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Prosperity and Thrift: The Coolidge Era and the Consumer Economy, 1921-1929
The story of a pantry shelf, an outline history of grocery specialties: a machine-readable transcription.
INTRODUCTION
A Great National Influence
for Better Foods
Have We an American Dish?
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There is not, strictly speaking, such a thing as American cooking.
There is French cooking and German cooking, and Italian cooking and Chinese cooking--at least to the extent that dishes cooked in the manner of each of these nations have distinguished characteristics readily familiar to the knowing. But of American cooking we have none.
True, we have Southern cooking and New England cooking; but in respect to culinary practice generally, these United States are not united. Like The Great American Novel, The Great American Dish has remained steadfastly sectional.
There is, nevertheless, quite evidently under way a trend and a tendency to a type of cooking that is as distinctly American as Colonial architecture, Ford cars and the movies.
The nucleus of this movement has been in the departments of home economics in our leading co-educational and state universities and normal schools; and its propagation has been chiefly through the culinary and domestic science features in our leading women's magazines.
Appraising dietary values, testing and sifting cooking recipes, and methods of every kind, these schools have acted as a clearing house of existing information. Selecting the good and rejecting the bad, they have been steadily developing and perfecting a new cuisine that is now taking on a national character.
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Martha Van Rensselaer
Editor, Home Makers' Department, The Delineator
As director of the New York State College of Home Economics at Cornell University, Martha Van Rensselaer has earned national and international eminence.
With Miss Flora Rose, she served under Herbert Hoover on the State Food Commission during the war and later became head of the Division of Food Conservation of the United States Food Administration.
Some idea of her standing may be obtained from the fact that she was not long ago named by the League of Women Voters as one of America's twelve greatest living women.
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And every year these schools and universities send out thousands upon tens of thousands of young women--who take back into their communities a new knowledge of home economics and new principles of better cooking; while our great national periodicals aid them in disseminating to the greater millions new ways of cooking and home-keeping.
Chief source and inspiration in the movement, leading in the originality and authority of its work is the New York State College of Home Economics of Cornell University, under the direction of Martha Van Rensselaer and Flora Rose.
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