Paddleford Clementine - The great American cookbook: 500 time-tested recipes: favorite foods from every state!

Published by
RIZZOLI INTERNATIONAL PUBLICATIONS, INC.
300 PARK AVENUE SOUTH, NEW YORK, NY 10010

www.rizzoliusa.com

Original text from How America Eats Estate of Clementine Paddleford
Adapted Recipes, Introduction, and Compilation Kelly Alexander 2011
Foreword Molly ONeill 2011

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior consent of the publishers.

Distributed in the U.S. trade by Random House, New York

eISBN: 978-0-8478-3747-2

Library of Congress Control Number: 2011927161

v3.1

Foreword

Id already logged several hundred thousand miles researching how America eats by the time I ran into Clementine Paddlefords opus How America Eats. After twenty years of writing restaurant criticism and food features in newspapers and magazines, I was gathering recipes and food stories to create my book One Big Table: A Portrait of American Cooking. Stumbling upon a signed copy of the book that documented Miss Paddlefords cross-country odyssey was like running into an earlier version of myself. A better, more adventuresome, more visionary, pioneering version. My inner journalist rent her garments and gnashed her teeth. Id been scooped forty years before Id even begun.

Id found the volume at a garage sale outside Manhattan, Kansas, not far from the man-made lake that now covers Blue Valley Farm, the 260-acre sprawl where Miss Paddleford was born in 1878. I completely forgot about the chicken farmer Id planned to interview that day. Instead, I sat in the car paging through the book, taking note of the dated photographs, the sometimes ingratiating prose, the occasional watered-down version of ethnic dishes. But I also took note of the regional specialties like San Francisco Cioppino and Lobster Newburg from Maine, Kentucky Burgoo, New Orleans Gumbo, and the vinegary Barbecue from South Carolina (a dish that I had thought was first introduced to a national audience by Craig Claiborne in the pages of The New York Times).

Only after Id reassured myself of the obvious superiority of my own venture did I inhale sharply. Miss Paddleford had been writing about food for more than thirty years when Mr. Claiborne joined the staff of The New York Times. So who followed whom? After weeks spent comparing entries from How America Eats with Mr. Claibornes work, I had little doubt. Clementine Paddleford was Lewis and Clark. She drew the map of American regional cooking that the rest of us are still following.

During her thirty-year reign as food editor of The New York Herald Tribune (from 1936 until the paper, eclipsed by the upstart New York Times, closed in 1966), Miss Paddleford wrote at least once and often twice per week for the Tribune, wrote a monthly column for Gourmet magazine, and published seven books. In the decades before highways, air travel, and regional train spurs made the far-flung corners of the country more accessible, Miss Paddleford flew her own Piper Cub to remote lumber camps in Washington State, fishing grounds in Alaska, and grazing areas in the high plains of New Mexico, as well as hundreds of other off-the-grid farming spots. Duncan Heinz cooked for her in his Kentucky home; so did the chefs aboard the submarine Skipjack. She roamed ethnic ghettos to chronicle immigrant cooking, attended the national hobo conference, dined with the Duchess of Windsor, and attended the coronation luncheon for Queen Elizabeth in 1953.

She built a readership estimated at 12 million people per week and became a household name. Bill Arno made her the subject of one of his cartoons in The New Yorker. Clementine Paddleford was, wrote R. W. Apple in The New York Times, the Nellie Bly of culinary journalism. She was a regal presence in the newsroom, the managing editor of the Tribune said in an interview with Mr. Apple, a woman of enormous clout.

But after she died in 1967, her fame suffered a fate similar to that of the souffl that she observed being served to Winston Churchill in 1946 before he made his Iron Curtain speech in Missouri. With a rapturous, half-hushed sigh, wrote Miss Paddleford, the souffl settled softly to melt and vanish in a moment like smoke or a dream. By the time I enrolled in cooking school in Paris and began writing about food in 1978, I, like most of my contemporaries, had a vague and misbegotten knowledge of our predecessor. Years later when I rediscovered her, I decided I had to uncover her story.

Clementine Paddleford was a single mother who survived a youthful bout with throat cancer, speaking through a voice box that she concealed with a Gothish black velvet ribbon. She bent gender roles and minted a new way of writing about food when she refused to sit at her desk or stay in the kitchen. She and James Beard were the first to celebrate American cooking. She documented immigrant cooking, coined the phrase regional cooking, and was a proponent of farm-to-table eating long before it was fashionable. But she paid a high price for being first.

I was unaware of how much shed influenced me when I began my own American odyssey. But with two years down and eight to go, she became my constant companion. While driving around the United States, we time-traveled through a century of fashions in American food, the history of food writing, the nature of success, the definition of American cuisine, the loneliness of living far from home. Miss Paddleford toted her cat, Pussy Willow. I traveled with Tootsie, my dog. Everybody got along just fine.

Before Clementine Paddleford, there were two types of food writers in the United States. There were Ladies and there were Gentlemen.

The Ladies tended to focus on hearth and home and to observe the wider world through their kitchen windows. They wrote recipes, not prose, and they took their recipes very seriously. Beginning with the domestic science movement in the late nineteenth century, the Ladies of Food were all but willing to die defending the honor (read: accuracy) of the recipes they wrote. In addition to being right, they were prudent, efficient, sensible, health-conscious, buttoned-down, mildly creative, carefully generous, and economy-minded. They either were or did their best to sound like paragons of the established order and the settled life. Their recipes were instructions for life as it should be.

The Gentlemen, on the other hand, tended to range widely, to pride themselves on their adventuresome spirit, their worldliness, their knowledge of cuisine and their capacity to consume significant quantities of alcohol. Leaving the private sphere to the Ladies, the Gentlemen focused on food in public life, in restaurants, cafes, and bars, at newsworthy social events and affairs of state, at rustic rituals and regional feasts. While the Ladies literary tone ranged from kindly grandmother to shrill school marm, the Gentlemen assumed either an ironic, avuncular tone or one of a sadly disappointed know-it-all. They wrote criticism and travelogues. Their stories were about life as it