Food Of A Younger Land by Mark Kurlansky

From The Week of June 13, 2010

Mr. Kurlansky, who has taken it upon himself to be the biographer of all things micro-history, points out , in Food Of A Younger Land, that, for the longest time, the United States never bothered to codify or define its own culture. There were no travel books, culture guides, or cook books that attempted to define the country. One imagines this to be a natural byproduct of the US' history as a nation of immigrants; after all, how can a culture be defined when most of its citizens hail from somewhere else? In any event, Mr. Kurlansky sets about describing one of the great, unfinished projects of the Roosevelt WPA, to sum up the traditional dishes endemic to America's various regions and to put them all in a cook book for everyone to enjoy.

Though the project was never completed, a treasure trove of information was acquired, compiled and then narrated by the project's scribes, many of whom were out-of-work authors or newspapermen. From the varieties of Vermont maple sirup to the astounding Arkansan squirrel soup, the staples of American cuisine are defined and catalogued complete with recipes. Mr. Kurlansky re-traces both the project's history and its final product, causing Food Of A Younger Land to be both a history of the effort and a coda to what is essentially an unpublished cook book from the 1930s. It shouldn't work.

But it does. Oh, Mr. Kurlansky relies too heavily on the project's accumulation of recipes, stepping aside far too often for the book's original material, but it's easy to imagine why he made this decision. The recipes and the essays that were meant to accompany them are charming glimpses of a time remembered far more for the smashing of tanks and the roar of guns, than it was for the simple times, the perfection of a well-cooked meal. Mr. Kurlansky could have bettered this account by contrasting the past with the present and shedding some light on how eating habits have changed since the 1930s, but otherwise this is an amusing and sometimes stomach-churning cook book and cultural history unlike, well, any other I know. (3/5 Stars)