What I've Read: The Food of a Younger Land

To me the biggest takeaway from this book was something I obviously/kinda sorta/already knew but never thought about in a way like this until reading this book and also having a conversation with my grandmother about its details.

And the big detail is the creation of the interstate highway system. That it was really only created about 60 years ago is extremely fascinating to me. When Dan, Luke and I went to Ireland last year, we laughed that Ireland was just completing its first major sections of its own interstate system, but when I read this book I was surprised at how young our own highways are. Eisenhower was sick of military supplies not reaching the coasts fast enough, so something had to be done.

How the hell does this relate to a book about food? Well, the crux of Kurlansky's book is that before we had interstates (and thus fast food restaurants and on and on) there was a stronger reliance on local recipes, supplies and food customs. Regional cooking was not a craze but a necessity because there was not way of putting a French restaurant on Main Street unless your town happened to have a large French population and access to French products.

Kurlansky doesn't actually write much in this book at all, just little snippets to introduce the recipes, traditions and that were written by writers during the Depression. Back in the ‘30s, the government gave writers, poets and others jobs to write things so they could contribute to the nation and earn a small bit of a living. One of the main projects of the Federal Writers Project was to write a national cookbook, composed of pieces from each state in the country. This way, people in Nevada could get a better understanding of how those in Alabama or Maine ate. It also served as a national record of the times. Many of the pieces are amazing because of their regional perspective and accompanying voice. Several of the writers from the South write with deep, often barely unrecognizable accents, but theirs were some of the richest experiences and food histories based on poverty and slavery.

The FWP ended before the book was completed, so Kurlansky had to piece everything back together and give it some background and setting. And not everyone was schmuck writers, either. Zora Neale Hurston and many other well-respected authors and playwrights were part of the project which was interesting to see. Some of the other highlights, and there were many, was reading about Penn Station in NYC was the birthplace of eating raw oysters; how much the menu at the Brown Hotel in Louisville has changed very little over the decades; how much the people in Oregon and Washington don't just love salmon but loooooove salmon.

It's little regional quirks and differences that you learn about that are truly fascinating considering it's happened within a few generations of my birth and gave me the opportunity to speak with my grandmother about Depression-era times and the kind of eating that took place in her younger years living in Frederick and later New Jersey. Though not food-related, just listening to hear talk about how a drive from her house to Manhattan (which now takes about 30-45 minutes depending on traffic) took almost 3 hours because only two two-lane roads went from northern Jersey to the city. Crazy stuff, and fun to talk about with her. Always glad when a good book allows you to connect with a family member, and that is why this book gets a big thumbs up from me.