The Food of a Younger Land Read Online Free PDF

1941, said,
    This is a reminder that deadline for contributions to America Eats has long passed. Results of research already done should be sent at once to this office, even if in rough form and incomplete. It is highly important to conserve work already done, as the war effort may cause an abrupt change in the activities under the Writers’ program.
    In January 1942 Denis Delaney of the Massachusetts Project replied that Massachusetts would not be able to make a major contribution to America Eats because the state project had shrunk to the point that most of their writers were replacements from other states who knew little of New England traditions.
    Other states rushed in copy. The entire file for the state of Washington is stamped “received Dec. 17, 1941.” All five regional essays were called in, and they arrived in various states of disrepair. New Jersey handed in the one for the Northeast with apologies, saying, “The whole essay boils down, I fear, to a list of foods, which we are aware falls short of the design of the book.” They pleaded that more time would be needed to do the job as it should be done. Joseph Miller, the Arizona supervisor, sent in the Southwestern essay with apologies. “It’s a shame, such an interesting subject, that more time couldn’t have been taken to think the thing through.” He then suggested that Saxon might be able to fix it. “He’s a good writer.” Some editors started talking about changing the book to place greater emphasis on the ability of the early pioneers to deal with privation, as more suitable to a book coming out in wartime.
    On May 1, 1942, the Federal Writers’ Project officially became the Writers’ Unit of the War Services subdivision of the WPA, which went on to produce sixty-four Servicemen’s Recreational Guides, a guide to the U.S. Naval Academy, books on military history, and books such as the Bomb Squad Training Manual from the Ohio Project.
    On May 14 Katherine Kellock was dismissed with two weeks’ notice and spent most of her remaining time making sure that every manuscript and letter she had was turned over to the Library of Congress, much of it with little cataloging or filing. On July 15 Lyle Saxon finally left the project without ever having edited America Eats.
    By February 1943, when the WPA was finally closed down, some million words had been published about America by the Federal Writers’ Project. There were at least 276 books and hundreds of pamphlets and brochures, in all more than one thousand publications. But America Eats was not one of them.
     
     
     
    W hen I opened the files of America Eats in the U.S. Library of Congress, I felt as though I had accidentally stumbled back into prewar America. The manuscripts were all typed. Most of them were blurry duplicates, reproduced with carbon paper on that thin translucent paper that they used to call onionskin. The America Eats project often took articles from magazines or newspapers or earlier WPA publications and put them in their files with the intention of using them in the new book. These, too, were typed with duplicates in carbon paper because there were no copying machines. Within these gray cardboard boxes it was prewar America again.
    What remained of America Eats is mostly to be found in these five boxes filled with onionskin carbon copies. There are also twenty-six photographs. This cache is clearly incomplete. The New York City pieces are entirely missing, at least some of them to be found in the Municipal Archives in New York amid the papers of another unpublished WPA project, Feeding the City . But of the many other missing papers, it is not always possible to say if the material was not produced or just had never been sent in to the Library of Congress. The Missouri file contains only a short memo about a cookbook. In the letters among the America Eats papers there is a reference to an outstanding piece on Down East cooking that had been prepared for the guide to