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Title details for The Food of a Younger Land by Mark Kurlansky - Available

The Food of a Younger Land

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

by Mark Kurlansky
Stephen Hoye
Audiobook
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1 of 1 copy available
Mark Kurlansky's new book takes us back to the food of a younger America. Before the national highway system brought the country closer together, before chain restaurants brought uniformity, and before the Frigidaire meant that frozen food could be stored for longer, the nation's food was seasonal, regional, and traditional. It helped to form the distinct character, attitudes, and customs of those who ate it.


While Kurlansky was researching The Big Oyster in the Library of Congress, he stumbled across the archives for the America Eats project and discovered this wonderful window into our national past. In the 1930s, with the country gripped by the Great Depression and millions of Americans struggling to get by, Franklin D. Roosevelt created the Federal Writers' Project under the New Deal to give work to artists and writers, such as John Cheever and Richard Wright. A number of writers—including Zora Neale Hurston, Eudora Welty, and Nelson Algren—were dispatched all across America to chronicle the eating habits, traditions, and struggles of local people. The project was abandoned in the early 1940s and never completed.


The Food of a Younger Nation unearths this forgotten literary and historical treasure. Mark Kurlansky's brilliant compilation of these historic pieces, combined with authentic recipes, anecdotes, photos, and his own musings and analysis, evokes a bygone era when Americans had never heard of fast food and the grocery store was a thing of the future.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    May 28, 2009

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9781400191697
      • File size: 341233 KB
      • Duration: 11:50:54

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • AudioFile Magazine
      Prepare yourself to learn that mountain oysters aren't seafood and that nobody likes lutefisk the first time they try it. This audio documentary about the American cuisine enjoyed during the Great Depression comes from the author's research into manuscripts written under Roosevelt's WPA, the Works Project Administration. Narrator Stephen Hoye reads hundreds of recipes, making them more palatable with his nuanced pronunciation of ingredients and lively renditions of cooks describing their preparation of traditional meals. He imitates the African-American speech of the Old South so well that he must occasionally translate his own words into contemporary English. There's no traditional story, just colors, smells, and flavors transmitted through audio. Listeners can be assured they'll be hungry during most of the delicious feasts described. J.A.H. (c) AudioFile 2009, Portland, Maine
    • Publisher's Weekly

      March 16, 2009
      A genuine culinary and historical keepsake: in the late 1930s the WPA farmed out a writing project with the ambition of other New Deal programs: an encyclopedia of American food and food traditions from coast-to-coast similar to the federal travel guides. After Pearl Harbor, the war effort halted the project for good; the book was never published, and the files were archived in the Library of Congress. Food historian Kurlansky (Cod
      ; The Big Oyster
      ) brought the unassembled materials to light and created this version of the guide that never was. In his abridged yet remarkable version, he presents what some of the thousands of writers (among them Eudora Welty, Zora Neale Hurston and Nelson Algren) found: America, its food, its people and its culture, at the precise moment when modernism and progress were kicking into gear. Adhering to the administrators' original organization, the book divides regionally; within each section are entries as specific as “A California Grunion Fry,” and as general and historical as the one on “Sioux and Chippewa Food.” Though we've become a fast-food nation, this extraordinary collection—at once history, anthropology, cookbook, almanac and family album—provides a vivid and revitalizing sense of the rural and regional characteristics and distinctions that we've lost and can find again here.

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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