The Food of a Younger Land Read Online Free Page A

wrote with a wide range of skills. As long as they were able to deliver copy containing information, a handful of reliable writers could amalgamate it and turn it into books. Some copy was little more than lists of facts. Others sent in short stories and poetry. Supervisors also came with varying levels of competence. According to Jerre Mangione, who worked on the FWP, Lyle Saxon, a supervisor in the South, was sent to one southern state director, the aunt of a senator, to find out why all of Kellock’s instructions were ignored and only literary attempts were being sent in. The woman ushered Saxon into a stately pillared mansion to a room where her staff was at work and said, “Have you ever seen such an inspiring sight? Seventeen poets, all in one room, writing poetry seven hours a day.”
    Experienced professionals such as Lyle Saxon gathered the material and wrote the books. The Massachusetts book was largely written by Merle Colby, from an old New England family, who wrote about the history of New Englanders. Idaho was written by Vardis Fisher, who was thought to be one of the most promising western writers, often compared to his close friend Thomas Wolfe and to Faulkner and Hemingway. While his reputation has not endured, largely because he put aside the writing of successful novels for failed tomes of ancient history, he did write thirty-six books by the time of his death in 1968. Today Fisher’s books remain in print and still have a following in Idaho, where he is also remembered for having commissioned for his home Idaho’s only Frank Lloyd Wright building.

    B y 1939 Katherine Kellock could see the guidebooks coming to an end. Guides had been done or were in progress for each of the forty-eight states, Puerto Rico, Alaska, and Washington, D.C. Guides to about thirty cities plus regions and even small towns had been published. They were an unexpected success. Some of the guidebooks are in print today and remain useful and enjoyable. Alfred Kazin, writing about 1930s literature in 1942, credited the guidebooks with considerable literary merit and wrote that they “set the tone of the period.” But now the FWP was in need of a new idea, new ways of examining America. It turned to ethnic themes such as Armenians in Massachusetts and Italians in New York and the New York City Writers’ Project planned one on Jews and Italians in New York with the working subtitle From Shofar to Swing. But Kellock had the idea for a nationwide examination of how America eats.
    America Eats was to be put together very much like the guidebooks, with many contributions amalgamated into a few essays by the handful of competent writers. It came out of the ethnic books, which in turn came out of the “Negro” sections of the guidebooks. It was to be a book on eating traditions and foods in the various parts of the United States. Like most of the FWP work, it would have a strong social and anthropological component. It would show varying ethnic traditions as well as the regional and local customs.
    With the Depression waning and war looming, it was clear that America and its customs would soon be changing. By the 1930s frozen food was appearing. Industrial food from the beginning of the century, such as Jell-O, factory-made bread, and cake mixes, was making huge gains in the market from new advertising vehicles such as radio. What could better spell the beginning of the end than bottled salad dressing, the manufacture of a product that was so easy to make at home? The editors of America Eats understood that in another ten years American food would be very different.
    The Washington office sent a memo to regional editors calling for America Eats to be a 75,000-word book on “American cookery and the part it has played in the national life, as exemplified in the group meals that preserve not only traditional dishes but also traditional attitudes and customs. Emphasis should be divided between food and people.”
    According to the plan,