America Eats! by Pat Willard

Source of book: I own this

 

This book is one of the odd ones my wife picked up at one time, and I later discovered just perusing our shelves. 

 

The book takes its title and its idea from one of the many Great Depression era government programs that lost funding eventually and never completed its task. The idea was that a small army of writers would explore various parts of America and report on its unique food traditions. As one might expect, this nebulous task left a lot of room for interpretation - and dispute. The primary one, naturally, was what food was truly “American”? Since, except for Native American food (which was scandalously underrepresented in the project), all “American” food has immigrant roots, how long ago did the immigration have to occur? How much transformation? No easy answers there, of course. However, Pat Willard comes up with some interesting conclusions of her own. (See below.)

 

So, in the late 1930s, the project lost funding, and was largely forgotten. Many of the archives disappeared, while others languished and molded away in state government buildings around the country. When Pat Willard sought to explore and write about the project, she found that so much was missing that she needed to take a different approach. Also, while some writing was good (a few famous authors contributed - the University of Iowa published their regional manuscript, and noted that Richard Wright and Saul Bellow were believed to have been among the authors), much of it was dreadful - the sort of thing you might see in a small-town church bulletin, not even a newspaper. 

 

So, Willard decided to write a somewhat different book. She took what she thought was a good cross section of the best work of the project, and combined it with the story of her own epic road trip to try to find the traditions that were written about. For this, she focused on large public or community events - fairs, festivals, food events, funerals, political events, and so on. If the archive mentioned something, she tried to find if it still existed. In its final form, the book is a mix of the original articles from the project, Willard’s own experiences, and her best shot at some of the recipes. That may sound like a mess, but Willard did a great job of tying things together, organizing by region and event, and generally taking a big mess and making a rather entertaining book out of it. In doing so, she centers the food and the community rather than herself, with a really low-key style that gives the idea and flavor of the food and the events devoted to it, without ever seeming to get in the way. 

 

This book was written in 2008, so some of the pop-cultural things from the last decade and a half won’t be in there - in particular, food television hadn’t become quite the phenomenon, let alone exploded into its own weird uniquely American entertainment form. (And believe me, I do rather love food TV, which is why I refuse to watch it at home - I’d waste far too much time for my own good.) 

 

Willard acknowledges that American cuisine has had its really low moments, and attributes some of this to our relatively recent birth - it takes time for things to become polished - but also to the time in which we came of age. 

 

The bad press that our national cuisine has received at times is partly due to timing. You can’t tell me every other country in the world has not had its share of bad kitchen days. But, in comparison to others, ours is a decidedly young cuisine. Think about it - compared to our four hundred years of cooking, nearly every cuisine that is considered great has been developing for at least a thousand years. On top of this, our cooking has had the misfortune to develop just when mass media was beginning to flourish, which subsequently allowed our most egregious sins to be so widely broadcast. 

 

Also a factor was the sheer difficulty of documenting a cuisine in constant change, constant innovation, and constant reinvention. 

 

The difficulty of bringing America Eats! to full life in an accessible way has dampened what the surviving papers came to celebrate so clearly: a lively cuisine that is always evolving with the continual influence of a changing populace. One of the most contentious yet most important themes rumbling through the papers was how a region’s cooking manners were influenced by different people, especially foreigners, moving into a territory and gradually rubbing one method of doing something against another until it became incorporated as a local tradition. What immigrants shared with the people who had settled before them was the hard experience of leaving behind their homelands and being faced with the prospects of a vast wilderness filled with unfamiliar plants and animals that forced them to be imaginative about the ingredients the used. Drawn together out of necessity and loneliness, out of the need to create something beyond themselves simply to survive, all these strangers - the constant flow of newcomers weaving among the people who preceded them - slowly inched toward conceiving a common table and helped to give birth to an inimitable national identity.

 

That’s all introduction to the main body, which starts off with a bang in describing Brunswick Stew. Which, since my wife has one branch of her ancestry descended from real hillbilly moonshiner sorts, was familiar to her - including the debate as to whether a true Brunswick Stew can exist without including squirrel. 

 

This chapter focuses on soups and stews made in huge batches for community occasions. I love how Willard describes the phenomenon - which still exists across America. 

 

It’s nice to report that, when a community need arises, we’re still inclined as a nation to pull out a big pot and start throwing into it a lot of ingredients, with the understanding that sharing a large batch of something delicious with neighbors and strangers alike is a fine and proper way to accomplish some good.

 

One of the family traditions that I very much cherish and embrace is our love of food, communal gatherings to eat said food, and our embrace of inviting whoever needs a place to go. 

 

Another chapter looks at harvest festivals generally, but with a particular focus on a watermelon festival. I agree with Willard that it is nice to find watermelons with seeds, rather than the increasingly insipid and tasteless seedless varieties that everyone seems to love. 

 

The chapter on political fundraiser food is pretty amusing - the smaller the politician and race, the better the food, unsurprisingly. One unexpected gem from the original project is the description of the speaker as damning taxes and the Republican party. Times have changed, I note. 

 

The original project includes a decent number of African American gatherings - the one on chitlins is particularly good writing - but the tone is quite dated. Willard tries to make up for that by talking about the history of some of the events. In the chapter on church gatherings, she attends one such event in (I believe) Delaware. The church was founded in the early 1800s by Peter Spencer, a freed slave. For a while, he tried to attend a local multi-racial congregation, but things were not, shall we say, equal. As Spencer wrote, “The Methodist Episcopal Church in this region thought proper to deny the colored members of said church the privileges guaranteed by the word of God and His liberal Gospel.” 

 

The modern-day preacher tells Willard another truth: “You can tell what a culture’s values are when you look at their celebrations.” 

 

In the chapter on the Southwest, Willard talks about the Municipal Market that was described in the original project. Today, as with most of these public markets, they have gentrified and become nothing like they once were. (Not that they are bad - plenty of good food to be had - but no longer places where working class locals eat.) Instead, Willard nails it when she says the modern equivalent is the taco truck. And heck yeah, I agree with that. My own home state has a long history of food trucks in general, and taco trucks in particular. In fact, I have one across from my office. Okay, technically it is a trailer, not a truck, but same idea. And lengua tacos to die for. 

 

I was surprised to run across, in the chapter on city life, a reference to McSorley’s Tavern. Hey, I wrote about Joseph Mitchell’s slightly fictionalized writing on that place. It is interesting to see how it has - and hasn’t - changed since then. 

 

While McSorley’s made the cut, in general, the America Eats! project looked down on city food - something astonishing to us these days, where cities are hotbeds of innovation and diverse cuisines. Actually, they were back then too, but, well, you might guess why the project mostly denigrated city food. 

 

Before any discussion can get under way, however, it should be understood how America Eats! intended to look at uban eating, for the papers - or rather the editors - had a rather jaundiced view of the situation. The introduction to city eating in the Northeast section of the manuscript states: “Regional cooking has been gradually forced out [of cities] by the products of fast freight and of the canning factory and to some extent by the influence of immigrants.” 

 

Yeah, those immigrants. They change things, and those “regional” foods by earlier immigrants get modified or replaced. Willard points out just how many iconic American foods are city foods - associated with specific cities. I mean, Baltimore crab cakes? Boston beans? Philly cheese steak sandwiches? Think about it…

 

There are a couple of great lines by the author in the concluding chapter of the book, and I think they are a great way to close this post. 

 

By talking about our food within the context of social engagements, the federal writers were able to reveal something very important about American cooking: It’s not actually the taste of our food, but the use of it, that has been important to our cuisine’s development. Even at the most food-centric gatherings, emphasis was less on the dishes than on how they supported the reason for people to meet. 

 

I believe this to be true with all my heart. Food is, in many ways, just an excuse to be social. For a number of years (pre pandemic), my brother and I ran regular dinners with a group of culinary-minded friends, where we picked a theme and cooked to it. The food was, I must say, top notch. But the best fun was having a reason to get together, something in common to gather around. 

 

And then, the final observation:

 

What I learned on the road was that we are now far more accepting of - in fact we delight in - foreign flavors being added to our dishes. Our worldview is broader than it was in the 1930s and our sensibilities have embraced multicultural attitudes. 

 

This is certainly true of our food. Even the most bigoted of our citizens love their Mexican food. And their Chinese food. And, increasingly, their Thai, Vietnamese, Salvadorian, Ethiopian, Lebanese, and…the list goes on. For myself, I love living in a state that has an incredible abundance of variety of food from around the world. The explosion of multicultural influence as raised the game of traditional American cooking as well, and fusion flavors are so widespread that we often don’t even notice them as a new innovation. My hope is that our embrace of worldwide food will eventually be matched by our embrace of the people themselves - an invitation of all to the same table.