipes, some of which are mouth-watering, while not a few make you want to hold your nose or worse. The differences between the regions is grandly apparent. I particularly enjoyed the story of how "hush puppies" came to be and how they got their name. (I also became ravenously hungry for the best hush puppies I've ever eaten, in a small town in Minnesota.)

Some of the articles, particularly those from the South, reveal how ingrained racial biases were, with language that would never be allowed to see the light of day in a government sponsored project today.

Kurlansky writes an introduction to each region's articles. The book is culinary history, but also cultural history as well, of a land before nationwide restaurant chains, thousands of frozen and canned food items and a concern with sodium and carbs. The differences in our society, the massive class of factory workers in the Northeast, the agrarian society of the South, the robust farmers and laborers of the Midwest are all separated by rich detail.

This is a book for browsing. With several dozen articles divided into five sections, this is a wonderful book for just opening to a page and reading. Make sure you don't do it when you're hungry, though: many of the recipes will leave you on the verge of making gluttony a life goal. The great tragedy is that nearly all this great, carefree cooking and eating has disappeared from our land.

Jerry

When I first ordered this book I was under the impression that it was going to be about food from an earlier time in American history...like from the 18th and 19th centuries. Instead it centers on President Roosevelt's WPA program of the 1930's.
I was initially disappointed.
I was initially wrong.
It's actually a very good book, giving wonderful historical information about America's food, region by region. Of course, being a born and bread midwesterner, that was the first section I delved into and found a fine mix of 'cuisines' from this section of the U.S. - some familiar and some not - with history thrown in to boot.
But, the Kentucky Eggnog listed in the southern region looked interesting as well.
And then there is the...well, you get the picture - - -
Although there are a number of recipes interspersed throughout, this is not a cookbook. It a pleasurable informational social history book of an era that many of our parents and grandparents can still remember.
The best part about this book is that it is chock-full of the type of historical information that one rarely thinks about - my favorite history...social history. FOOD history.
As I mentioned, however, the title can easily throw one off. It should have a more accurate title which, I believe, might be a benefit to this book, as "The Food of a Younger Land" does have a hint of an even earlier time in our nation's history than the era in which the author writes.
All 'n' all, this is a fine collection of early 20th century history that most have probably never given a second thought.
Good stuff.

If you are buying this for your Kindle, make sure you go to the one on the bottom of the list, or you won't get the full edition. They are being sold in sections on here and it is deceiving. The first section, The South Eats, is all you will get if you order the top. Yes, the title says "The South Eats" when you open it, but the print editions are not sold in sections, only as one book, so selling it off in sections is a bit on the deceptive side I would say.

If you know somebody who loves jumping on trends, especially the sort of person who is infatuated with books by Michael Pollan or Eric Schlosser, you probably have heard a lot about Slow Food. Now you can turn the tables! Mark Kurlansky's new book will help you school your shallow, lifestyle-chasing friends and show `em YOU are the true foodie.

For the uninitiated, the [[ASIN:1931498016 Slow Food movement]] began as a reaction against the proliferation of heavily processed and mass-produced foods. Slow Food proponents seek to encourage people to eat locally produced foodstuffs, in season (sorry, no more eating oranges in the summer and tomatoes in the winter). It didn't take long for urban hipsters to latch on to Slow Food and change it from a simple "eat healthily, locally, and seasonally" idea into a consumption-focused status symbol.

Well, guess what? Not all that long ago, Slow Food was just "food". Regional dishes and seasonal ingredients were commonplace. Each part of the US had its own unique customs and traditions that often were unknown in other areas. Just about all American food was "slow" before the outbreak of World War II.

Kurlansky, who unearthed the long-lost source material for an abandoned Federal Writers' Project book, America Eats!, in the Library of Congress, has compiled a fascinating glimpse into the original Slow Food. There are recipes, descriptions of feasts, amusing anecdotes, and, of course, stories about plain old daily cooking. A few of the articles were written by authors who became well known, but the bulk of the material was contributed by relatively obscure writers. The quality of the writing consequently varies greatly from piece to piece. Far from being a weakness, this blend of polished and unpolished writing adds a great deal to the book's charm and authenticity.

Overall, The Food of a Younger Land delivers on its premise. There are, however, two caveats for prospective readers:
* Kurlansky did not write the book. His contributions, while informative and well written, are limited to an introductory essay and notes on selected articles.
* The text is heavily focused on the Northeast and the South because pieces about these regions made up the bulk of the source material.

Bottom line: The Food of a Younger Land will appeal to anybody who is interested in culinary history, regional cooking, or traditional American dishes. Keep in mind, though, that it is not a cookbook or a rigorously researched history project.

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Two books to check out if you like this one:
[[ASIN:1598530054 American Food Writing: An Anthology]] (O'Neill)
[[ASIN:0192806815 The Oxford Companion to Food]] (Davidson)

Mark Kurlansky has written several excellent books in which he traces the impact of a single ingredient -- such as cod or salt -- on human society. I've read and enjoyed his work, so I was enthusiastic about my opportunity to read The Food of a Younger Land through the Amazon Vine program. It's an enjoyable read, for foodies or for those who love Americana -- but maybe not in the way you'd expect.

That's because the essays in this book were not written by Kurlansky, though he writes dandy headnotes for each. Rather, these essays are the result of the author picking-and-choosing from the best of an abandoned work from the Work Project Administration, part of President Roosevelt's New Deal. Among the Depression Era projects was one that included writers, and they were put to work (initially) writing the U.S.' first travel guidebooks. But the follow-on "America Eats," chronicling the everyday foods and food events across the country, was interrupted by Pearl Harbor -- and most of those writers went to work elsewhere.

Kurlansky found the original manuscripts, or at least what remains of them, and chose the most important or interesting for this volume. So instead of a 1942 book recording "what we eat today," what he produced is a snapshot of a generation of foodstuffs that have largely been forgotten. It's like discovering a photo album in your grandma's attic.

If you are in your 50s or older, some of these essays will bring back memories of gas station pumps on dusty highways, when bottles of Coke were sold in bright red machines. You'll remember the roadside stands of your youth, where you bought piccalilli or Shoe-Fly pie. And it will, indeed, fulfill the book's title: The Food of a Younger Land. For instance, an essay called "Foods along US1 in Virginia" extols the virtues of spoon bread, Brunswick stew, Virginia ham and herring roe scrambled with roe. And as Kurlansky comments, "Imagine an article [today] about eating along I-95."

Overall, it works. As much of a foodie as I am (and the number of cookbook reviews I've written should be proof enough), there's plenty in this book that I never knew, from recipes for Brunswick Stew (too bad I lack a handy squirrel) to the steps in a Vermont "sugaring off." I'm reminded how exotic it once was to eat a taco in California, and how incredibly food was tied to what was in season locally. (When I was a child in New York, it was a big deal to have a family member send you oranges from Florida.)

Still, this is not a "read at one sitting" book. Reading it is like listening to a music album by a singer with a unique voice; a couple of songs at a time are good, but an entire album's worth is tiring on the ear. Some of the material is understandably repetitive, and I like Kurlansky's choices -- but after a while, I've read *enough* about the (much debated) appropriate ingredients for New England clam chowder or how various southerners make chitlins. I read most of it within a few days (it was the only book I'd taken with me on a road trip), but I wish I'd spread it out over a week or two. If you do that, I think you'll like this book very much indeed.

_The Food of a Younger Land_ by Mark Kurlansky was a very interesting book, not like any I have ever read before, one that I really enjoyed. Basically it is an anthology, but a strange anthology; Kurlansky in this book went through the archives of the Library of Congress and gathered together a collection of often unsigned manuscripts that were being used to produce a book, a portrait state by state and region by region of what America ate in the 1930s and early 1940s (and through the research and interviews gathered for the book, as far as back as the early 19th century). Interestingly, the book was not a private effort but was being produced at the behest of that national government, part of the Federal Writers' Project of the Works Progress Administration, a project to put unemployed writers to work. Earlier the program had put together a number of successful regional guide books but unfortunately the program largely died thanks to World War II before this project, which would have been called _America Eats_ could be edited, the missing submissions collected (each state was to submit reports), bound in a final form, and published.

What Kurlansky found was a collection of finished written pieces, interviews, raw data, and newspaper articles submitted by a number of states, each state program directed to focus especially on unique cuisines and any differences of opinion on how a certain dish was to prepared (such as say clam chowder). In writing this book the author took the best and most interesting of the essays submitted, edited a few, and several times included additional commentary, sometimes providing more background on the food or recipe discussed, other times commenting on the writer who produced the piece or the state of affairs since the article was written (some foods were just beginning to appear in the United States as the book was being written, such as the taco and ravioli, while others, such as lamb, were in decline).

The articles in _The Food of a Younger Land_ ranged from simple recipes with no real accompanying commentary to newspaper articles to interviews to multi-page pieces that read like short stories to sometimes even poetry. On occasion the dialect used could be a little thick, particularly with that used to show how African Americans in the South spoke (and even a little offensive, a fact which Kurlansky noted). One article had a number of Spanish terms and Kurlansky himself noted that the writer had a very poor understanding of Spanish.

I liked the format most of the time, though I found myself breezing through some stories. I didn't always read every recipe line by line and I found the black dialect often hard to follow and irritating. Sometimes more than one story or entry would present the same information, sometimes in a very similar format as well. Sometimes there were odd misspellings in the entries (not in Kurlansky's own writings); on page 271 one writer talked about using fresh corn meal that "had not yet become infested with weasels." Generally though such oddities were rare. In general the anthology format really worked as if one didn't like a particular story one could go on to the next one very easily.

By and large though most of the stories were interesting and I learned quite a bit. I liked the several page introduction to each region's cuisine and I liked those commentaries of the author that followed the later career of some of the writers as several became or were noted authors.

There were five regions included in the book. The Northeast included not only New England but New York as well. Topics covered included doughnuts, May breakfasts (a Rhode Island tradition), the famed dishes invented by New York City hotels (such as Lobster Newberg and Waldorf Salad), the advent of mushroom farming, Automat food, Vermont sugaring-off parties, clam bakes, clam chowder, the New York city love of oysters, and the turmoil surrounding on what constituted a proper jonny cake. The South included Kentucky and Maryland and had the most articles I believe of any region. Southern foods and recipes covered include barbecue, possum, burgoo, Brunswick stew, chitterlings (and gatherings called chitterling struts), various oyster dishes, types of corn bread, fried chicken, hush puppies (which had to be explained), grits and grunts (the preferred food of the Conchs, the people of the Florida Keys), Mississippi molasses pie, divinity chocolates, and three articles about the controversies surrounding mint julep. The Middle West Kurlansky wrote once had a distinct cuisine before it was "ravaged by fast food," and it was as interesting and varied as any other region's cuisine, "something that seems unimaginable today." Though strangely the information collected did not include Chicago, Kurlansky was able to introduce the reader to a number of Native American dishes such as pemmican, the Scandinavian-American dish lutefisk, Minnesota booya picnics (booya is an oxtail and vegetable stew of sorts), the tea substitutes favored by the settlers (made often from sycamore chips and red-root leaves), and something called vinegar pie. The Far West, which included northern California and the Pacific Northwest, featured salmon, geoduck clams (pronounced gooey duck), the Smelt Fry, preparing beaver tail for consumption, Idaho Basque cuisine, the Depression Cake, and a funny article railing against improper preparation of mashed potatoes. Lastly, the Southwest section featured many Mexican and Mexican-American dishes largely unknown outside the region back then but familiar to many Americans today such as tacos and burritos as well as articles on Iowa Picnics in Los Angeles, the beginnings of southern California health food, the Grunion Fry, regional Native American food such as piki bread, cowboy and chuck wagon food, Arizona Menudo Parties, and prairie oysters (which are not shellfish and strangely mostly cooked and consumed by men alone).

An interesting book, it was fun to see what America was like just before the spread of fast food and the easy purchase and storage of frozen food.

I used this in a Capstone senior h.s. course on the role of food in history. The book was part of the syllabus covering the cultural role of foods in the US in the 1930s. Students found it interesting enough to read the sections assigned. Being a history nerd, I enjoyed all of it.

As I read "The Food of a Younger Land," it struck me as perhaps a useful companion to a book I read several years ago, [[ASIN:1578061180 Dixie Before Disney: 100 Years of Roadside Fun]], about roadside culture in the South before the days of interstate highways. This is a similar sort of thing, in that it chronicles America back in the days before our food -- like our accents, our entertainments, our clothes, our retail options, and our politics -- were homogenized by highways and mass media. For people interested in that era, or in trying to find the remnants of it that exist today, "The Food of a Younger Land" could be a worthwhile reference to have around.

Still, I have to admit the part of the book I found most interesting was compiler and editor Mark Kurlansky's Introduction, in which he explains how this book came about in the first place. In the Depression, the federal government created all sorts of make-work programs, including the Federal Writers Project. In this case, writers around the country were charged with contributing pieces to a book about regional cuisines and eating habits, to be titled "America Eats." However, Pearl Harbor and the war intervened, the project was never published, and the submitted manuscripts sunk into the oblivion of federal archives. Kurlansky has found some of them (many seem to be lost forever) and pulled them together for this volume. As he notes, however, relatively few of the people serving in the Federal Writers Project were accomplished writers. Others had done no more than submit poetry to local collections or journals, worked for small community papers, or simply *wanted to be* writers without ever having been published. As a result, there's a considerable variety to how good the pieces in this book are: some are quite interesting, while others -- New Deal writing like New Deal architecture -- are nothing noteworthy at all. Others still are merely lists or menus.

I didn't find the results of the compilation especially engrossing, and I don't imagine I'll press this into the hands of my friends with the wild eyes of a zealot. But for readers with interests in regional cuisine or a sort of cultural anthropology, this may be worth checking out.

(Note: Readers interested in this book should probably also read [[ASIN:1596913622 America Eats!: On the Road with the WPA - the Fish Fries, Box Supper Socials, and Chitlin Feasts That Define Real American Food]] by Pat Willard, which takes a modern look at regional cuisine based on the work of the WPA described in "Food of a Younger Land.")

So it's not a cookbook, and that's fine, but I at least expected a little more detail when it comes to the foods of the Great Depression.
The book is broken into little articles with a various range of quality and information. As a glimpse into mid 20th Century food writing, it is satisfactory. Compared to articles anyone could easily find in their local library's microfiche of old local newspaper food sections of the same period- it does not excel.
A great idea for a book, that falls a little flat for the food enthusiast or home kitchen wizard; it's better suited for cultural historians of the period it covers.