“American homemakers are increasingly aware of their rich heritage of cooking, of its wide variety as a result of its regional origins. We have the fine culinary traditions of those who settled in Louisiana, Virginia, New England, the South, the North, the East, and the West. No statement of the excellence of the cooking of American homemakers, who are representative of every race of mankind, is complete without a reference to the fine cooking of the Negroes of the South, who are natural gourmets. They seem to have inherited a sort of tradition of good cooking, and it may be that this will have a large place in the final development of a real American type of cookery.”
Introduction, The Gold Cookbook by Master Chef Louis P. De Gouy
Oscar Tschirky
1947
Just a couple of decades later, and in another book, on another topic, which to me at least, is not at all unrelated . …
An Empire of Wealth: The Epic History of American Economic Power
“When Lyndon Johnson succeeded to the presidency on the assassination of John F. Kennedy, he proved to be a very different president. A decade older than Kennedy, Johnson was fully a son of the New Deal, one with deep faith that government could solve social and economic problems. . .. With the help of an overwhelming electoral victory in November that year, Johnson prodded Congress to pass bill after bill. The Equal Opportunity Act (1964), Mass Transit Act (1965), Appalachian Regional Development Act (1965) Head Start (1965), the Demonstration Cities and Metropolitan Development Act (1966), Higher Education Act (1967). Along with many other, smaller, programs that involved the federal government in areas of national life it had never before been concerned with, these cause a breathtaking rise in federal expenditures. Nondefense government expenditures rose by a third in just three years, from 1965 to 1968, from $75 billion to $100 billion. Two years later they were $127 billion. Meanwhile, the Vietnam War escalated quickly. In 1965 the defense budget had been $50 billion. In 1968 it was $82 billion.”
John Steele Gordon
(P. 382)
Kensho Homestead 