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Food of a Younger Land: A Portrait of American Food

Editor: Mark Kurlansky
Publisher: Riverhead Books
Cloth $27.95 (397 p.)
ISBN: 9781594488658
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Reviewed by Marcia Lusted, Statusing

Most of us are familiar with the WPA or Works Progress Administration, a program started during the Great Depression as a way to get Americans back to work. The WPA is best known for sponsoring artists, musicians, and writers, and the most famous books to come out of the project were the 48 state guides to America, called the American Guide Series.

In the late 1930s, the WPA's Federal Writers' Project embarked on another book project, which was destined to be abandoned with the advent of World War II. Called America Eats, it was to be a guide to the regional and traditional foods of America, at a time before fast food chains and frozen foods homogenized Americans' diets.

Thanks to editor Mark Kurlansky, the writings that were collected before the project's cancellation, which had languished in the Library of Congress, have become The Food of a Younger Land. Kurlansky has taken the manuscripts-- many of them unedited and unpolished, but a goldmine of information about traditional American food-and arranged them by region to tell the story of what American food was like when it was still regional.

From eating at the Automat in New York City, to Coca-Cola parties and Chitterling Struts in the South, to Washington's Geoduck clams and Vermont's maple syrup, the book is a combination of recipes, narratives about food customs, and observations about food history. After providing an excellent introduction to the origin of the Federal Writers' Project, the America Eats project, and its development and demise, Kurlansky lets the writing of these WPA authors speak for itself. The result is a wonderful mixture of styles, from formal to casual, on a wide range of subjects. Kurlansky gives background on each region of the United States and the writers there, when they are known, and his editing enhances the book but doesn't overpower the original voices. The result is an amazing window on the foods of America…and while some sections aren't for the squeamish or the faint of stomach, others will make you want to try cooking some of these all-but-forgotten recipes. The book is readable and very entertaining, and at the very least, it will leave you hungry!