The Food of a Younger Land Read Online Free PDF Page B

Portland, Maine, and then omitted at the last moment to make room for photographs. At the request of the Maine Project, it was returned to them. This manuscript, which the note referred to as a “very valuable essay,” vanished along with most of the Maine archive in a later fire.
    The paper in the boxes at the Library of Congress amounts to a stack almost two feet high of raw, unedited manuscripts, many from amateur writers. It is far more material than the 75,000 words envisioned for the book, but FWP projects averaged 10 percent of the submitted material. A surprising number of essays begin with the line “In the fall, when the air turns crisp . . .” A memo from Washington stated, “The work should be done by creative writers who will avoid effusive style and the clichés adopted by some writers on food and who have been interested in sensory perception and in their fellow-men, their customs and crochets.” This ideal was not always lived up to in these manuscripts the way it probably would have been in the final crafted book. But an astonishing array of interesting culinary and cultural observations are present.
    Some of the manuscripts were information intended to be incorporated in the five regional essays. A range of short stories, poems, anecdotes, and essays were apparently vying to be run as the additional material that was to accompany the five essays. The America Eats staff was considering running this additional material with bylines. Professional and would-be professional writers seemed to be trying to make their pieces stand out so that they would be selected among the few signed articles. But some sent in notes, others recipes, and some submitted lists of local books for the informal bibliography.
    Because many of the articles were to be incorporated into larger pieces, some have no byline. Some projects, such as New Mexico and New Hampshire, as a matter of practice, never used names. In states where authors are identified it is often in WPA fashion, as the “worker.” Some of these unsigned manuscripts, though probably not many, may be from unnamed literary masters. Algren’s contribution has been identified because it turns up in other collections, but inevitably, since it is not signed, there are some historians who question its authenticity.
    Ironically, the chaotic pile of imperfect manuscripts has left us with a better record than would the nameless, cleaned-up, smooth-reading final book that Lyle Saxon was to have turned in. A more polished version would still be an interesting book today, a record of how Americans ate and what their social gatherings were like in the early 1940s. Like the guidebooks, it would have been well written and well laid out. And it would not have had frustrating holes and omissions. But we would have had little information on the original authors. There are among these boxes a few acknowledged masters, such as Algren and Eudora Welty, some forgotten literary stars of the 1930s, and authors of mysteries, thrillers, Westerns, children’s books, and food books, as well as a few notable local historians, several noted anthropologists, a few important regional writers, playwrights, an actress, a political speechwriter, a biographer, newspaper journalists, a sportswriter, university professors and deans, and a few poets. They were white and black, Jews, Italians, and Chicanos—the sons and daughters of immigrants, descendants of Pilgrims, and of American Indians. Typical of the times, there were a few Communists, a lot of Democrats, and at least two Republicans.
    One thing that shines through the mountain of individual submissions is how well they reflect the original directive: “Emphasis should be divided between food and people.” It is this perspective that gives this work the feeling of a time capsule, a preserved glimpse of America in the early 1940s.
    With this in mind, I selected not always the best but the most interesting pieces, both unsigned and signed. The