BARNES & NOBLE | America Eats!: On the Road with the WPA - the Fish Fries, Box Supper Socials, and Chittlin' Feasts That Define Real American Food by Pat Willard, Bloomsbury USA

America Eats!: On the Road with the WPA - the Fish Fries, Box Supper Socials, and Chittlin' Feasts That Define Real American Food

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America Eats!: On the Road with the WPA: The Fish Fries, Box Supper Socials, and Chitlin Feasts That Define Real American Food Pub. Date: 7/7/2009 Publisher: Bloomsbury USA
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America Eats!: On the Road with the WPA - the Fish Fries, Box Supper Socials, and Chittlin' Feasts That Define Real American Food Pub. Date: 7/8/2008 Publisher: Bloomsbury USA

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Overview

What the Sterns did for road food, Pat Willard does for festive American group eating in this exploration of our national cuisine, with a never-before-published WPA manuscript as her guide.

In America Eats! Pat Willard takes readers on a journey into the regional nooks and crannies of American cuisine where WPA writers—including Eudora Welty, Saul Bellow, Ralph Ellison, and Nelson Algren, among countless others—were dispatched in 1935 to document the roots of our diverse culinary cuisine. With the unpublished WPA manuscript as her guide, Willard visits the sites of American food’s past glory to rediscover the vibrant foundation of America’s traditional cuisine. She visits a booyah cook-off in Minnesota, a political feast in Mississippi, a watermelon festival in Oklahoma, and a sheepherders ball in Idaho, to name a few. Featuring recipes and never-before-seen photos, including those from the WPA by Dorothea Lange, Ben Shahn, and Marion Post Wolcott, America Eats! is a glowing celebration of American food, past and present.

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly

The original America Eats! was written for the WPA by out-of-work writers during the Depression of the 1930s as "an account of group eating as an important American social institution," the development of local, traditional cookery by churches and communities, fairs, festivals, rodeos, fund-raisers, rent parties and the like. It was never completed or published, but when food writer Willard (Secrets of Saffron) found the manuscript in the Library of Congress, she decided to follow the footsteps of the original writers to find what remained of these feasts, or a modern equivalent. The result is an interesting anthology of original WPA writing (most by unknowns, but often lively) and contemporary experience. Willard found Brunswick Stew (historically made with squirrel meat) in North Carolina and Virginia as well as versions of it in Minnesota (booya) and Kentucky (burgoo). Recipes (not always with squirrel) are given. There are still Melon Days in Colorado and Oklahoma, and an Apple Week in Washington State. Fewer homes have kitchen gardens now, and some fair food is distinctly modern (fried Twinkies), but Willard did find a wild-game dinner in Oregon and, of course, barbecue everywhere. Where there were once tobacco farms in traditionally dry Southern counties, Willard, in this engaging book, finds vineyards. (July)

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The Barnes & Noble Review

The very title -- exclamation point officially included -- conveys the exuberance of its original editors. Starting in the late '30s, as part of the Works Progress Administration, a passel of notable writers -- Eudora Welty, Saul Bellow, and Ralph Ellison among them -- were paid to document American cooking from coast to coast. Alas, the project was met with the same suspicion as many other WPA projects -- Frivolous spending! A haven for Communists! -- and was soon killed for good. Now food writer Pat Willard has retrieved the shelved manuscripts, placing selections from the originals side by side with an account of her own coast-to-coast road trip to track down modern havens of American eating. No mere recipe hound, she stays true to the original project, with an eye on "importance of social gatherings that glorify the non-professional cook and keep traditional cookery alive." The selections from WPA writers document thresher's dinners, chitlin struts, and squirrel hunts -- with dialect, social attitudes, and racial prejudice intact. Willard finds county fairs and venison farms, and explains the difference between Brunswick stew, booya, and burgoo. The occasional recipes come in proportions meant for sharing -- say, 30 pounds of oxtail, four hens, and a bushel of tomatoes. While plenty of food writers have documented American cookery, few do so with quite the same vintage charm, literary snap, and respect for the kind of recipes best made in neighborly batches to serve 50 or 500. --Amy Benfer

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781596913622
Publisher: Bloomsbury USA
Publication date: 7/8/2008
Pages: 320
Sales rank: 1,147,496
Product dimensions: 6.48 (w) x 9.20 (h) x 1.05 (d)

Meet the Author

Pat Willard is the author of Pie Every Day, A Soothing Broth, and Secrets of Saffron, which was nominated for an IACP award for the best literary cookbook. She’s written for Bon Appetit, Ladies Home Journal, American Heritage, and the Los Angeles Times. She lives in Brooklyn.

1 The American cauldron 1

2 The big-hearted feast - fund-raising dinners 17

3 The harvest queen - agricultural fairs 47

4 The wild shores - the Northwest 78

5 The groveling season - political gatherings 98

6 A gathering in the woods - national holidays 124

7 At the Lord's table - church suppers 148

8 The undertaker's meal - funeral ceremonies 180

9 Stomping at the post - social club celebrations 197

10 The frontier - Mexicans, Indians, and cowboys 222

11 City life - a walk between then and now 151

12 America eats! now - home from the road, mulling things over 278

Acknowledgments 291

Photo credits 293

List of recipes 295

Index 297

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JoanP60615

Posted September 11, 2009

Made me want to eat!

The Works Progress Administration was one of the glories of the New Deal. Although it employed millions of people, it is probably best known for the work it provided to artists and writers through the Federal Writers' Project and the Federal Artists' Project. One of the projects it embarked on was to document "how America eats", more specifically, to document local social gatherings at which food was served and thus describe "American" cookery and its importance to community. Despite the many writers and photographers who contributed to the project, the planned book (to be called "America Eats!") never came to fruition, but the papers were boxed up, and, though many were lost, many were preserved.

Decades later, Pat Willard had the brilliant idea of going back to the towns and gatherings visited by the FWP writers to find out if those traditions and foods were still around. Her book alternates excerpts from the original manuscripts with her own descriptions of what she found, grouped by themes such as "Agricultural Fairs", "Fund-raising Dinners", "Political Gatherings" and the like. (She also includes a few recipes, as lagniappe.) Willard found that many of the events memorialized by the FWP writers no longer existed or had been transformed (some weren't even remembered!), but others were still going strong.

As we travel the roads of the United States, eating dishes ranging from Brunswick Stew in North Carolina to barbecued salmon in Oregon, we learn, through the food and the reasons for the socializing, the history and culture of these places. Lucky Pat Willard, to taste so many good things. And I greatly appreciate her bringing the stories written for the FWP out of the boxes in which they'd been stores and into the light of day.

If I have any quibble with the book, it is with Willard's defensiveness about American cuisine. The food can speak for itself!
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lmh65

Posted February 17, 2009

very good

I really enjoyed this book. I liked reading about the communties and their get togethers. It's nice to read something that when times are tough, people still manage to get by and always have enough for strangers or others that are in need.
I love reading books that show people willing to help one another, not like in this dog eat dog world we live in now
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