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Title

• America Eats!

Author

• Pat Willard

Publisher

• Bloomsbury Publishing PLC

America Eats!

On the Road with the WPA — the Fish Fries, Box Supper Socials, and Chitlin Feasts That Define Real American Food

Overview

From the publisher

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 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With the unpublished WPA manuscript as her guide, Willard visits the sites of American food’s past glory to rediscover the vibrant foundation of America’s traditional cuisine.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.