About the Book
At the height of her career, Clementine Paddleford was as popular as Julia Child and as respected as James Beard. Today, she’s the most important food writer you’ve never heard of.
"I have ranged from the lobster pots of Maine to the vineyards of California, from the sugar shanties of Vermont to the salmon canneries in Alaska. I have eaten with crews on fishing boats and enjoyed slum gullion at a Hobo Convention. I have eaten many regional specialties I had never eaten before—cioppino on Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco, Alaskan King Crab of the North Pacific in Seattle, mango ice cream in Tampa, chawed on cuts of fresh sugar cane in Louisiana, eaten roasted young goat in San Antonio, and roasted fresh truffles flown in from Italy at the Four Seasons in New York."
So boasted Clementine Paddleford, the first writer to truly define American food. Her life was as unforgettably cinematic as her name: She was born on a Kansas farm in 1898 and grew up to become one of the most influential journalists of her day, at the height of her power commanding a huge salary writing for both the New York Herald Tribune and This Week magazine. In a career running from the 1920s to the 1960s, she did what no one had done before: write smartly, sassily, and with unerring enthusiasm about the pleasures of regional American food. "At a time when few people in Philadelphia knew what enchiladas were and few in Chicago knew what cioppino was, Ms. Paddleford described them both in loving detail, along with New Orleans-style red beans and rice, Lindy's cheesecake and Hungarian-American stuffed cabbage from Cleveland," wrote the late R.W. Apple Jr., New York Times correspondent and food writer.
Before Paddleford, newspaper food sections focused on economy and necessity. Engaging the reader in the pursuit of pleasure was not a priority. Paddleford knew better. Her columns, paens to the tomato and the strawberry, to lemonade, biscuits, fried chicken and dozens of other dishes, sent readers out of the house to taste the best of the season. Paddleford reached an audience of more than 12 million people a week. In 1953, Time magazine named her the country’s "Best-Known Food Editor." Charmingly quirky, she was an unforgettable force, arriving on tarmacs in swirling skirts, capes, hats, and velvet chokers. She was also a woman of strong and admirable character, having survived an early bout with throat cancer that left her talking through a tube. Paddleford, undaunted, earned her reputation as a workaholic original: She flew her own plane, took many lovers, and above all never stopped moving.
And yet a few years after her death in 1967 all traces of her life were nearly erased. Today her name is known to just a handful of influential food writers and editors for whom she has, until now, been a cult figure.
HOMETOWN APPETITES tells her story in full for the first time. Here the two leading authorities on Paddleford—Kelly Alexander, an award-winning food writer, and Cynthia Harris, the Kansas State University archivist who organized Paddleford’s documents—brush off the dust to reveal one of our greatest culinary figures. With an elegant foreword from Colman Andrews, co-founder of Saveur magazine and restaurant columnist for Gourmet magazine, plus more than 50 of Paddleford’s regional American recipes, retested for modern home cooks, Hometown Appetites finally puts Paddleford back where she belongs in the pantheon of pioneering American journalists.
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