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November 10, 2008:
Hometown Appetites: The Story of Clementine Paddleford, the
Forgotten Food Writer Who Chronicled How America Ate
by Kelly Alexander and Cynthia Harris (Gotham) The
rollicking biography of Clementine Paddleford: “a go- anywhere,
taste-anything, ask-everything kind of reporter who traveled more
than 50,000 miles a year in search of stories. . . . matched as a
regional-food pioneer only by James Beard.” (R. W. Apple , Jr.,
The New York Times)
In Hometown Appetites, an award-winning food writer and a
leading university archivist come together to revive the legacy of
the most important food writer you have never heard of. Clementine
Paddleford was a Kansas farm girl who grew up to chronicle America’s
culinary habits. Her weekly readership at the New York Herald
Tribune topped 12 million during the 1950s and 1960s and she
earned a salary of $250,000. Yet twenty years after “America’s
bestknown food editor” passed away, she had been forgotten— until
now.
At a time when few women worked outside the home, Paddleford flew
her own Piper Cub to meet her readers and find out what was for
dinner. Before Paddleford, newspaper food sections were dull primers
on home economy. But she changed all of that, composing her own
brand of sassy, unerringly authoritative prose designed to celebrate
regional home cooking. Her magnum opus, a book called How America
Eats, published in 1960, reveals an appetite for life that was
insatiable. This book restores Paddleford’s name where it belongs:
in the pantheon alongside those of James Beard and Julia Child. It’s
a five-star read in the spirit of national bestsellers such as
Heat and The United States of Arugula.
From Publishers Weekly: At long last, an enthusiastic, significant rehabilitation of Paddleford's career as food writer from 1936 to 1966 at the New York Herald Tribune. Alexander, whose article on Paddleford for Saveur won the James Beard Journalism Award in 2002, and Harris, the archivist at Kansas State Univ., to which native Paddleford left her papers, happily resurrect Paddleford's work. An indefatigable journalist, Paddleford broke with the staid home-economics primers of the era. With humble Midwest beginnings and a degree in industrial journalism, Paddleford set out for New York City to make a name for herself, and found that her energy and sheer prodigiousness opened doors at popular publications like Farm & Fireside, Christian Herald and This Week, the Tribune's Sunday magazine. Influenced by the peripatetic culinary adventures of salesman Duncan Hines, Paddleford launched, in 1948, a series of columns in This Week called How America Eats, spotlighting regional cooks and their down-home specialties. With her trademark florid prose and historic touches, Paddleford became widely known, and her subsequent book, How America Eats (1960), became a bestseller. The authors make an upbeat case for reconsidering Paddleford's achievement in this enjoyable read, and include a slew of her comfort recipes. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.