America Eats

The growing interest in local food systems combined with the economic downturn makes for a good climate for books about American food of the Depression period. The rationing of World War II was followed by the transfer of wartime technologies for food preservation to the general marketplace, changing American food forever from a patchwork of regional cuisines to a national diet based on chain restaurants, frozen and canned food and, above all, homogeneity. The Depression period, for all the limitations that poverty brought to the tables of most Americans, can seem now like the last hurrah of real food.

So it’s a great time for the release of two new books about WPA food writing, a nearly-forgotten part of the great cultural projects of the New Deal. Though writers and editors were engaged to create a national guide to American food, the project was never completed and the writing produced never published, until this year. I haven’t read Mark Kulansky’s book The Food of Younger Land, which outlines the history of the project and then includes selections from the archive, focusing on writing from major authors like Eudora Welty and Zora Neale Hurston. Pat Willards’s America Eats: On the Road with the WPA takes a somewhat different approach, interlacing excerpts from the original WPA pieces with her own reporting from church dinners, harvest festivals, and other food-centered gatherings that have continued from WPA days.

This is a somewhat disorderly, frustrating book, which may result from the sheer variety of material Willard includes. The writing that was done for the WPA project spanned a range of styles, from journalistic reports to sentimental sketches to fictionalized accounts. The quality of the writing is a varied as the style. Among the best Willard included are a sensitive short story from Iola Thomas of the Iowa office about a threshers’ dinner and a description of the conch-eaters of the Florida Keys by Stetson Kennedy. Some of the other selections tend toward the twee, in some cases condescending to the subjects to a degree that is deeply off-putting.

Willard’s prose is clean and straightforward and her interest in American food and cultural tradition seems genuine. Some of the limitations of the book seem a direct result of the limitations of the primary material. Some regions were neglected in the original project; many arbitrary decisions were made about which immigrant foods were to be included and which were not “American enough;” cities other than New York were completely neglected. Willard, in following in the footsteps of the project, is forced into some of the same limitations, and she acknowledges them. But perhaps the greatest limitation, one which Willard references only briefly, is the focus on food events, rather than broader food traditions. We hear about the fairs and festivals, church suppers, political dinners and funeral feasts, but not about daily home cooking or, for that matter, professional cooking done in small eateries. This would not be a problem if Willard didn’t try to make larger claims for the meaning of the decline of these events in terms of larger culinary and social history. When trying to discuss these issues, particularly in the final chapter, Willard is weak, making poorly-supported assertions and moving on quickly without any depth of analysis. She lacks the subtle sensitivity for regional food evidence by a writer like John Thorne and the scholarly comprehensiveness of someone like Waverly Root. But she has skill at drawing a scene. I very much enjoyed her portrait of the Basque Sheepherders Ball, the funeral feast of the Choctaw Indians, and the Mexican coaches of South Sixth Avenue in Tucson.

In trying to find and report upon the closest equivalents to events described in the original WPA pieces, Willard also fails to look at newly developing food traditions. The resurgence in interest in local foods has lead to new celebrations of regional specialties. In my part of the country, there are maple syrup days, cheese festivals, harvest fairs and homebrewer competitions that may be recent in origin (some dating to the first “back to the earth” gatherings of the seventies, others part of the most recent local food revival), but are nonetheless authentic inheritors of the spirit of those festivals of the 1930s, social events truly centered on a shared love of good food. By ignoring new traditions, Willard paints an incomplete picture of the current state of American food and its place in community life.

Overall, the book may not provide a lot of insight into the changes in America’s food culture, but it is enjoyable as a kind of scrapbook of American food celebrations of the Depression and today.

Quick post - quick side dish

I don't even have a picture. But I wanted to remember a side dish I pulled together the other night, because I found myself wishing there were more of it left over, even though at the time it didn't seem particularly special. Maybe it's not, but it's good nonetheless, and easy and fast and made up of stuff I almost always have on hand. The proportions here are approximate, I didn't measure:

Carrot-Orange Salad
About 3 cups of shredded carrots
One heaping tablespoon of mayo
One heaping tablespoon Greek yogurt
1 tablespoon orange juice
1 canned mandarin oranges, drained well
1/2 teaspoon cumin powder

Blend mayo, yogurt, juice and cumin powder. If you are serving right away and don't plan to have leftovers, just mix in the rest of the ingredients. If you want a salad that will stand up, you should salt the carrots lightly and let them sit for at least a half-hour. Then come back, rinse off the salt and squeeze the carrots until they give up some of their excess juice. That way, they won't give off juice while sitting in the dressing, making it watery. Also, if you only have regular, thinner yogurt, you might cut back on the orange juice to just a 1/2 tablespoon.

The cumin gives a nice smoky edge to the simple carrot-orange sweetness, and of course there's the creamy-tangy aspect to the dressing. This is a very easy-going salad that would complement many other dishes. You could, of course, use segmented oranges instead of mandarin, but that's adding time and effort. And personally, canned mandarin oranges are a guilty pleasure, a weakness of mine. They're also good for the husband with Crohn's, since all the fibrous stuff is removed completely.

On a food imagery kick

And I'm loving these posters, the United Plates of America, each one depicting a particular state map as a food item. Check out Massachusetts as calamari, Vermont as a carrot and (just to expand our horizons here), Michigan as bacon and eggs.

Of course, I would really have loved these if each state were represented by one of its more characteristic foodstuffs, but still very cool.

Great article

This was really well done.

Contemporary Victory Garden Propaganda

These posters are great.

The Haymarket: Strategies for a Recession

I grew up in the suburbs, not in Boston, so I didn't go to the Haymarket until I was about ten or twelve or so. But I knew about it, because my father's job would take him into the city some days, and if he were there on a Friday or Saturday, he would come home with bags and bags of produce. I always loved fruit, so this was a treat, because he would buy things he didn't buy at the regular supermarket, like plums and cherries and black grapes.

The first time I saw the place in person made quite an impression, though. In high school I participated in a writing contest, and for the creative portion I submitted a piece about feeling agoraphobic at the market. It's still a rather disorienting place to be: far more people than space; sometimes overwhelming smells, particularly on hot days; lots of shouting. But it's been a big part of my food-buying life since I moved to the city, and I have great affection for its somewhat rough charms.

For those of you who don't know about Haymarket, let's first clarify what it is not. It's not a farmers' market. The guys who sell produce there are certainly not farmers. It might better be described a sort of outdoor fruit and vegetable outlet store, a last chance discount center for overstocked, aging produce.

The Haymarket has a long history, having started in the 1830s as an area of produce vendors selling from horsecarts. Now the vendors set up tents in U-shaped area about two city blocks long on Fridays and Saturday and sell produce they buy at the Chelsea wholesale market on the cheap before the new shipments come in for the new week. The prices are unbelievable. The quality is, to say the least, mixed.

Culturally, shopping the Haymarket is a authentic Boston experience. The vendors are mostly from Italian families who have owned their stands for generations. A few Asian families have gotten in on the act, too, which is nice. The clientele is far more diverse. There are lots of old Italian women from the North End, students on budgets, slow-walking tourists getting in everyone's way, and many, many recent immigrants from all over. I once heard a vendor tell his buddy, in a thick Boston accent, that he could name vegetables and count to ten in 15 languages. He didn't mention the number of languages he could swear in, but I bet it was impressive. The vendors can be rude or at least brusque, but if you smile and are polite, generally they're fine, and they might just call you sweetheart, which I always like.

But what about the goods? I go to Haymarket primarily when there are no local options (dead of winter), so I would be buying supermarket produce anyway, or when I need stuff that isn't possible to get locally, like limes and pineapples. This miserable, rainy, busy, exhausting pregnant summer, though, I've been going far more often. I'm not the only one. It's been crazy-crowded at the market since last fall, when the recession started to really hit a lot of people hard. But if you're going to get the most out of it, I suggest a few strategies:

1) Go early in the morning - preferrably on Friday, but early Saturday is better than late. The produce won't have sat out in the sun all day, so it will be fresher, and there won't be so many of the aforementioned slow-moving tourists.

2) Bring your own bags. Don't be a jerk and bring a shopping cart. Everyone will hate you. Just bring a bunch of tote bags, because you will buy more than you mean to, and carrying a bunch of heavy bags on your shoulder will be more comfortable than carrying a bunch of heavy bags in your hands. If you can find someone to come with you, do it - then you can get a watermelon.

3) Don't touch the produce unless the vendor tells you it's okay. Some things you can just pick up, like a pineapple or the top bunch of leeks. But the soft, delicate stuff, which unfortunately is just the stuff you would probably want to pick out yourself, is strictly off-limits. Is this a tactic to pawn off crappy produce on you? Yes, sometimes. But it's also reasonable - if every customer was allow to paw through the displays picking the perfect figs or tomatoes, everything would be bruised within an hour.

4) Expect rot. Have I mentioned that you will be paying a pittance? I used to say that you had to expect to throw away about 1/3 of what you bought here. Now, I would say I throw away less than a 1/4 (see strategy 6 - what to buy), but I still go through the bags when I get home and immediately toss anything that looks bad - one bad apple and all that. Also, if you're buying something that's likely to be delicate, plan on using it that day - don't even think about buying raspberries on Friday for a dessert Monday.

5) Take a walk through the market first. Sometimes only one vendor will have something you want, sometimes prices vary from stand to stand, quality almost always does. Walk through, then buy on your way back.

6) There are things you should buy here, and things you should not.

Great choices:

Limes. Standardly 8 or 10 for a dollar, usually in great shape. Lately they've been selling whole boxes for $2.50 - I'm guessing that's about 50 limes worth. If you're feeling ambitious, it would be smart to buy, juice and freeze in ice cube trays.

Lemons. Not quite as cheap or reliable as limes, but still cheaper than the supermarket.

Cherries and plums. My dad's favorites are very cheap here compared to supermarkets, and generally the quality is good, although sometimes the plums can be soft. I have been buying two two-pound bags of Bing cherries each week for about a month now, and have yet to get a bag that wasn't close to perfect, every last cherry. I will switch off to local plums once I see them at the farmers' market, but until then I'm stocking up here.

Bananas. My husband has all sorts of medical limitations on his fruit consumption, but he can have all the bananas he wants. I got a lovely bunch of about ten large bananas for a dollar this weekend.

Watermelon. Another fruit that can be hard to find at the farmers' market, and I have a hard time getting through summer without it. The little "personal-sized" ones have more edible area than you might think, because the rind is so thin, and they're easy to carry home.

Ginger. No local option, always cheap here and almost always of good quality.

Some things are generally okay and well-priced, so if your other choice is the supermarket, not a farmers' market, no reason not to save money on fennel, peppers, leeks, carrots, cabbage and other fairly long-storing basics.

Be careful, but consider looking for:

Tropical and Asian fruits and vegetables. The range of tropical fruits and vegetables has definitely increased in recent years, but the quality is questionable. Pineapples are usually a good bet, but a week ago, every pineapple I saw was rotten to the core (which was why they were selling for 50 cents). Sometimes you can get great mangoes; sometimes the mangoes look good, but inside they're rotten. But they generally have two types of papaya, and often you can find lychees, jicama, ripe platains and other things you might not be able to get at your standard supermarket.

Figs in season. I love figs, but only the most doting and devoted Portugese and Italian gardeners are able to nurse a tree through a New England winter. In supermarkets, the price is prohibitive, but figs at the Haymarket can be very reasonable. They can also be moldy, especially if you buy a little pint pack. Pick a weekend when you'll have company on Saturday, and go for broke with a whole case for 7 or 8 dollars. Eat them immediately.

Herbs. Generally, I would rather pick up dill, parsley, mint and so on at the farmers' market, but in the off-season, herbs are much cheaper at Haymarket.

Proceed with caution - or maybe just skip altogether:

Berries. I often give in for convenience if I'm there already, but the raspberries and blackberries will always be rotten. Strawberries are a mixed bag, but they will taste like supermarket strawberries even on the best of days. Blueberries are okay, and hard to come by at the farmers' market, probably your best bet.

Garlic. All they ever seem to have are those six-packs of garlic in the net bags. The garlic is always either dried or sprouting. Don't bother.

Bags of salad greens. Look, these are of questionable safety from the supermarket, let alone from a tent that sits in the sun for hours. It can be quite exciting to see a pillow-sized $3 bag of organic mesclun mix at Haymarket, where once organics were unknown, but the bottom half of the bag will be black mush. In season, you can get far better salad greens at the farmers' market. Off-season, the supermarket is still a better choice.

Pears. I don't really eat pears out of season; they just don't have the perfume and flavor of a real pear (rarely do I eat apples out of season, either, though sometimes I cook with them). The widely available commercial pears tend to rot from the inside out, making appearances deceiving. Get your pears from an orchard in the fall, and then forget about them until next year, or splurge on Harry and David of you're rich (and if so, why are you reading this?)

Potatoes. I don't know why the potatoes are so often bad. But they are. Again, farmers' market first, then supermarket.

Good luck. In this economy, we all need all the help we can get. A cheap bag of limes is a nice place to start.

New Orleans, again

So my husband and I took a sort of belated long honeymoon (as compared to the short honeymoon we took after the wedding) to New Orleans. Basically, this was a huge excuse to ignore my pregnancy diet for a week and eat marvelously unhealthy things. Note I didn't go off the wagon completely - some fruit smoothies, cereal, and salads here and there kept me in vitamins and fiber, and I drank oceans of water, pulling my eyes away from the cocktail lists with a defeated whimper.

Notes and observations:

I never get tired of beignets. I could eat them every day. Of course, I would be enormous.

The best fried chicken I ever tasted was at Coop's. I have to work on my fried chicken technique.

Even the places that seem crappy are pretty good. At one point we needed to find a place to sit and eat in mid-afternoon, just because I got suddenly terribly hungry, the way the pregnant do, and it was hot, and I needed to sit down. We walked into the first restaurant we saw. It looked okay, but probably a bit touristy. Whatever- I had a fabulous plate of crawfish cakes and my husband had a huge and delicious muffuletta. The worst place we ate was a pub near the hotel, where we stopped for just a bite mid-afternoon, late enough that we were concerned about ruining dinner. We ordered three side dishes: mac and cheese, alligator sausage and jambalaya. The mac and cheese was pretty bad, the jambalaya just okay, and the alligator sausage pretty good. But the fellow served everyone out, making a plate each for my husband and myself, and after I downed two or three glasses of soda water, he brought me one in a to-go cup to take with me - without my asking.

I often find it's the little things I eat that stick in my mind the most, more than the meals. There was a woman selling fresh-squeezed fruit juices at the farmer's market - non-standard flavors, like watermelon lime. Mine was delicious.

Club soda with two types of bitters is better than club soda with only one. New England lacks bitters options.

The Southern Food and Beverage Museum is still a work in progress and comes off as a bit thin and probably underfunded. That said, it's got a lot of potential and it makes for an entertaining and very affordable hour or so.

My dream job would be curating a museum like that for New England.

Mandina's has the best fried oysters I've tasted.

I deeply appreciate the waitress there sending us up the block to Brocato's for ice cream, even when I was clearly going to order dessert at Mandina's until she recommended the gelato. That's putting customer service above self-interest, a rare virtue.

I had a scoop each of pistachio and gianduja. Awesome.

The bread is the secret to the po-boy's superiority over the standard sub.

The bacon brownie is interesting and good, but not exactly as delicious as I want it to be. But the Thai chili chocolate chess pie is, indeed, all that. AS were the smoked scallops.

It's hard to eat as much as you want when it's humid and over 90 degrees. That may be what keeps people in New Orleans from all being morbidly obese - no one can bring themselves to eat before sundown.

Also, tourism can get in the way of eating. Sometimes the things you want to see and the things you want to eat are not located right next to each other. This presents an unfortunate dilemma.