About Clementine Paddleford
Clementine Paddleford was an eccentric. A Kansas farm girl who grew up to chronicle America’s culinary traditions, she was charmingly offbeat in her swirling capes and skirts—and she wrote florid food prose to match. And yet, she was the first journalist in American history to take food seriously. She pioneered a smart, sassy reporting style that managed to elevate food writing from the dull formulas of home economists to must-read material. Flying around the country, sometimes in a Piper Cub plane that she herself piloted, she worked tirelessly to gather the best recipes from cooks in every region. That meant divining the best cheesecake in New York City, hunkering down in chili parlors in Texas, and touring salmon canneries in Alaska—and tasting everything she could find in between. It also meant that between 1948 and 1960, she traveled more than 800,000 miles in the pursuit of food—more than three times the distance from the earth to the moon.
All that orbiting paid off: Paddleford’s weekly readership at the New York Herald Tribune topped 12 million during the 1950s and 1960s. In 1953, Time magazine named her America’s "best-known food editor." At the height of her career, Paddleford pulled down a salary of $250,000—an almost unheard of sum, especially for a woman, in that day. In 1960, Paddleford published her tome How America Eats, a collection of 12 years of columns, which became a seminal work. So why haven’t you heard of her?
To learn even more about Clementine Paddleford, visit her archive at Kansas State University.
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