These cringes are not just from the recipes...

I would be remiss not to note that Campbell's Great Restaurants Cookbook, U.S.A. (ed. Doris Townsend, 1969) reminds me that the 1960s were definitely NOT enlightened times. Each selection of recipes comes with a headnote describing the restaurant from which they came, and some of those headnotes have... shall we say... not aged well.

Maybe some people will think the biggest offense in the section featuring Homard à la Crème is the idea that one should waste lobster, brandy, sherry, butter, and cream in a can of condensed cream of mushroom soup.

I'm more disturbed by the description of the Bacchanal restaurant from which it comes, however...

The end of the last line... Ouch! I'll bet the people who played those "slave girls" et al. had to put up with a lot. People who thought it was a good time to be served this way were surely royal pains in the ass.

And then there was the Golden Lion, which offered up a different type of old-school cruelty.

No, I'm not talking about stretching out a creamy oyster soup with an indeterminate number of cans of frozen condensed oyster stew. 

I'm talking about using phrases like "gateway to the Orient" and "exotic spectaculars" and a longing for "the glory of British colonialism at its height, when far-ranging British ships were opening to Western civilization the mysteries of the East." This concept aged so poorly that The Golden Lion no longer exists, but the Seattle Public Library's digital collection offers a menu, and the menu does in fact include an oyster-based Golden Lion Soup, priced at $1.50 (which, assuming this menu is roughly contemporary with the book, would be about $13 now). 

I know people often long for a simpler or more glorious past, but looking through old cookbooks is a good reminder that I am happy not to be there! Not that society has necessarily made that much progress since this book was published, but we've made enough that most reasonable people know it's at least in poor taste to playact oppressive stereotypes and assume one should be "justly proud" about it. It's a small, small victory, but I'll take what I can get...