"Today American cookery is at a crossroads somewhere between technology and tradition. On the one hand we have a tremendous boon of items on the market called convenience foods -- prepared dishes, mixes, freeze-dried dishes, frozen foods of all kinds, and complete frozen dinners. While these have seldom improved the American palate they have helped the less enterprising cook, whose approach to food is a matter more of necessity than of creativity, and have permitted some cooks to serve better food than they could ever have produced themselves.

On the other hand we have a widespread vogue for fine traditional cookery. French cuisine is the goal of every amateur in the kitchen. One must do all the famous provincial dishes, and the bourgeois dishes, and now and again attempt to reconstruct some of the monuments of grande cuisine, an aspiration that often leads the novice into techniques far beyond his depth. Without question it is a delight to follow the meticulously planned trail of Julia Child or read the sublime evocations of Elizabeth David, but we should also look into the annals of our own cuisine. We have so much to complain about in the quality of food served in many restaurants and in not a few homes that we forget what distinguished food Americans have produced in several periods of our history."

From American Cookery by James Beard. Copyright (c) 1972 by James Beard. By permission of Little, Brown and Company.