| Just prior to the attack upon Pearl Harbor, the Federal Writers Project commissioned writers across America to begin work on what was to be called "America Eats", an examination of our foodways at that point in time. Shortly after the start of WWII, the project was abandoned, and all submitted work up until that point was eventually turned over to the Library of Congress, where mountains of letters, poems, recipes and more sat until now. A wide selection is included here, and Kurlansky prefaces many of the pieces with information about the author, place and time.
The "snapshot of this moment in time" cuts both ways, of course - and I should give fair warning here that a few pieces contain, let's just say, "less than what would now be considered politically correct" language. The book is split into five main sections, each consisting of a different region of America as then defined by the US Census Bureau - "The Northeast", "The South", "The Middle West", "The Far West", and "The Southwest". The groupings are pretty much as you'd expect, with a few exceptions - Delaware included with "The South", Nevada as part of "The Far West" rather than "The Southwest", California split into two regions...
There are too many highlights to even begin to comment upon in-depth here, but two of the pieces I enjoyed most were a fantastic rant by a Portlander against mashed potatoes (!); and "New York Soda-Luncheonette Slang and Jargon", which is quite simply 5 pages of incredibly awesome Depression-era slang - 70 years ago, my Polish-immigrant grandfather very well may have sat down at a Manhattan lunch counter and (quickly, because folks were impatiently waiting behind him!) yelled out "smear one, burn it; some murphies, one lump and a brunette... and put a stretch on it!". See the book for details...
Other favorites of mine include the story of intimate Italian dinners given at private homes in Vermont quarry towns (amazingly enough, the author of that piece felt she had to explain what ravioli were at that time), a debate on New England vs. Manhattan Clam Chowder, pieces on baked beans, wild game recipes and uses from all over America, Zora Neale Hurston's imagining of that mythical African-American "way off somewhere" land of endless good (Southern) food, an uncredited piece on Wisconsin lumberjack sourdough pancakes, one woman's memoirs of her time as a young girl "cooking for the threshers" in 1890's Nebraska with her mother and other local women and children, Oregon pioneer food memories, pieces on Pacific Northwest Salmon and Washington State geoduck clams, a piece on how Washington State hot school lunches worked in the 1930's, a brief history of drink in Portland (we've always been a city of drinkers, apparently!), and many pieces documenting the drastic changes in the Southwest as they were happening - pieces on Mexican-influenced food in Southern California ("A Los Angeles Sandwich Called a Taco"), big outdoor lunches eaten in New Mexico, Arizona cowboy breakfasts and the work of Texas range cooks. The book ends with a long list of heritage cookbooks (many of which can still be found today) compiled then by the same writers who were working on this project.
History, food and culture. This is the way we ate. The best description of this book I've heard yet is "this is what food blogging would have looked like in 1940". The description fits perfectly. Pick up this book, you won't regret it. Highly recommended. |
