Hometown Appetites: The Story of Clementine Paddleford, the Forgotten Food Writer

335 Pages·2010·0.94 MB·English

by  Alexander Kelly

Table of Contents

Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Foreword

CHAPTER 1 - Just Watch My Footprints
CHAPTER 2 - My Own Boss Absolutely
CHAPTER 3 - Rhapsody on a Kitchen Sink
CHAPTER 4 - It’s Always Interesting
CHAPTER 5 - All the Sights and Smells of the Country
CHAPTER 6 - What Men Eat on Submarines

EPILOGUE
Acknowledgements
A Note on the Recipes
Notes
Index

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Published by Gotham Books, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

First printing, September 2008

Copyright © 2008 by Kelly Alexander and Cynthia Harris
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Alexander, Kelly.
Hometown appetites : the story of Clementine Paddleford, the forgotten food writer
who chronicled how America ate / by Kelly Alexander and Cynthia Harris.
p. cm.
Includes index.
eISBN : 978-1-59240389-9

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This book is dedicated to the memory of
Clementine Paddleford.

It was also written in remembrance of one of her great champions, the late R. W.
Apple Jr.
Why Clem Matters
When Kelly Alexander, then a senior editor at Saveur—the magazine I’d co-
founded in 1994 and was currently running as editor in chief—came into my
office one November day back in 2001 and asked if I’d let her write a piece
about Clementine Paddleford, I said yes right away. The truth is that I didn’t
know much about Paddleford; I’d heard the name, of course, and remembered
that she’d been associated with the old New York Herald Tribune, but that was
about it. I did, however, know a fair amount about Kelly.
In the early years of the twenty-first century, we had a situation at Saveur that
I believe was unique among American food magazines: Every one of our top-
level editors was also a writer, and a good one, and every one of them regularly
penned stories for the magazine—often long features involving substantial
research and extensive travel, which they somehow managed while still doing a
damn good job at their office duties. Their stories were consistently among the
strongest pieces we published (they won a number of James Beard Awards and
other prizes), and because these writer-editors (now, alas, long scattered) pretty
much lived and breathed the magazine, the things they wrote also tended to be
particularly definitive of the values we stood for. They spoke the language, in
other words, in more ways than one. Thus if one of them—Kelly in this case—
came to me and said “This is a good Saveur story,” that was good enough for
me.
Once I’d sent Kelly off to begin her research at the repository of all things
Paddlefordian—Manhattan, Kansas (a town to which I have familial
connections, coincidentally; the local graveyard is full of distant cousins of my
father’s)—it did occur to me that I ought to do a little homework, and I got ahold
of a copy of Paddleford’s masterwork, How America Eats, originally published
in 1960, though based on earlier columns from the Herald Tribune and This
Week magazine. As I started reading this obviously feisty, indefatigable
Kansan’s reports (and recipes) from half a century earlier, I was seduced by their
unpretentious tone and evocative detail, but I was also quite astonished. Though
her writing was new to me, Clementine Paddleford had apparently invented
Saveur when I was still in my highchair—not really invented it, of course, but
concerned herself with exactly the same culinary issues and approached her
subject matter from exactly the same point of view we did.
This connection seemed particularly vivid to me because I had recently been