WPA

"A Portrait of American Food -before the national highway system, before chain restaurants, and before frozen food, when the nation's food was seasonal, regional, and traditional -- from the lost WPA Files.

During the Great Depression, President Roosevelt's Works Progress Administration (WPA) created the Federal Writer's Program (FWP) to provide work for unemployed authors. There were a number of projects that evolved, including a series of guidebooks for the different states. Late in the show more 30's, the "America Eats" project began. There were actually a series of projects in different sections of the country, which were intended to be combined in one huge report. WWII intervened, and the reports from individual writers were never collated or published.

Enter Mark Kurlansky, researcher extraordinaire. He has taken the long abandoned manuscripts, culled out the best and put them together in this delightful look at how our parents and grandparents ate.

The book is divided into the original five geographic sections envisioned by the FWP. Each section features representative essays, stories, recipes, anecdotes, reports of festivals and church suppers, along with photographs and drawings. I started this book as an audio, which while well done, did not lend itself to savoring all the information, so I borrowed a print edition from the local library. It is such a fun read, that it is now on my wishlist to purchase so that I can add it to my food collection. It is part history, part social memoir, and part cookbook. All of it interesting and enticing. Some of my favorites include

From the Northeast:
* the North Whitefield Maine Game Supper,
* the almost infinite discussion of the variations of clam chowder,
* the glorious reminiscences of the New York Automat (complete with 5 page glossary of slang and jargon for short order cooks in New York);
* the "Italian Feed" in Vermont;

From the South:
* recipes for possum, squirrel, rabbit, rattlesnake and chitterlings;
* a good recipe for crab imperial (an outstanding and scrumptious chesapeake bay dish well remembered from MY youth--it was THE dish for banquets, weddings, and any big celebration--no girl left home in Maryland without knowing how to make it).
* The introduction to Mississippi food written by Eudora Welty is one of her earliest works and representative of the kind of work the FWP engendered.

From the Middle West:
* recipes and stories about food favored by various Indian tribes such as buffalo tongue as a delicacy favored by the Sioux (who incidentally never used salt until they were introduced to it by white men in the early 1900's);
* the Lutefisk favored by the Scandanavians who settled in the Great Lakes region;
* recipes from the cooks serving the vast lumberjack camps in Michigan---

"At night they came into camp stamping with cold and grim with hunger. In the cookhouse the long tables were loaded with food; smoking platters of fresh mush, bowls of mashed potatoes, piles of pancakes and pitchers of corn syrup, kettles of rich brown beans, pans of prunes, dried peaches, rice puddings, rows of apple pies." pg. 269.

From the Far West
"The life of these people is not entirely one monotonous round of fried beans, baked beans, boiled beans, and just beans,varied only by an occasional jack rabbit or two...";

* there were numerous recipes and essays about salmon, smelts, clams, Montana Beaver Tail, and Washington Wildcat parties.
* This fascinating section also included a list of Colorado superstitions (pg. 296) of which my favorite is #12: " You will receive mail from the direction in which your pie is pointing, when it is set down at your place at the table."
* The recipe for Depression Cake is almost identical to one I inherited from my gram (via my mom) which is known in our family as "YUM YUM Cake"--I still make it every Christmas.
* And the essay by Claire Warner Churchill entitled "An Oregon Protest Against Mashed Potatoes" had me rolling on the floor.

The Southwest section was the shortest--for some reason the WPA lumped only Arizona, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Texas and Southern California into this section. Most of the recipes were heavily influenced by the Spanish American presence so prevalent in that area.

* Don Dolan contributed an essay entitled " A Los Angeles Sandwich called a Taco."
* There were also several essays and discussions of the food (and customs) of the Choctaw and Hopi Indian tribes, and
* A story about Oklahoma prairie oysters (aka the results of 'cattle neutering'.)

The book concludes with lists of cookbooks available during the era, and a current bibliography for more up-to-date resources. This is a tour de force. Kurlansky has done a yeoman job of taking a ton of material and getting it down to a manageable and enjoyable volume. A great read for anyone interested in social history and food. show less

Fitfully interesting collection. The pieces here, as Kurlansky's introduction explains, were submissions to a series of planned food guides; however, for reasons both editorial and political, the WPA ended up canceling the project, and much of the material was lost. What survived is serviceable prose, but a lot drier than one would expect, especially given that several of the writers went on to become names, and sometimes the essays resort to cliches and overdone lyricism. Also, as with any show more hodgepodge, the pieces vary widely in quality and interest. It might have been better to use the essays as primary material for a book that's really about the project, rather than publish these very unpolished essays themselves in anthology form. show less

Everyone knows about how the US government supported artists during the Great Depression through the New Deal, although most people only know about the photographers who worked with the WPA. A lesser known organization within the WPA was the Federal Writers' Project, which employed over 6000 new and established writers during those hard times.

The first major project of the FWP was to write travel guides for all the states (as well as DC and some territories). Some of these are apparently show more still in print. The second major project was a book titled "America Eats." Unfortunately, work on the book was slowed and eventually abandoned as the situation with WWII made the economy turn. The files for "America Eats" (at least, the bits that were collected and basically dumped into a box in the Library of Congress) were forgotten for years. Author Mark Kurlansky came across the file while researching another book at LC. In this book, he has compiled what was in that LC file (whether the pieces are good or bad), but most importantly, he puts in some context for the pieces, describing the FWP, the WPA, and pre-war America.

I was really struck with how different this country has become in such a short time. This entire book revolves around home-cooking. Very few restaurants are mentioned, and these pieces were written before convenience foods were available like they are today. The country is also divided into regions that seem a little strange today (New York paired off with New England? California split, so Los Angeles and south goes with the Southwest, while San Francisco and the north go with the Far West?) The book shows an absolutely fascinating slice of life - I don't know if I would use the term "a simpler time," but definitely a different time.

There a few famous names in here too (Eudora Welty, Zora Neale Hurston, Nelson Algren) and it's interesting to get a little background on how writers (whether they were already famous or became so later) were part of the FWP. show less

It’s mostly in dialect, which I hate, but I was enthralled by these stories. I have never been more thankful for the Depression (and thus, the WPA) than while reading ex-slaves’ tales of their lives. What’s really fascinating is how matter-of-fact they are about everything, and the casual cruelties they took for granted—whipping people in the morning so they would have to work the entire day with a flayed back, that sort of thing.