So I wish I could say I celebrated our American culinary heritage on the 4th of July by eating Georgia Possum and Taters or Mississippi Molasses Pie or Washington Aplets and Cotlets, just a few of the regional dishes written about in Mark Kurlansky's new book, The Food of a Younger Land, but in fact I did not. Instead, my cookbook club assembled on just a regular old Sunday to eat old-fashioned food, drink mint juleps and discuss the fascinating dishes that once filled the American plate.

The Food of a Younger Land is a collection of essays once destined to be a book put out by the Federal Writers' Project, an arm of the Works Project Administration created to employ out-of-work writers during the Depression. The FWP dissolved before the book was published and the five boxes of raw material -- essays, recipes, photographs -- sat quietly in the Library of Congress until Mark Kurlansky stumbled onto them while doing research for another book. He has edited together "the chaotic pile of imperfect manuscripts" into a collection of surprising depth and variety. Some essays read like short stories, others like anthropological reports. One is simply a list of "New York Soda-Luncheonette Slang and Jargon." (A favorite: "14" means Look at the beautiful girl, while "14 1/2" means A beautiful girl, a little on the plump side.)

Unfortunately for those who want to recreate the recipes, the one trait all the essays share is a certain impreciseness, a tone which implies you probably know exactly what "Don't have the solution too strong" means when you are preparing lutefisk (cod soaked in a lye solution for 15 days, if you didn't know) and you find the instructions "Cook until done" perfectly clear. Not only did America once eat differently; America once cooked differently too.

Looking for a little more guidance, I turned to a recipe in Saveur for my Florida Shrimp Pilau, the Caribbean variation of a Middle Eastern pilaf. Others in the group used recipes from their grandmothers or just winged it. After loading up my plate, I realized suddenly how mushy everything was, all soft grains and smooth purees, food meant to be easy on those with bad -- or fake -- teeth. America once chewed differently too, it seems.

My favorite of the day was Oklahoma Kush, a sort of cornbread stuffing written about in what may be the most sparse essay of the book. It's just a single paragraph:

"Kush," popular dish among pioneers: Take cornbread and crumble it up, cut up some onions, add black pepper, a pinch of salt, a little lard or butter, put it in a pan, pour boiling water over it (add eggs if desired), then put in the oven and bake.

Lily also added mushrooms and herbs to her kush, which made for a moist, perfectly seasoned hash I would happily eat straight from the bowl with a big spoon.

One particularly tasty surprise was the Depression Cake, apparently the invention of some sad housewife who needed to make a cake but had no butter or eggs. Instead she used bacon grease, stewed raisin juice and lots of spices (to mask the taste of bacon grease and stewed raisin juice). Jessica was a little terrified of her creation, but it was like a yummy gingerbread: tender, not too sweet and deeply spiced. Does the bacon grease PR team know about this yet?

To drink we had Mexican Coke in bottles, emulating the Coca-Cola parties in Georgia, a "simple, inexpensive form of entertainment [which] is particularly popular with the young matrons and young girls." To really drink, there were mint juleps being made on the spot by Erin, who offered two types, as explained in the essay "The Mint Julep Controversy":

There are, broadly speaking, two schools of thought regarding their preparation -- the don't-crush school and the do-crush school. The don't-crushers austerely contend that an abundance of mint sprigs in the top of the glass, to give the partaker a fragrant aroma of mint as he sips the drink, is sufficient. The do-crushers insist that the mint should be bruised and crushed so that its flavor is incorporated in the drink itself.

Do-crushed or don't-crushed, the drinks were potent. You'd think the two mint julep schools would just forget their differences after a couple rounds.

Or maybe embrace them. There was a time when you could drive across the country and not see a single Outback, Applebee's or Red Lobster -- which today sounds as mythical as unicorns roaming the plains. More than anything else, this book is a reminder of how beautiful regional food differences are, and how fleeting.

Now go cook something your granny used to make!