The Food of a Younger Land: A Portrait of American Food--Before the National Highway System, Before Chain Restaurants, and Before Frozen Food, Whe

Talked with a friend about her drives around the USA in the 50's - 80's, and how everything was regional when she was young and became homogeneous over the years. Got her this book and she loved it! Reminded her of many things she saw and many she missed. All her friends are now sharing this book and sharing stories of the foods they grew up eating and wondering what happened to all those delicious recipes etc. Well, this book does have some small problems in writing and descriptions, but Kurlansky seems to do a great job pulling out the important parts and showing the story of how things came about. I like his leaving the original articles but explaining the contexts. Am probably going to have to buy another copy of this for other people now, it's started enough interest in people's foods from the past. I probably would like more historical context for the original articles because am not a USA historian and need to learn more of that anyway. Get this book and enjoy!

Mark Kurlansky is a truly gifted writer. He manges to satisfy my love for both food and history in his books. His most famous work is probably the book entitled Salt: A World History. Read that if you haven't. But, on to this review! The Food of a Younger Land discusses the history of american food at a time when Chilli's and McDonald's weren't doing their best to homogenize the american diet. Written as a product of the Federal Writer's Project during the New Deal to create work for folks in the aftermath of the last economic depression, it is full of a panoply of articles from authors unknown to as well-remembered as Zora Neale Hurston. Most are short blurbs describing a local delicacy/eccentricity, and most are well-written and concise. This is not a recipe book - most archived recipes and interviews have approximate ingredients. This is from an era of cooking with thought and feeling and care. It's a shame the tone of the articles, written much as a schoolbook from the 40's would be, are somewhat anticeptic and implacable. However, if you are a foodie and adore food history, many of these are also written or transcribed in the local dialect and "flavor" of the areas (as my grandmother used to so tactfully put it). It's a wonderful, if extremely dated, snapshot of american food and cuisine before it became an industrial machine. Worth it for any library of food or food history, and great to inspire ideas, if only it had been better written.

Kurlansky has a remarkable gift of making the mundane fascinating (a whole book on Salt? Yes!) Here he's collected together notes on food as a folkway in America.

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

Did ever wonder what it was like to eat at an automat or have a drug store lunch in New York City in the late 1930's? Did you ever want to experience a South Carolina Backwoods Barbecue? Did you ever want to learn how real Rhode Island Jonny Cakes or Montana Fried Beaver Tales were made? In this wonderful collection of recipes and stories about food and America, readers will get the chance to experience a taste of America that has long ago ceased to exist. This is a hybrid book of sorts, part recipe book and part history book, that has a regional feel to it. This is not surprising since the writers, employed by the government funded Federal Writers' Project during the late 1930's and early 1940's, reported to regional offices that employed them. The United States was coming out of the depression at the time and projects like this gave writers a chance to feed themselves and their families. The project ended before a book was produced but the author, while doing research in the Library of Congress, rescued the articles. The articles and recipes vary greatly. In some cases you get a one or two paragraph explanation/recipe of a particular food item like Florid Hush Puppies or Kentucky Spoon Bread. In other cases articles will tell what it was like to be part of a New York Literary Tea or a Puget Sound Indian Salmon Feast. There is an article on an Oregon Protest Against Mashed Potatoes or Food Along US 1 in Virginia. A fun article/recipe talks about how a woman with little in her kitchen created "Depression Cake" which can be made today and looks tasty, while another tells of "A Los Angeles Sandwich Called a Taco." There are plenty of recipes like Mississippi Molasses Pie, Maine Chowders and Long Island Rabbit Stew. This is a fun read which will entertain those who can't cook at all and will give many ideas for new recipes for those who can. It is a testament to an America long gone and writers, including Eudora Welty, who even in a depression cared enough about their craft to keep on writing about America.