Food of a Younger Land.

Admin stuff first: The third episode of the Keith and Jason podcast – yes, I know we need a name – is now available for download. You can also hear my hit from today on the Herd, but Fish must have been out sick since they didn’t play the Law & Order theme music for me.

I’ll be on ESPNEWS via phone at 2 pm EDT and on ESPN Radio’s Baseball Tonight at 7:25 pm EDT.

They’ve posted my quick analysis of the Garko/Barnes trade; I’m hoping my Cape All-Star Game bit will be up shortly.

I downloaded Mark Kurlansky’s The Food of a Younger Land as an audiobook on a whim and ended up with a small gem. Kurlansky’s book contains little of his own writing, but is instead a selection of some of the most interesting pieces from a New Deal-era project called “America Eats,” a collection of food essays by writers in the Federal Writers Project, describing local food traditions and recipes from around the country. The project was never completed and the Writers Project fell apart when World War II came and the job market for writers improved, but the archives are freely available at the Library of Congress.

The most interesting aspect of the book is the list of contributing writers, including many writers who went on to greater fame as novelists, including Eudora Welty, Lyle Saxon, and Nelson Algren, as well as Zora Neale Hurston, who had already had some success as a writer but needed the money and ended up horribly treated in the Florida wing of the Writers Project as a black woman who, in the eyes of the whites running the project, didn’t know her place. (She was paid a fraction of what a comparably experienced white writer received on the project.) Only a short story by Hurston appears in the book, but it’s among the highlights. The recipes are largely not worth your time – they’re inexact and often dated (unless you know where to buy squirrel meat); I’m all for using pork fat, but my limit is well short of what’s required to make many of the southern dishes in the book. The selections are often quirky, like the list of New York lunch-counter slang terms (a “Bay State bum” is a customer who demands a lot of service and leaves no tip) or two pieces on animal “fries” (one pig, one lamb, and even Kurlansky doesn’t explicitly tell you what part of the male animal is put in the fryer), as well as a little poetry, descriptions of Native American feasts, long essays on barbecue, and arguments between regions on who makes the best (insert food type). If you’re into food, it’s worth a skim, although the variety of authors means quality is inconsistent and some of the essays are as dry as others are interesting or funny.