The Food of a Younger Land Read Online Free Page B

the writing was to be “light but not tea shoppe, masculine not feminine.” This odd but important statement was Kellock’s effort to have food writing approached more seriously. Kellock did not want America Eats to be like most of the food writing of the day that generally appeared in women’s magazines or in women’s sections of newspapers. These items, almost always written by women and for women, followed the belief that women were not interested in politics and social problems. The style was bright and cheerful and all issues and social observations were avoided.
    The memo went on to say, “In describing group meals tell how they are organized, who supplies and cooks the food, what the traditional dishes are, what local opinion is on heretical variations in the recipe, and what the group mores are in connection with the meal. (Virginia, for example, dusts shellfish lightly with flour before frying and scorns the Maryland custom of dipping the fish in batter.)”
     
     
     
    B eing a government agency, the FWP divided the country in accordance with the peculiarities of the U.S. Census Bureau. Like the census, the book was to have five regions, and it titled them “The Northeast Eats,” “The South Eats,” “The Middle West Eats,” “The Far West Eats,” and “The Southwest Eats.” The South would include the old Confederacy minus Texas but with Kentucky, Maryland, West Virginia, Delaware, and Washington, D.C., added. Nevada and Utah were put in the Far West rather than the Southwest, and the FWP had its own invention of dividing California into Los Angeles-based Southern California in the Southwest and San Francisco-based Northern California in the Far West. The result was that the amount of copy from each region was determined not by the variety of foods, the size of the area, or the population, but rather by the number of separate Writers’ Projects in each region. The South generated the most copy, because fifteen projects were reporting. The least copy came from the Southwest, with only five projects reporting. This unevenness, which is quite pronounced, probably would have been evened out in the final book. Each region was to have an essay of about one hundred pages and one, two, or three additional pieces.
    The regional essays were to be produced by the Writers’ Projects in whose writers Washington had particular confidence. That Louisiana was in charge of the South and Illinois with the Chicago staff was given the Middle West was predictable. But the Northeast was run by the New Jersey Project rather than New York City or Massachusetts; Arizona had the Southwest; and Montana, not Northern California with San Francisco, had the Far West. This may have reflected which projects were best holding together in the slowly evaporating FWP of 1940.
    At its peak in April 1936, the Federal Writers’ Project employed 6,686 people, but by the time America Eats was proposed in 1939 the project was down to 3,500. By November 1941 the number had dropped to 2,200. Writers didn’t like working for the government and felt there was a stigma to writing for a welfare check. They also did not like writing without a byline. They left whenever they had another opportunity, and by 1940 the economy was improving. In that year alone, 2 million unemployed Americans found jobs.
    Kenneth Rexroth, weary of doctoring bad writing, resigned in 1939. John Cheever, who disliked the people of Washington in their matching and predictable suits, wanted to leave, but Alsberg talked him into helping with the New York City Guide. He resigned after it came out in 1939. By 1941 Vardis Fisher had left the Idaho Writers’ Project, which had few people remaining.
    The New York City Writers’ Project struggled to keep Richard Wright. Wright had been born in 1908 in Mississippi, the son of an illiterate sharecropper and his educated schoolteacher wife. The family moved to Memphis when he was young, and he got books from the library by