The Food of a Younger Land

In the 1930s, President Roosevelt created the Works Progress Administration, which was charged with finding work for unemployed Americans. The WPA created the Federal Writers' Project for unemployed writers. After creating hundreds of guidebooks on America, writers were asked to contribute to a project called America Eats. The plan was to produce a book of compiled essays and recipes that would describe the various traditional foods eaten throughout the U.S. Unfortunately, the project was abandoned when the U.S. entered WWII. The essays and recipes that were written were archived in the Library of Congress, but never published until now. Mark Kurlansky has compiled these documents, adding his own commentary, in The Food of a Younger Land. The book is broken down by region: the Northeast, South, middle West, far West, and the Southwest.

What a fantastic book. I've been reading so much about industrialized food lately that it was so refreshing to read about what people ate before frozen foods and McDonald's became the norm. But I will admit that I was surprised at how unhealthy those foods would be considered by today's standards. People sure liked pork fat. And lard, lots of it. And while I couldn't say whether it's healthy or not, they also liked animals' testicles. From Rocky Mountain oysters (sheep) to Prairie oysters (cow), Kentucky oysters (hog), and lamb fries (duh), testicles seemed to be popular in just about every region in the country. What I found interesting was that while women typically were responsible for preparing food, in the case of testicles, this was considered a man's job. There were many food traditions described that I had never heard of before: sugaring-off parties in Vermont, Coca-Cola parties in Georgia, and chitterling struts in North Carolina. The eggless, butterless Depression Cake shows how people made do with the few ingredients they had during the Depression. But the beginning of convenience foods are evident in some of the essays. When one woman remembers her childhood on a Nebraska farm in the 1890s, she says that in the '90s, calories were unheard of. But today (1940s), many farm women have become more calorie conscious and are replacing heavier dishes with salads. They are also less dependent on home-made foods, getting their bread, cream and butter from a grocer and using canned vegetables. Although I don't think I'll be trying any of these recipes, it was fun to read them. It definitely made me hungry for some cornbread though.