This post originally appeared earlier this month in my column, "Interesting Times," in The World, a weekly newspaper in Washington County, Vermont.

What do people eat when the economy nosedives? During the current Great Recession, can we learn from what Americans ate during the Great Depression?

A 1930s stimulus program provides some answers. When the nation went through the Great Depression, writers from the Federal Works Progress Administration (WPA) documented what people were eating regionally. Now Mark Kurlansky has collected many of them in a new book, The Food of a Younger Land.

I looked for the WPA reports from Vermont. Roaldus Richmond, born in Barton, wrote that the varieties of pickles Vermonters made were “almost infinite,” and he listed many fruits and vegetables that people pickled in the 1930s: pears, peaches, apples, plums, raspberries, cucumbers, and so on. He also included a recipe for lemon pickles—how often did Vermonters get their hands on enough of the southern fruit to want to pickle them? Or maybe the lemons were only seasonally available, so people bought them by the case and preserved some for later in the year. Many older people have told me that an orange, another southern citrus fruit, was a treat they got only at Christmas back then.

Another Vermont writer, Cora Moore gives a recipe for pickled butternuts. We still have butternut trees in Vermont, but not a lot. I know permaculturists who are busy planting all the butternut trees they can, because they think the oil- and protein-rich nuts are so valuable.

Neither of these articles was particularly about belt tightening in the kitchen. I thought the article on beans in New England would be about cost-conscious cooking. How did  people use this inexpensive protein source for keeping bellies full during hard times, I wondered.

It turns out that the baked beans of New England originated with the Puritans, who shunned all work on the Sabbath. Beans were a dish they could make on Saturday night, and they would still be good to eat—maybe better—the next day. James Francis Davis wrote that the New England households of the 1930s still kept to this Saturday night bean-making ritual, even though the religious injunction against Sunday work had been relaxed. This wasn’t a poverty story, either.

Apparently the writers who filed the reports in The Food of a Younger Land were more interested in capturing regional food culture, which builds up over generations, than in documenting how people ate well for less money during the Depression. Still, the articles portray a nation of people who were much more food resilient, and self-sufficient, than most of us are now. They put up pickles out of any variety of fruits, vegetables, and nuts. They made their baked beans, rather than buying them in cans.

What I like best about The Food of a Younger Land is the great variety of food that people in mainstream cultures ate back then, and how local much of it was. With lean times here and ahead, it’s good to be reminded about how many ways there are to put local food on our plates.