Hometown Appetites

Did you hear the one about Clem’s trip to Idlewild? According to the gang who in the early 1950s lunched in the ninth-floor test kitchen at the Herald Tribune, it went like this. Paddleford heard airlines touting the quality of their meals, and was of course interested in learning more. One airline, no one could remember which, invited the influential food writer out to what was then clumsily known as the New York International Airport at Idlewild, Queens, to show her the skillful chefs, the ingenious devices to load the food into the airborne galleys, and to let her learn at first hand how delicious everything was. So the airline sent a limousine to 41st Street to pick up Paddleford, and she was ferried out to what is now J.F.K. Airport to poke into it all.

Sometime in the afternoon there was quite a dust-up—the limo driver could not locate Paddleford. Nervous, he called the Trib and asked where she was, mentioning which hangar he’d be waiting at. The women in the office tittered: Old Clem kidnapped? Lost? Was she stuck on a plane or in a hangar or trapped someplace? Mercifully, no. Paddleford was found, according to legend, sleeping peacefully, propped against a tree at the edge of the tarmac. Word was, she’d had an extra gin and tonic with lunch, and airport security was finally deployed to find her. Reunited with the driver, she boarded the limo for home.

Paddleford was good copy, in print or over coffee. Joan Cook, a ninth-floor reporter on the parent and child beat, said Paddleford told this one on herself. Paddleford had a former lover who lay dying in Bellevue Hospital. “Clem was not made of rock,” Cook reminded her friends, saying that Paddleford went to the formidable old hospital in the afternoons to visit the discarded dear one. According to the story, the guy asked her to bury him at the Redding house, underneath an apple tree where he and she “had spent so many happy hours.” According to Cook, when the man died, Paddleford attended to the cremation, taking the urn of ashes to her country home. In time, she got a shovel and dug a hole under the tree. At that point, Paddleford reported that Claire stepped in to say: “You can’t just go out and dig a hole and bury ashes. You have to have some kind of permit.” Paddleford thought this probably had a ring of truth. So she then took the urn and put it on a shelf “next to the bottle of bourbon,” as Cook explained, where she and her lover “had spent so many happy hours.”

These stories were widely circulated through the Trib staff, and while some of them may have been burnished by time, they show how larger-than-life their subject had become. (Whatever doubts may be raised about the vision of Paddleford with her foot on the shovel under the apple tree, a 1950 death certificate for one Bruno West was preserved among her papers. Claire recalled being at the Redding farm once when some highball glasses inexplicably broke and she and Paddleford decided West’s ghost was probably behind it. Claire said that she and Paddleford would look at each other and say “Bruno!”) Paddleford had become a bona fide brand by this time, world famous, and everyone working at the Trib and This Week, across town in the Graybar Building on Lexington Avenue, was aware of her clout.

Paddleford was a particular presence among the close-knit group of women who spent their work days on the Trib’s ninth floor. At this point the editorial part of the ninth floor had ceased to be called the Home Institute, although “Home Institute” was still used as a label above extra material added to the back pages in the Herald Tribune edition of This Week. A sleeker model had slid into the area, now called Women’s Features, and with it a new cast of characters.

In addition to Paddleford, by 1952 Eugenia Sheppard’s posse included Helen Carleton, a super-chic garment-district reporter and photo stylist; the reporters Guin Hall, Harriet Morrison, Harriet Jean Anderson and Joan Cook; Pat Doyle, Sheppard’s secretary, and Helen Marshall, Paddleford’s; and Bea Meyers, a fact checker. Among the more amazing reportorial hires made by Sheppard was Denise McCluggage, like Paddleford a Kansan, but one who loped across the room like a cowboy in sling-back pumps. She later became a pioneer female sports-writer with a specialty in auto racing and went on to become a racing driver herself. In 2006, she became the first journalist inducted into the Automotive Hall of Fame. What the petite fashionista Sheppard or the omnivorous Kansan Paddleford would have thought of their former colleague is unguessable.

Closer to Paddleford’s domain were Joyce Jones, a home economist in her early twenties who had recently replaced Anne Pappas in the job of testing the recipes that ran in Paddleford’s column, and Helen Cloudy, a test kitchen helper and general office assistant in her early fifties. In July 1952, in anticipation of Cook’s impending maternity leave and with an eye on the continued medical leave of Cleora Forth, the editor for the Home Institute material for This Week, Sheppard hired Betsy Wade, a new graduate of the Columbia Journalism School, as a desk person and reporter.

Wade, now seventy-eight and retired, junkets around the country giving seminars and lectures to students and other audiences about feminist issues in the newsroom. More than fifty years ago, four years after her time at the Trib, she became the first woman to be hired by the New York Times as a copy editor. At the Times for almost forty-five years, she was a union activist and a moving force in the sex-discrimination lawsuit filed against the paper in 1974. Wade credits Paddleford with giving her tools to help open the Times doors. Though she rose to be head of the foreign copy desk at the Times, Wade’s first editing assignment there was in Women’s News.

Shortly after Wade arrived at the Trib, her stepmother, an old friend of Tracy Samuels, Paddleford’s sorority sister from Chicago, asked Samuels to drop a line to Paddleford about the new Trib employee. Within days, Paddleford emerged from her hideaway into the outside office and stood over Wade’s desk. “I understand you are a friend of Tracy Samuels,” Paddleford said. According to Wade, she replied that Samuels was a friend of her father’s and stepmother’s and was a frequent guest at their home. “Tracy Samuels is the best person in the world, and I’m so delighted that you’re here,” Paddleford replied. “If I can do a thing to help you, let me know.”

Paddleford kept her word and then some. “Clementine wasn’t just invaluable to me in my career,” Wade says, “she was invaluable to me forever.” Paddleford gave the young reporter a priceless break. When out of town on assignment, she had to leave the Friday market basket column to someone in the office because it could not be written in advance. As Wade describes it, it covered “how much perishable foods like lettuce and bananas cost that week and that kind of thing.” Bypassing Harriet Jean Anderson, an established food reporter, Paddleford specified that Wade would assume this chore. Sheppard had already been giving Wade bylines on her features, but to fill in for the mighty Paddleford—even with just the prices of lettuce and bananas—under her own byline gave her a valuable stepping stone to the future. “That is what Clem Paddleford did for her friends’ children,” Wade said. “And I think that there was a very strong aura about those children who came from this Chicago group.”

“Ohio does more sophisticated eating than any other state in the United States outside California,” Paddleford said in the opener of her April 13, 1952, column. The manager of the restaurant even compared the “really beautiful, almost as beautiful” view of downtown Cincinnati to that from the famed Rainbow Room at Rockefeller Center in New York, where he had first trained. It was here that the Caesar salad was presented to Paddleford, and lovingly passed on, very likely for the first time, to her readers: “The ingredients are never mixed in advance—this salad must always be made at the table,” she explained.

Jones found the concoction, studded with five kinds of dried

fruits and four aromatic spices, difficult to replicate—the dough was sticky, it had to stand overnight, the fruits became soggy, etc.—and she failed several times to produce something that Paddleford accepted. Undeterred and unwilling to abandon the recipe though she had many others from this kitchen, the boss kept Jones at the task until the cake came to satisfactorily resemble what Paddleford had eaten on her reporting trip.

Caesar Salad

½ teaspoon salt, or more to taste
1 large clove garlic
5 anchovy fillets, minced, about 2 teaspoons
Juice of 2 lemons, about ¼ cup
5 drops Worcestershire sauce
2 eggs, at room temperature, coddled for 2 to 3 minutes to taste
1 cup garlic oil (see below)
2 heads romaine lettuce
4 tablespoons finely grated parmesan cheese
Croutons, sautéed in garlic oil (see recipe)
Freshly ground black pepper, to taste

For the garlic oil:
1 cup olive oil
3 cloves garlic, smashed with the side of a knife

For the croutons:
1 baguette, crust removed, cut into 16 cubes
Remaining ²⁄³ cup garlic oil

To make garlic oil, let olive oil and garlic sit together at room temperature for several hours or overnight before removing the garlic.

Over medium heat in a medium skillet, fry bread cubes in garlic oil until well scented and golden.

Sprinkle salt with a generous hand over the inside of a wooden bowl. Rub with cut clove of garlic. Add minced anchovies, lemon juice, Worcestershire sauce, and egg, mixing to combine and then drizzle ¹⁄³ cup garlic oil to bowl, and blend with whisk, breaking up the cooked egg white if chunky.

Break heads of washed and dried lettuce into fair-sized lengths (about 2 inches), dropping into bowl. Add parmesan cheese and croutons. Toss to combine all ingredients, adjusting seasoning and adding freshly ground black pepper to taste.

Yield: 4 large servings

Swiss Pear Bread

1½ cups dried pears (if not available, double the dried apples)
1½ cups dried apples
1 cup dried currants
1¼ cups seedless raisins
¹⁄3 cup pitted prunes
1 teaspoon finely diced candied citron
2 tablespoons butter, plus 1½ tablespoons
½ tablespoon anise seed
¼ teaspoon ground cloves
½ teaspoon ground cinnamon
½ teaspoon ground nutmeg
½ cup sugar
½ cup walnuts, whole or chopped
½ package active dry yeast
2 cups warm water
¾ teaspoon salt
4 to 5 cups sifted all-purpose flour

Put dried pears and apples into a pot with water to barely cover and bring to a low simmer, cooking over low heat until very tender. Combine while hot with currants and raisins. Cook prunes in water to cover until soft; add to hot cooked fruit mixture. Add citron, 2 tablespoons of the butter, the spices, and ¾ of the sugar while mixture is still hot. Let stand overnight.

In the morning, if any water remains, drain it. Then add nuts to the fruit mixture. Dissolve yeast in ¹⁄8 cup of the warm water and let stand 5 minutes without stirring. Then mix thoroughly and add 1½ tablespoons of butter, salt, the remaining sugar, and the rest of the warm water. Let stand until the mixture bubbles. Mix in enough flour to make a stiff dough. Keep stirring in additional flour as long as it’s possible (about 4 cups).

Turn dough out on floured surface and work in enough more flour to prevent sticking (it might take 1 cup). Let dough rise until doubled in bulk. Pinch off 3 pieces the size of a golf ball. Add fruit-nut mixture to remainder of dough. Work fruit into dough by kneading until there are no streaks of white left. The dough will be quite sticky. Divide into 3 portions. Shape into narrow loaves. If it’s still too sticky, add more flour, working in well. Using a generous sprinkling of flour on the board and rolling pin, roll each of the small pieces of dough into a very thin sheet, so thin there are likely be some holes. Wrap a sheet of this plain dough around each loaf. Make it uneven so that the dark fruited roll shows through gaps and holes.

Let rise in a warm place until nearly doubled in bulk, about 1 hour.

Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Bake for about 20 minutes, until the dough has come up, then reduce heat to 325 degrees. Continue baking for 25 to 40 minutes more.

Yield: 3 loaves

By this time, Paddleford was making $28,000 a year, she had cars that the paper hired to fetch her and take her to interviews, and she had a flow of visitors ranging from food and kitchen equipment manufacturers to restaurant press people. Observing Paddleford’s comings and goings and her roster of colorful guests was a popular office sport. One Wade recalls vividly was Peter Schlumbohm, the German-born American chemist who created the Chemex coffeemaker in the early 1940s. “He would come up to the kitchen and set up his coffee-making contraption and put in his filter,” Wade said. “It made much better coffee; he kept saying it never touched metal and that was the difference. So when he was coming to show some modification of it to Clem, he would go back into her office and they would talk.” Schlumbohm’s invention, based on the notion that “a coffeepot should not be a steam engine,” as he once explained it to Time magazine, went on to make him millions before he died in 1962 at age sixty-six of a heart attack. Wade believed he was probably not just a source but eventually became a friend of Paddleford’s because his incursions into the test kitchen would otherwise have been excessive.

Paddleford’s private office was back on the 40th Street side of the building. Marshall sat close to the department entrance, near the 41st Street set-back, where she clattered a rickety standard typewriter and coped with two phones, assuring Paddleford uninterrupted time to write, or talk to the cat she brought to work. Sometimes when Paddleford had to explain illegible copy changes, she would swish out to Marshall’s desk, her scarf flowing, sheaves of paper, pencils and sometimes recipes in hand. When she spoke, she bent over Marshall to be heard, keeping one hand free to press a middle finger on her throat tube at each breath. Sometimes crises erupted, but mostly the Paddleford-Marshall exchanges were modulated and always conducted with an eye on the deadlines.

In the spring of 1953, Paddleford was invited to cover this fete, the highlight of which was to be the frying of tons of chicken in what was dubbed “the world’s largest frying pan.” She was really engaged. “Clementine had gotten a car and driver to go down there,” Wade said, “and she came back late in the afternoon, my guess would be around 4, 4:15. And she was as excited as I’d ever seen her. She had found herself a story. It was full of people preparing chickens by their own recipes. I suspect it was something that she recognized from her childhood. She was just atwitter. And she came in to the desk of her secretary Helen Marshall, which was immediately inside the doorway. She said ‘Oh, Helen, oh, I just had the best time and it’s such a good story and I didn’t have a photographer with me, but I found a freelance photographer down there and I just told him I would buy whatever he had inside his camera sight unseen.’ And Helen said, ‘Oh that was smart, Clem.’ And Clem handed her the yellow box of cut film and said, ‘Take it down to the lab right away and see if you can get something developed.’ Then she went in her office and her cape was flapping and she sat down and pulled out notes, I guess. And in a very short time Joe Engels, the photographer, came upstairs and made Clem as upset as she had been happy. He said to her: ‘Clem for god’s sake there’s not a goddamn thing on that film. You bought yourself nothing!’

“Helen Marshall looked up from her desk and you could see her wig rising on her head,” Wade said. “And she said, ‘that’s what I thought when I opened the box.’ And I just looked at Helen Marshall and thought: I’m not going to say anything. Clem is going to have to be the one to tell her that she opened the box of undeveloped film and destroyed it with daylight. I think Clem eventually called up the public relations person and they sent her up a picture of a giant frying pan or something of that nature. They would be findable. The conversation between Helen and Clem after that was back in Clem’s office.”

This event fed one more Clem tale into the chatter of one ninth floor routine: Four days a week, Cook, Doyle, Jones, Wade, and Cloudy, and sometimes McCluggage, gathered in the test kitchen to eat lunch, with the participants taking turns bringing tunafish salad, liverwurst, bologna, probably the humblest fare that passed through there. Sharing lunch was a major money- saver, but it also made for a companionable time. When Cloudy and Jones were finished with their testing or marketing for the morning they would clean up and set up for lunch. “We’d all come into the kitchen and sit around the island in the middle, and eat our sandwiches and drink iced tea or lemonade,” Wade recalled. “And after that we played canasta for the rest of our lunch hour.” In these sessions, if Paddleford was out of the office, she was sometimes a topic of conversation—and not always favorable. “We made fun of her writing,” Wade says. “We laughed because a lot of it was overdrawn, but she knew what she was doing and she knew what she could get away with—which was practically everything.” At that point, the paper’s copy editors offered little resistance to Paddleford’s often florid prose.

Stanley Alpern, who joined the Trib as a twenty-one-year-old copy boy in 1948, was one of the souls who had to deal with this. “It was highly unusual for one so young to become a copy reader—the average age of my seventeen colleagues on the copy desk must have been about fifty,” Alpern reports. “Copy readers are, or were then, usually former reporters who settle down to a desk job in mid-career. The American Newspaper Guild, our trade union, had inserted a clause in the N.Y.H.T. contract specifying that copy boys (or girls) should be given one-year try-outs on the copy desk, when feasible, and I was the first one chosen.” As low man on the totem pole, Alpern was given the job of cleaning up Paddleford’s copy and putting a headline on the column. “She was already an N.Y.H.T. institution,” Alpern recalls. “I was flattered to be so trusted, but actually it was not an assignment that any copy reader coveted. It was not easy to edit Clementine’s prose.” This was not only because the subject of food was considered far less exciting than hard news, but also because her copy contained words and phrases beyond the realm of the Trib stylebook. Alpern remembers wrestling with Paddleford’s grammar and spelling, but unlike her editors at This Week, he does not recall her coming to the desk to complain about changes.

“Sometimes it was to her detriment that they didn’t go after her a little harder,” Wade said. “I had a friend working at This Week in an internship and he said to me, ‘she really is strange.’ And I said, “what do you mean?” and he said that she wrote in a sentence that ‘the children were happy as a guinea.’ And he said, ‘What do you suppose she meant? Do you think she meant a guinea hen? She couldn’t possibly mean an Italian.’ And I said, “I don’t think so.” And he said well, I think ‘happy as a guinea’ went into This Week.”

In early 1950, Martin Weldon, a reporter for WCBS radio and a contributor to The New Yorker magazine, spent the better part of a week trailing Paddleford for a profile of the Home Institute. Instead of treating Weldon as a nuisance, Paddleford embraced his presence and allowed him unlimited access to the goings-on; she even chronicled his time in the kitchen. “Anne Pappas let him help mix the batter for French crullers,” the account began. “Eugenia Sheppard, women’s features editor, took him along on a photographing binge, something to do with sleeveless dresses. . . . Ann Pringle gave him a detailed report of Macy’s mid-winter furniture show. . . . Guin Hall introduced him to the newest equipment in the Home Institute laboratory . . . we took him for cocktails with Edna Cast, the date lady here from Mecca, Calif., with new date products to show.” The crowning touch here was that Paddleford signed off and let Weldon write the rest of the column. “If this Martin Weldon wants really to wear the other man’s shoes, let him wear our No. 7s and write today’s yardage,” Paddleford wrote.

Weldon’s postscript is a send-up of typical ninth-floor activities, from cruller-making (“Well, the batter stayed up and I thought I passed with flying crullers, but when I started offering the bake around, everybody got busy on long-distance calls”) to

tasting the newest product from the venerable Schrafft’s chain of bakeries and restaurants, which was Fresh Strawberry Butter-cream Roll (“Helen Cloudy, the Home Institute maid, looked at me for a long minute. ‘It’s the custom around here,’ she said, ‘to taste these new foods, not to finish them right down to the end.’ ”) Weldon wrote that he left his tour with “a lot of respect for the way the gals of this department rush from fashion show or hot stove to typewriter to deadline,” before urging readers to tune in to his radio broadcast to learn if the reporter’s “own 10½s fit him after this breathless week in the pounding pumps of twelve women.”

Crullers

3½ cups sifted all-purpose flour
4 teaspoons baking powder
¼ teaspoon baking soda
¼ teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon ground nutmeg
¹⁄8 teaspoon ground ginger
½ cup egg yolks, about 6 extra-large egg yolks

½ cup buttermilk or sour milk
½ cup half-and-half
1 cup sugar

1 to 2 quarts vegetable oil

Sift flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt, and spices into a large bowl. Beat yolks in a large bowl; mix with buttermilk and half-and-half. Add sugar and stir until well blended. Add sifted dry ingredients and beat until almost smooth.

Turn a portion at a time onto a lightly floured surface and roll or pat out to ½-inch thickness. Cut with a 3-inch doughnut cutter, or use a 3-inch biscuit cutter, then make a hole in the center of each round with a 1-inch cutter or the end of a wooden spoon handle.

In a heavy 6-quart pot filled no more than halfway with oil, heat oil to 365 degrees. Fry doughnuts 45 seconds to 1 minute on each side, until golden brown. Drain on paper bags.

Yield: 2 dozen crullers

Paddleford must surely have enjoyed this, but it provided no day off: The column’s sidebar features a recipe for a “money saving dish” meant to take advantage of the remains of the “gala cuts of pork” that were cooked in the preceding holidays. “Now homemakers are thinking of pork as ever but the more thrifty of the cuts . . . rich in nourishment, ace high in appeal, but easy on the dollar.” Move over, Weldon, because you can’t turn the head of Paddleford if she’s looking after her penny-pinching home cooks. She gave them sweet-sour spareribs, devised by the test-kitchen cooks.

Another reporter took at look at Paddleford’s life. In December 1954, Catherine Royer profiled Paddleford on a show for the Voice of America, “Women in the Free World.” The title

of the segment: “A Country Girl Whom Misfortune Stirred to Great Achievement.” Royer focused on Paddleford’s bout with throat cancer. “As she sought ways to pick up the thread of her life,” Royer said, “a friend offered her a newspaper job at a modest figure, as Food Markets Editor at the New York Herald Tribune ’s Home Institute. She put all the sights and smells of the country into it.”

Sweet-Sour Spareribs

2 pounds pork spareribs, about 16 pieces 4 inches long
Salt
1 tablespoon vegetable oil
About 1½ cups water

¼ cup raisins
½ teaspoon salt

2 green peppers, cored and thinly sliced

1½ teaspoons cornstarch
¼ cup sugar

¼ cup cider vinegar

1 teaspoon soy sauce

Season ribs generously with salt. In a large Dutch oven over medium heat, heat oil and brown ribs in batches, about 5 minutes to a side. Add ½ cup of water, the raisins, and salt. Return all ribs to Dutch oven, cover tightly, and cook over very low heat for 20 minutes, turning once about halfway through. Add green pepper slices, stir in cornstarch blended with sugar, the vinegar, and 1 cup of water. Cover and continue cooking over low heat for 30 minutes, turning once about halfway through. After 10 minutes have passed, add soy sauce and continue to cook over gentle heat, using a spoon to baste the ribs. The liquid will slowly reduce, so add more water as needed to prevent drying. The ribs are finished when tender, glazed, and slightly saucy.

Yield: 4 appetizer servings

Pushing forward, Paddleford now had the aid of an established serial column. By 1951, the “How America Eats” series was three years old, and it had attracted a serious following in both of its publications, This Week and the Trib. One big reason was that Paddleford aggressively sought to publish the kind of unglamorous recipes we now consider comfort food. There she was with managing caterer for the Des Moines, Iowa, Women’s Club, whose job, in a throwback to Paddleford’s days covering all those church supper planners for the Christian Herald, entailed planning a weekly luncheon for four hundred from October to May. Edith Davison, “a home economics graduate of Iowa State College,” provided her prize recipe for macaroni and cheese. (Her appearance, incidentally, is not an example of nepotism on Paddleford’s part; this Davison was not related to Paddleford’s pal Eloise Davison, coincidentally herself a 1924 home economics graduate of Iowa State College.) This version of the old familiar was “almost a souffle, but easier to handle.” Down home dinner-on-a-busy-weeknight fare, that was Paddleford’s meat, and she knew it.

Souffl Macaroni and Cheese

1½ cups scalded whole milk
1 cup soft bread crumbs
1½ cups grated cheddar cheese
1 cup cooked macaroni
3 eggs, separated
¼ cup diced pimientos
1 tablespoon chopped parsley
1 tablespoon grated onion
1 teaspoon salt
3 tablespoons butter, melted

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Grease a casserole.

Pour milk over soft bread crumbs; add cheese. Cover and let stand until cheese melts. Add macaroni. Combine and add beaten egg yolks, pimiento, parsley, onion, salt, and butter. Beat egg whites until stiff but not dry and fold into mixture.

Pour into prepared casserole. Bake uncovered for 25 to 35 minutes.

Yield: 4 entrée servings

Far from shunning these commonplace dishes, Paddleford’s readers ate them up and came back for more. Paddleford gave herself a little back-patting in her Christmas Day column that year, posing the question, how do we know this column is well read? “Never a week but somebody is writing, ‘I lost that most marvelous recipe for the Philadelphia sticky buns,’ or again it’s the prize angel cake baked by the Governor’s wife of Oregon, Mrs. Douglas McKay.” As a holiday gift to her fans, she printed “tied with ribbons of citron, all a-sparkle with sugar, perfumed with spice” the “eight best-loved recipes of a three-year journey crisscrossing the states, stopping at home kitchens, at roadside inns to gather food lore and famous regional dishes,” which included both the sticky buns and the green goddess salad dressing originated in the kitchen of San Francisco’s Palace Hotel.

Paddleford created good copy for local papers, too. A 1952 trip to Florida and Puerto Rico was typical. The Florida Times-Union , in Jacksonville, published pictures of Paddleford interviewing the region’s “most celebrated cooks,” while the Tampa Morning Tribune reported that she came to town “with the 14 sharp pencils and pliable notebooks which make her an annual customer for the year’s largest handbags.” El Mundo, San Juan’s

leading daily, in one day printed two stories about her visit: “Clementine Paddleford Recibe Informes Sobre Platos Nativos” and “La Experta de Herald Tribune Busca Recetas en Puerto Rico.”

Green Goddess Dressing

4 anchovy fillets, finely minced
2 tablespoons minced onion
1 tablespoon parsley, very finely chopped
1 tablespoon tarragon, very finely chopped
4 teaspoons chives, very thinly sliced
1 tablespoon tarragon vinegar
1½ cups mayonnaise, preferably homemade
Salt, to taste

Combine anchovy, onion, parsley, tarragon, chives, and tarragon vinegar in a medium bowl. Add mayonnaise; gently whisk together until combined. Season with salt to taste. Serve over greens tossed together in a salad bowl rubbed with a cut clove of garlic.

Yield: 1¾ cups

Philadelphia Sticky Buns

1¼ cups whole milk
1 package active dry yeast
¼ cup warm water
5 cups sifted all-purpose flour
1½ teaspoons salt
¾ cup plus 1 tablespoon sugar
½ cup shortening
2 eggs
¼ cup butter or margarine, at room temperature
½ cup packed brown sugar
2 teaspoons ground cinnamon
½ cup chopped walnuts
½ cup raisins or dried currants
2 cups corn syrup

Scald milk; cool to lukewarm. Dissolve yeast in water in a large bowl and add milk. Make a sponge by adding 2 cups of the flour, the salt, and the 1 tablespoon sugar, beating until smooth. Set aside in a warm place.

In a large bowl, whip shortening until light. Whip in the ¾ cup sugar. Add eggs, one at a time, beating each in thoroughly. Gradually beat this mixture into the bubbly sponge. Stir in remaining flour, or enough to make a soft dough.

Cover and let rise in a warm place until doubled in bulk, 1 to 1½ hours. Divide dough in half and roll each portion to ¼-inch thickness. Spread with butter. Combine brown sugar and cinnamon and sprinkle over dough. Scatter on the nuts and currants and dribble with 1 cup of the syrup. Roll each piece as for a jelly roll. Cut each roll into 1½-inch lengths, about 12 pieces per roll. Grease 2 deep 9-inch-square pans well with ½ cup syrup each. Stand buns on cut end in pans.

Cover and let rise until doubled in bulk, 1 to 1½ hours. Top buns with remaining syrup.

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Bake for 30 to 40 minutes, or until brown. Turn out of pans immediately.

Yield: 2 dozen buns

Fritas de Bacalao (Cod Fritters)

2½ cups sifted all-purpose flour
2 teaspoons double-acting baking powder
1 cup plus 3 tablespoons water
½ teaspoon salt
2 tablespoons butter, melted

1 clove garlic, minced

2 cups fresh codfish, shredded and seasoned
generously to taste with salt or ½ pound salt cod,
soaked in a bowl of water in the refrigerator
for 24 hours, with the water changed several times

2 quarts vegetable oil

Sift flour and baking powder into a large bowl; add water and salt and mix well. Add melted butter and minced garlic; blend thoroughly. The batter will have a fairly thick, sticky, bread-dough-like texture.

If using fresh codfish, salt the batter. If using salt cod, remove from water and simmer in fresh water. As it begins to boil, remove from the heat and drain. Remove any skin and bones and shred the fish.

In a deep pot, heat vegetable oil to 350 degrees. With two spoons loosely form walnut-size balls; make sure there are pieces of cod in each ball. Drop balls in hot fat and fry in batches until deep golden brown and cooked through, 4 to 5 minutes.

Yield: about 30 fritters

She may have been getting around the globe a little more, but she always made sure that she swung through her home state of Kansas at regular intervals, not because she had much family there that she was close to (although she certainly had plenty of old friends who were happy to welcome this newly minted media star). It was because she truly believed in the wholesomeness of the food of the Midwest. She returned to it again and again. “Today I hear much criticism regarding food in the Middle West,” a Kansas column began. “The complaints come usually from tourists who pass through at sixty miles an hour, eating en route in public places, and seldom at the best. I doubt these scorners have ever sat down as a guest at a family table.” To prove her point, she offers a specialty from the Orville Burtis Ranch in Ashland Bottoms. “Crowd supper parties were a frequent event. Mrs. Burtis would make stew or maybe a tub full of chili. Either dish has a rib-sticking quality that makes you young beyond your time. The meat was taken from her well-stocked thirty-foot locker, and it was home-grown steer beef.”

For all her adherence to her personal principles about food, Paddleford was rewarded with an ever-increasing audience—

and an ever-increasing group of advertisers who wanted to associate their products with her well-received words and formulas. Her employers certainly knew how to work this to their advantage. The Trib in particular heavily promoted their star. An ad in June 1950 urged readers “a trifle tired of the usual table d’hote” to get “a daily dash of Clementine Paddleford’s exciting column of culinary scoops in the Herald Tribune every day,” which was guaranteed to “convert you into an amateur Escoffier overnight.” The ad copy bragged: “Miss Paddleford literally travels the world to bring you news.”

Chili

1 pound dry red kidney beans
4 quarts cold water
5 cups tomato juice
1 tablespoon salt
2½ pounds ground chuck
1 tablespoon plus 2 teaspoons vegetable oil
3 tablespoons chili powder
1 large onion, grated, about 2 cups

Rinse beans; cover with cold water and soak overnight in heavy 6-quart casserole. Cover beans and simmer in their soaking water 1½ to 2 hours, or until they are tender, adding tomato juice from time to time to keep beans covered as liquid boils away. If tomato juice runs out, add more water if necessary to keep liquid an inch above the beans. Add ½ tablespoon of the salt.

Divide meat into batches. In a large skillet over medium heat, heat ½ tablespoon of the vegetable oil and brown meat, stirring the next batch into the earlier one. Divide chili powder evenly among batches and stir continuously until evenly browned. After all the meat is browned, add remaining salt. Remove beef from heat.

In the remaining 2 teaspoons vegetable oil, sauté onions until golden. Add beef and onion to casserole of beans. Cook mixture over low heat, stirring continuously, about 10 minutes longer. Serve with rolls or crackers.

Yield: 8 generous servings

The paper’s newsletter publicized her awards, too, while giving a little nod to the advertisers who paid the paper’s bills. “That isn’t our Clementine’s flying carpet draped around her shoulders,” ran the copy in yet another promotional piece, this one dated June 1, 1951. “That was just part of her garb on November 13th last, when Paul S. Willis, President of Grocery Manufacturers of America, Inc, presented her with the First Honorable Mention Certificate in the Life Line of America Awards—at the GMA’s annual luncheon at the Waldorf. The award was one for best interpretation of essential processes and services on food from farm to table.” A few years later, the promotion department had a field day when Paddleford’s appearance at the tenth annual meeting of food editors, held in Chicago, was written up in Time magazine in October 1953.

By the 1950s, Paddleford’s authority was widely acknowledged. This was in part because of her research and travel, but also because of her journalistic voice, close to the scene and ever speaking directly to her audience. It still retained its buoyancy and fanciful adjectives, but something had changed: More practice and the evolution of her own personal style with the times meant that Paddleford’s copy, while still containing some exotic adjectives, now benefited from a top coat of sophisticated, polished professionalism. She sounded less awestruck and more “this is the way it’s done.”

Now she was able to visit the homes not just of women her tipsters had alerted her about but to choose people and recipes to profile that interested her personally. Her reasoning must have been that if she found a food subject compelling enough, she could make her readers see exactly how and why. She turned out to be right, as was the case with her column about Robert P. Tristram Coffin’s lobster stew. Paddleford had made Dr. Coffin’s acquaintance during her travels in Maine, a state whose understated beauty and glorious natural food resources held a special place in her heart. Coffin, age sixty-one in 1953, was not only the Pierce Professor of English at Bowdoin College, just down the road from a working farm on the Kennebec River that Paddleford had herself purchased the year before, but he was also a poet and writer who had won the Pulitzer Prize for his work of poems Strange Holiness (Macmillan, 1935). Pretty distinguished company for a Kansas farm girl, a fact hardly lost on the reporter herself.

Dr. Coffin’s Lobster Stew

4 cups Maine seawater or 4 cups fresh water with 2 tablespoons
salt, plus additional salt to taste
6 medium lobsters (about 1¼ pounds each)
1 stick butter
3 pints milk
1 pint cream

Bring 2 cups water to a boil in a 10- to 12-quart pot with a tight-fitting lid. Lay in 3 lobsters on their backs, shell side down, to steam in their own juices. Cover and steam over high heat 7 or 8 minutes. Remove from pot and repeat with remaining saltwater and lobsters. The meat will be slightly underdone; pick it from shell while hot. Remove intestinal vein and lungs. Chop meat into large bite-size chunks.

Melt butter in a large pot over low heat and add lobster meat; sauté gently for 2 to 3 minutes. Add the milk, stirring clockwise constantly to keep the mixture from coagulating; bring almost to a froth but not to a boil, then add the cream and once again bring almost to a froth. Check the meat for doneness; if not quite cooked through, allow to simmer for a few additional minutes. Remove from heat. Season to taste. Serve immediately.

Yield: 6 servings

She became a frequent guest of newly expanded airline routes. In 1951 Air France flew her to Paris, Florence, and Rome on an ingenious mission: to learn “how Americans eat abroad.” The stories filed from Denmark, Brazil, Italy, and elsewhere were similar to those in the “How America Eats” series, but they were less vigorously promoted. R. W. Apple Jr., whose own exotic date-lines were followed closely by readers, noted that Paddleford was a weaker reporter away from home. Her wide-eyed approach left no margin for a commanding voice. Whereas her work on the regional American foodways was airtight with authority, the Europe-based columns would today be called gee-whiz journalism.

“Spring they say is when you fall in love,” she rhapsodized from Copenhagen in 1951. “Then and there we fell in love with a country that makes joyous with flowers. No Danish table is completely set without at least one daffodil. Spread over the stalls and pavement were snowdrops, primroses, anemones, lilies-of-the-valley, baskets of sweet-scented violets—everywhere the bold tulip: red and yellow.” She was there as one of ten American food editors invited by the Danish government. Paddleford wrote about pastries on the train from Copenhagen to the countryside; the 178 varieties of “smørrebrød,” or open-faced sandwiches, served at Oskar Davidsen’s restaurant; a visit with bleu cheese makers; and the curried eel at the Hotel D’Agleterre. Readers could get the recipe for the later, she wrote, via the sideline import company of a writer for a Copenhagen newspaper who was based on Madison Avenue in New York.

Three “news” stories, that is to say, articles about markets and economics that contained no recipes, were filed from this trip, all thickly buttered with wonder and awe. “The Nielsens are a family of four, and for food and household expenses they pay the equivalent of 300 kroner a month, or just about a third of the average worker’s income which is around 9,000 kroner, or $1,260,” she wrote, before noting that the mother “shops daily, foraging to take advantage of the good buys and to serve the perishables fresh”—partly because “she hasn’t a refrigerator.”

Perhaps the most inspired of what Paddleford called her “English series” is the piece in This Week about the coronation meal itself. Although not one of the select eight hundred invited guests (these consisted historically of people “representing the trade guilds of the City”), Paddleford scored interviews with both Lindsay R. Ring, general manager of Ring & Brymer, “the firm which has catered these Lord Mayor Coronation parties since the crowning of Victoria in 1837,” and Arthur Edwards, the chief steward of the Lord Mayor of London, charged with arranging the banquet tables for the new Queen. Edwards is pictured in This Week, a tall, slim figure who resembles a white- haired, pointy-featured version of Vincent Price as he stands somewhat spookily above a table with a gigantic fruit arrangement and an ice sculpture of the Queen on horseback.

All the details of the six-course menu are provided (Queen Victoria had more than one hundred dishes, Paddleford noted), from the turtle soup (“Once the huge turtles weighing 150 to 250 pounds were imported by the captains of Her Majesty’s ships returning from the West Indies. Now the big fellows come dressed and frozen”) to the beef course consisting of “Aberdeen Angus steers . . . fattened in Scotland and properly aged” that were roasted at Mansion House and “carried sputtering hot, to Guild-hall, four blocks away,” to the traditional orange jelly-based dessert called Maids of Honor. “The ‘Maids,’ Mr. Ring told me, were first baked at the order of Henry VIII to please Anne Boleyn.”

Files from the English trip provide a glimpse into a well organized machine of food journalism. The copious correspondence includes letters to and from Ring & Brymer; Huntley & Palmers, the cookie and cake manufacturers, who supplied Paddleford with special coronation tins for illustrations and gave her a bakery tour; and notes exchanged with Edith Walker, an official of the emergency meals division of the London Ministry of Food. She was referred to Paddleford by one of her frequent escorts, Bush Barnum, an advertising executive for the Glass Container Manufacturers Institute.

Paddleford came to know Barnum through her work, but he was also a man about town. He was included, along with Fred Astaire, Miles Davis, and Douglas Fairbanks Jr., in Esquire magazine’s 1960 list of America’s best dressed men. The citation said Barnum “graduated from Colgate in 1933, resides in Gramercy Park in one of Manhattan’s most desirable apartments, and has

been a Bernard Weatherhill—$260 and up per three-piece suit—customer for more than a decade.” Barnum offered to help connect Walker and Paddleford (“I think Miss Walker has both charm and ability, and that you might find a talk with her on Britain’s plans for emergency feeding interesting and worthwhile,” he advised). Paddleford took the advice and seemed to develop a warm relationship with Walker.

Maids of Honor

¾ cup whole blanched almonds
1 14-ounce package prepared puff pastry
½ cup sugar
2 egg yolks, beaten
2 tablespoons heavy cream
1 tablespoon all-purpose flour
Grated peel of 1 lemon
1 large egg
1 teaspoon water

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

Roast nuts on a baking sheet in oven until golden, 10 to 12 minutes.

Cool and process until fine in a spice grinder. Set aside.

Turn oven up to 400 degrees. Line 12 tart pans 2½ to 3 inches across with pastry. Alternatively, you can bake the tarts free-form by placing 12 2-inch to 3-inch squares of pastry on a sheet pan. In a medium bowl, combine nuts, sugar, egg yolks, cream, flour, and lemon peel in order given. Distribute the filling evenly into pastry shells or centers of squares.

Make an egg wash by beating the whole egg with the teaspoon of water. Brush tarts with egg wash. Bake for 20 to 25 minutes. Cool and remove from pans.

Yield: 12 tarts

Some letters took precedence, of course—especially those passed along by her boss at This Week, Bill Nichols. A Mr. G. C. Vandegrift of Philadelphia had written to Nichols questioning a caption for a picture showing “Elizabethan serving wenches,” the table implements that were on display in London’s Gore Hotel. The missive found its way to Paddleford via Joan Rattner, Paddleford’s copy editor there, who asked Paddleford: “Can you give him any kind of answer as to where you got terms?”

Paddleford hopped to it, providing Vandegrift with the contact information he would need. “I am the writer of this Coronation article and was in London to get the facts for the story,” she began. “I interviewed Robin Howard, owner of the Gore Hotel, whose idea it was to set up the Elizabethan dining room and made a study of that period: food, decorations, table utensils, everything in keeping. If you will write to him I know that he can answer your questions, for he spent more than year doing research of that period to have his dining room authentic in every detail.”

Rattner had inherited the editing of the “How America Eats” columns from her predecessor at This Week, Mary Lyons, in the early 1950s. She was a logical choice because she had spent about six months at the Home Institute before moving on to the Sunday supplement. Paddleford, she said, was hardly ever in the This Week office, conducting virtually all of her business there over the phone. Crucially, there was no test kitchen at This Week. Recipes for This Week were tested in the Trib kitchens or, on rare occasions, in the kitchens of freelance testers Paddleford employed in a pinch. Paddleford’s issues with her This Week editors were all about words and for that, the phone would suffice.

“Mary was a very sweet, lovely person,” Rattner, now Joan Rattner Heilman, a book author, recalls, “but I challenged Clementine more. She had some really weird sentence structure sometimes and if I made any changes in that sentence structure she would get really angry. She wanted things exactly as she wrote it. Exactly as she wrote it.” Rattner says that when she got to This Week, Paddleford was already a star and had the affect, behavior, and physical appearance of “a very strange woman,” in part because of her voice. “It was a voice like you never heard in your life, a very hoarse whisper,” Rattner says. Added to that were her unusual clothes. “She always wore a huge cape, kind of a beige-brown.” Rattner emphasizes that Nichols was very pleased at having Paddleford, strange or not, on his staff. “Respectful is the word for the relationship between Clementine and Bill,” she recalled. “He didn’t know her very well, to tell you the truth,” she says, but he was “very proud” of her, “she was a well-known person, an authority in her field.”

Paddleford’s “How America Eats” columns were on full boil, the author a seemingly inexhaustible source of ideas for what to cover next. For instance, Paddleford met Commander Winfield G. Knopf of the Navy, an officer aboard the aircraft carrier Leyte, at a small dinner in Manhattan. His ship was at the Brooklyn Navy Yard for an equipment overhaul. No unsuspecting table companion was left unmolested and soon, Paddleford had arranged for a tour of the vessel. Once aboard the “floating city,” Paddleford discovered a lesson in economy, reporting that the Leyte saved the Navy money because its cooks studied their garbage to determine what was not consumed, and then struck those items from future menus. The cooks reported that they gave three choices of meats, at least four vegetables, and six salads per day. Hits included such stick-to-your ribs classics as hamburger pie, fried shrimp, pizza, and chicken cacciatore.

One detail from this trip that she found less inspiring: “Outside big cities highballs and cocktails belong only before dinner or on party occasions. After life in New York and weekend living nearby I was surprised, yes and disappointed, that seldom, almost never, did anyone suggest a ‘drink,’ ‘Won’t you have a drink,’ meant coffee, tea, or lemonade.” This kind of note, a “data dump” in today’s newsroom parlance, is usually written by a reporter eager to show that the travel expenses are worth the cost; it’s difficult to imagine that Nichols would have cared in the case of his ace food writer, but these memos certainly didn’t diminish his estimation of her as earning her paycheck.

When not roaming the land, Paddleford was meantime fighting hard to maintain a semblance of a personal life. Receiving a letter in the 1950s from Helen Hostetter, a professor of journalism at her alma mater, she responded to a question about job satisfaction. The up sides: “Life is never dull” and also “That my work is fun. That few people are allowed to plan their own schedules, articles & go where they please no questions asked.” The drawback: “No time for friends or quiet weekends in the sun at my Connecticut hilltop.”

Paddleford distributed her limited spare time on her own priorities, but her choices now reflected her income. Weekends and evenings went to air navigation classes at New York University, where she enrolled in 1953. She wrote about this to Louise Swanson, a source from Flushing, Queens, whose husband was general manager of S. B. Thomas, a Manhattan bakery opened in 1847, today a huge enterprise whose leading brand is Thomas’ English Muffins. Mrs. Swanson’s son also had a tracheotomy tube. Paddleford wrote that flying was a singular pleasure. “I hope that he has found, as I have, that a breathing tube need not spoil one’s life in any way, except that you can’t go swimming, and tennis is too strenuous a game for me,” she wrote. “So, I have taken up flying for recreation. I don’t fly well but at least have my student’s license and am studying Navigation to try for my Pilot’s License this next summer.”

Her flying did improve, when she had time for her instruction. Paddleford wrote to her cousin Alice Paddleford Wood, whose family was to visit New York in the late summer of 1954, she would not be able to see them: “I’m so very disappointed, Alice, that your visit here is timed almost exactly to my trip to Alaska . . . to do a series of articles on salmon fishing and canning,” she wrote. “This had been a year of travel: to Brazil on coffee, Central America on bananas, France on wine—now Alaska . . . Maybe some day I can fly up and visit you. I’m getting pretty good now at finding my way. For a long time I was constantly getting lost—I’m not much good on directions.”

Connecticut was still her main place for relaxation. Weekends there were now spent with friends like Barnum and Alice Nichols. Claire had grown up, finished school, and, thanks to Paddleford, was engaged to be married. Through one of her contacts from her Danish food reporting, Paddleford had introduced the young Wellesley grad, then interning at the Herald Tribune in the photography department, to a handsome young Danish soldier named John Jorgensen. They wed in November 1952. That year, seemingly as a wedding present, Paddleford purchased a one hundred fifty-acre farm with a rambling house near Bath, Maine—not far from the one owned by Dr. Robert Coffin that she had so admired—for the young couple. She insisted that she, too, would use the house for vacations, perhaps so they would not feel beholden.

Claire reports that she fell so in love with the farm that she often dreamed of it while riding the subway in New York, and that one day while out buying shoes she realized it would be just as easy to do the things she needed to do in Maine as in Manhattan. “Just like that, we picked up and moved,” she says. By 1956, the Jorgensens were in Maine full time and set about becoming locals, beginning a steady stream of improvements to the farmhouse, adding new rooms and buildings across the property, and keeping goats. Their first child, Mark, was born in July that year. Today, he lives on the farm and runs a landscaping business.

Paddleford, now in her middle fifties, was wearing out some. In the fall of 1956 she reported in a memo to Nichols that she was suffering back pain and “battle fatigue” from fighting her Trib editors for more space for food versus fashion, and also from the occasional skirmish for column inches versus colleagues like Guin Hall and Isabel McGovern. Some of this may have been exaggerated, because in the same letter she also said she was insisting the paper give her an assistant to stave off becoming “a basket case.” Nichols presumably would be an ally in this effort.

A couple of weeks later, Paddleford reported in a letter to Hilda Hamlin of Northampton, Massachusetts, who had become a steady correspondent in the late 1940s, that her doctor had suggested a brief hospitalization, presumably for the back. Instead, she decided to check into the Waldorf-Astoria with her cat Pussy Willow. “My ailment—back muscles that wouldn’t function,” she wrote. “I was immobilized for a few days.” After four days being waited on and afraid that Pussy Willow would escape the room, Paddleford checked out and returned to work, apparently feeling well enough to resume travel.

A trip to New Orleans in December 1957 had more to do with official This Week business than with reporting on the place Paddleford acknowledged was a great favorite. A detailed letter to Nichols notes she was a guest of both Wesson Oil and of its advertising company, the Fitzgerald Agency. Paddleford’s letter reveals more of herself than she ordinarily let out, acknowledging that constant chaperoning by various officials left her “exhausted just being pleasant” because “twenty-four hours is about my limit on that.” A dinner companion, the wife of the ad agency’s vice president, she related, “drank too much and left with the shrimp,” although “she is old family New Orleans society, so it didn’t matter.”

The sponsors of the trip had crucial business in mind in inviting the prominent editor. In the same way that electric range manufacturers were battling to change the basic cooking instruction “turn off the gas” to “remove from the heat,” the oil companies sought to get their generic phrases imbedded in the language. Vegetable oils were burgeoning, with competing versions and competing labels. For instance, Kraft called its product “all-purpose oil,” while Lever Brothers identified its liquid Spry as “liquid shortening.” Wesson was trying to persuade Paddleford, and in turn This Week, to use its generic version, “vegetable oil.” By flying the reporter down, wining and dining her and putting her up in what she described as a suite “furnished with antiques of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries” that went for the then-exorbitant rate of $68 a night, they succeeded. But there may have been an iron fist in the lavish glove: Wesson had apparently threatened to pull its advertising. This is referred to in correspondence from George Beveridge, This Week’s Atlanta-based advertising director, who wrote to Nichols of Paddleford’s visit: “It is rare and wonderful and hasn’t she done us a lot of good! I really think that this is now all settled and in the respectable way in which we would like to have it settled.”

Nichols forwarded Beveridge’s letter to Paddleford with a note that read: “Here are happy words from N.O.” Whatever her role as a diplomat, Paddleford didn’t come away with nothing, publishing a column about a wonderful dinner at Brennan’s, a newer and beloved restaurant in the French Quarter, where the owner, Ella Brennan, sent over a bottle of 1953 Pomeroy Champagne “as I have known Ella fairly well and had written about their restaurant at its very beginning.” In return, Paddleford carried a recipe for Brennan’s shrimp bisque.

This piece of give-and-take is an example of everyday business in the life of Paddleford, who at this point was a star. As proof, she rounded out 1957 as the recipient of one of five awards given at the annual Front Page Dinner Dance of the New York Newspaper Women’s Club. The emcee of the evening was Steve Allen, the keynote speaker Governor W. Averell Harriman. A fellow recipient, for her series of reports about the conditions in the Soviet Union in her column, carried in the New York Post, was Eleanor Roosevelt. Lustrous company indeed for Paddleford, who won “for her prediction about the changing eating habits of the American people”—yet another of her trend stories.

“I asked the reason for Purim,” Paddleford wrote. “Mrs. Less explained it has been celebrated for around 2,400 years. It’s on this day the Book of Esther is read aloud to Jewish congregations in commemoration of her successful appeal to Ahasuerus, the ancient Persian Emperor, to save her people from the mass death planned by the Grand Vizier, Haman.” Paddleford did something smart with this column: reminded readers they needn’t be Jewish to enjoy a good cookie. “But we like them just any time,” she wrote, depicting the Less family’s love of playing bridge and the fervent requests of their friends to bring hamantaschen over “just

any time.” An accompanying photograph showed Less baking with her grandchildren, Laurel and Richard Kronenberg; another showed a platter of hamantaschen on a lace tablecloth. “Mother was delighted and she liked being in the limelight after Clementine’s article was published,”Jacqueline Kronenberg, Less’s daughter, now a retired preschool teacher in suburban Cleveland, said. In addition, her mother received letters asking about the tablecloth, and the letters, as well as the recipe, are still in the family.

Hamantaschen

Dough:
2½ cups sifted flour
½ teaspoon salt
½ pound butter, room temperature
3 egg yolks
3 tablespoons white vinegar
3 tablespoons cold water

In a medium bowl, combine 1½ cups of the flour, salt, and butter, rubbing butter into flour with fingers.

In a separate bowl, mix egg yolks with a fork. Add vinegar and water. Sift the remaining 1 cup flour into the egg mixture, mixing together lightly. Combine the mixtures and blend well with a fork. Store, covered, in the refrigerator 6 hours or overnight.

When ready to use, the dough will be sticky; work quickly while it is cold. Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Pick off dough the size of a walnut and roll on a well-floured surface into a 3¼-inch round. Place a level teaspoon of filling in a center. Pinch the sides together, forming 1 closed triangle over the filling. Cut the pinched edges about ¼ inch deep at ½-inch intervals to give a scalloped top when baked. Place on an ungreased baking sheet. Bake for 20 minutes, or until browned.

Yield: 25 hamantaschen

Poppy-Seed Filling:
¾ cup ground or whole poppy seeds
½ cup whole milk
¼ cup honey
2 tablespoons chopped pecans
2 tablespoons sugar
¹⁄8 teaspoon ground cinnamon

Place seeds in a fine strainer and run water through it again and again; if using whole poppy seeds, grind in coffee grinder. Place in top of double boiler with milk and cook over hot water until milk is absorbed; the filling will have thickened considerably. Add honey, pecans, sugar, and cinnamon. Cook about 4 minutes, stirring until sugar is dissolved and honey is blended. Cool, cover, and store in refrigerator.

Yield: about 2 cups

Apricot Filling:
1 cup dried apricots
¾ cup water
¾ cup sugar

Wash apricots. Chop coarsely. Place in small saucepan, add water, and cook over low heat until very soft, adding more water if necessary. Add sugar and heat, stirring constantly, until fruit comes to a boil, about 12 minutes. Cool, cover, and store in refrigerator.

Yield: about 2 cups

The filling in these two recipes is more than enough for the 25 turnovers in the pastry recipe. The poppy filling will keep for three days in the refrigerator and the apricot for two weeks.

Sometimes “How America Eats” columns took readers to less homey events. Paddleford visited Washington, D.C., at least twice in six years to investigate. In 1951 she profiled Mary Turner, for twenty-seven years director of the Home Service Bureau of the Potomac Electric Power Company; in this position Turner supervised the cooking classes that the company sponsored for hundreds and hundreds of women over the years. Paddleford made the bold statement that Turner “has done more, perhaps, than any other one person to influence the eating habits of cross-country America” because “all of these years she had taught women cooking, the tried and true and things brand-new” and her “influence has been nation-wide.”

Turner was indeed a powerful person, the kind of home economics wizard who might have earlier misjudged a young Paddleford because she lacked a home ec degree. There was nothing but love between the two, though, when Paddleford visited Turner at home; Paddleford displays a pitch-perfect ear for the life of a capital hostess. In that city, she notes, “women come, women go. They come from every state in the Union, live for a period, then home again to show the neighbors how it’s done.”

The second time Paddleford hit the capital was in 1957, when she was among the journalists invited to cover the unveiling of the “Senate salad,” an event theoretically created by senators from seven states to tout their regional produce. Paddleford joined the “movie and TV cameras” in the Senate Dining Room in Washington in June 1957 for this one. “The salad recipe was

made in conference with seven states trying to mix garden wares. The problem was which state would give what?” The solution: tomatoes from New Jersey, California lettuce and avocados, watercress from West Virginia, grapefruit and romaine from Arizona, “little green onions” from Texas, and celery from Louisiana.

Casserole of Baked Crab Imperial

2 cups whole milk
3 tablespoons butter
2 tablespoons all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon salt
¹⁄8 teaspoon black pepper
Dash cayenne
1 egg yolk, beaten
2 tablespoons sherry
1 cup soft bread crumbs
2 tablespoons minced fresh parsley
1 tablespoon minced onion
1 pound jumbo lump crabmeat
¼ cup toasted buttered bread crumbs
1 teaspoon sweet paprika

Preheat oven to 400 degrees.

In a small pan, warm milk over low heat. Meanwhile, in a medium pan over low heat, melt butter. Whisk in flour, raising heat slightly, and continue to cook until blended, about 2 minutes. Gradually whisk in warmed milk and seasonings and bring to a low simmer, stirring constantly, until thickened, about 2 minutes. Gradually add egg yolk, tempering to prevent scrambling, and continue cooking 2 minutes more. Remove pan from heat. Add sherry, soft bread crumbs, parsley, and onion; mix gently. Season to taste with additional salt and pepper. Add crabmeat.

Pour into well-greased shallow 1½-quart casserole. Top with buttered crumbs and sprinkle with paprika. Bake 20 to 25 minutes. Serve with green salad and toasted bread, if you like.

Yield: 4 entrée or 6 appetizer servings

The final ingredient? “Nobody argued when Senator Margaret Chase Smith announced, ‘Maine adds the lobster.’ And beautiful it was with the claw pieces laid in a wide band over the top and more sweet lobster lumps waiting the fork interwoven through the greens.” It turns out, Paddleford reported, that the official salad was a lot like one that Smith made for her family at home. “Senator Smith likes to serve the salad along with a steaming baked Maine potato. Dessert, I asked? Vanilla ice cream with fresh strawberry sauce. ‘It’s an old wives’ tale,’ Senator Smith said, ‘that lobster and ice cream are incompatible.’ ” Paddleford pointed out to her readers not from Maine that they would find

the recipe “an adjustable salad—instead of lobster, use chicken or shrimp, or crab meat. Or leave out the extras and make it a salad of greens.”

Senate Salad

1 cup bite-size pieces butter lettuce
1 cup bite-size pieces romaine or escarole
½ cup bite-size pieces watercress
1½ cups diced fresh lobster meat
1 cup diced celery
½ cup thinly sliced green onions (green and white parts)
2 medium tomatoes, cubed
1 medium avocado, peeled, pitted, and cubed
5 large pimento-stuffed olives, sliced
8 or 12 segments from half a grapefruit
Salt and pepper, to taste

Combine lettuces and make a bed on 4 individual plates. Place the ingredients in rows or separate piles on the lettuce. Season with salt and pepper. Pass with Senate salad dressing.

Yield: 4 entrée salads

Senate Salad Dressing
½ cup olive oil
1 tablespoon plus 2 teaspoons white wine vinegar
1 small clove garlic, chopped
3 hard-cooked eggs, finely chopped
½ cup mayonnaise

1 tablespoon thinly sliced chives
½ teaspoon salt

Combine oil and vinegar and whisk in remaining ingredients.

Yield: 2 cups dressing

Interviewing senators was big fun for Paddleford, and the chance to do turns like this one enhanced her profile as a reporter. Another less generic piece of work that separated the likes of Paddleford from other reporters, this time for reasons not of power but of restrained sentimentality, was her 1936 article “A Flower for My Mother.” Though portions of it had already been published, Paddleford had kept the manuscript active and had worked on it, slowly and steadily, over the years. In 1958, she again took up that work in earnest, turning it into a longer essay. She sent a copy of the manuscript to Bill Nichols with a somewhat disingenuous cover letter. “Here is ‘A Flower for My Mother’ written out of my head and very quickly,” she wrote. “This was first conceived as a ‘Most Interesting Person’ story for the Reader’s Digest, but never completed, just put into outline form. I think this is oversentimental, but it’s my general idea of the theme. You like it or you don’t. Let me know soon.”

It was an unqualified success, bringing hundreds of letters to This Week, such as one from Lawrence Thompson of Miami, whose parents were born in the Blue Valley. The town of Stockdale had been virtually demolished by 1957—it had been flooded to make way for the Tuttle Creek Dam in 1962—and when Paddleford replied to Thompson, she said: “I was in the valley only last August. It was all in ruin and gave me a heartache. I doubt, even with the dam opening delayed, that I will ever go back.”

The dedication is “To Jenny Jorgensen who is named for my mother.” This second child of Claire’s had just been born and Paddleford was clearly delighted at the arrival of a soul who would carry forward a name from the precious days in Kansas. If you can find it in the used-book market, this book is distilled Paddleford and in many ways less sentimental than its author believed. It was also more popular, perhaps, than she knew. A story published in the Manhattan Mercury, a Kansas daily, in May 1959, includes the following anecdote: “Not long ago a demonstration of [Paddleford’s] fame came up in a column syndicated by Leonard Lyons. He was quoting Ernest Hemingway who was telling of his experience in autograph signing. The author remarked that once when he stopped in a small Italian village, residents quickly bought out every Hemingway book in the local store for autographing. Then they bought other books for him to sign. ‘I was signing all sorts of books,’ he said, ‘from Galileo to Clementine Paddleford.’ ” The true collectors’ item, then, might be A Flower for My Mother autographed by . . . Hemingway.

Craig Claiborne was hired as a food writer for The New York Times in 1957, at the age of thirty-seven. He quickly became the restaurant reviewer, and ultimately the paper’s chief food editor. He shared some background with fifty-nine-year-old Paddleford. Claiborne was born in the Mississippi Delta town of Sunflower, where he, like Paddleford, had an especially close relationship with his mother that in his case showed up in a love of cooking. Instead of feeding a farm and helping run a grocery, Claiborne’s mother ran a boarding house. Claiborne’s upbringing also informed his palate, especially his relationship with a succession of excellent black cooks who managed his mother’s dining room and taught her son about food.

Unlike Paddleford’s, however, Claiborne’s childhood was traumatic: A Feast details “many memories of pain,” as the writer Roy Reed described in a book review, that Claiborne endured as “a man haunted by the memory of a hovering mother, a man of once-excessive appetite for drink and sex, a man tormented for years by early poverty, early fears and early homosexual guilt.” The book details the shame Claiborne felt over a childhood spent in hatred of the sports that boys were expected to like, and includes a confession of sexual abuse by his father.

In his memoir, as the food writer Betty Fussell so aptly stated, Claiborne detailed himself as a man “in the Twain tradition of the picaresque rube who alternates between chutzpah and shame,” a man who managed to escape the Delta in a yeoman’s and then an ensign’s uniform, first stationed in Morocco and then in Okinawa. Out of the service for good in 1953, Claiborne decided to follow his passion for food; he enrolled under the G.I. Bill in l’Ecole Hotelière de la Societé Suisse des Hoteliers in Lausanne, Switzerland. There he learned how to cook and, more important, appreciate the intricacies and traditions of fine French food. Upon returning to America, he landed a job writing about restaurants for Gourmet. He got through the final hurdle at The New York Times courtesy of a lucky Mississippi State connection—an irony, since Claiborne had felt unworthy as a young man at not having gotten into the famous university in Oxford. He thus became in 1957 “the first male food editor in a journalistic world dominated by women,” as Fussell put it, in what was only a slight overstatement.

Claiborne came to stardom not as a food writer in the tradition of Paddleford, who was the hero to home cooks, but as a restaurant reviewer. His main objective was to codify restaurant atmosphere and food in a way that gave readers a good idea of how they might like to spend their money while on the town, and his public proved quite grateful. As a result, Claiborne earned a reputation as a bon vivant and a quasi-celebrity, the kind filled with great anecdotes about everyone’s favorite restaurants—and once he even got arrested for drunken driving, in a story made humorous because he liked to tell it on himself.

A couple of reasons are possible. One is that Claiborne’s earliest articles for the Times seem to show him nipping at Paddleford’s heels. For example, in December 1965, Claiborne wrote about Paprikas Weiss, the Hungarian food importing business that had long been a favored source of Paddleford’s. Claiborne wrote about the place, which by then had been in business for seventy-nine years in May 1966, as if he were the first to discover it, lauding its “special dumpling machine” used to make galuska, a side dish, served buttered, with goulash (the goulash recipe of the shop’s second generation owner, Mrs. Alexander Weiss, is also given). This column appeared only about five months after Paddleford wrote in her regular column in the Herald Tribune that Paprikas Weiss had announced that the Hungarian goulash was coming to market in cans, a product she liked enough to recommend. The similarity of these two stories cannot have sat well.

Another factor is the emergence of the Times as a threat to the Trib itself. When Paddleford joined the Trib, it was by far the more exciting paper. By the late 1950s, however, its quality could not make up for its serious financial losses. The Times had one thing the Trib did not: its own Sunday magazine, which became a juggernaut for advertisers. “The Times ate the Herald Tribune, basically, because they managed to get a pile of money out of that Sunday magazine in co-op ads that were paid for by manufacturers,” Betsy Wade explained. “Huge, huge ads. But the Herald Tribune got thinner and thinner and thinner and sadder.” Shrewd as she was, Paddleford could not have mistaken this trend, and for all the job offers begging her to come do publicity work, there is no record of the Times’s ever knocking on her door. At this time, there were plenty of defections from the Trib to the Times, but not its biggest female stars: not Paddleford and not Eugenia Sheppard.

So Paddleford had to live with the emergence of Claiborne. However Paddleford may have been irritated by Claiborne’s presence on “her” turf, she need not have worried about losing her audience. At this time, she was the grande dame of food writing, and everyone, including Claiborne, knew it. In his memoir, published fifteen years after Paddleford’s death, Claiborne writes about coming onto the New York City restaurant scene in the late 1950s and finding it “a hick town.” “The only much-read and much-quoted critic in town was Clementine Paddleford, a well-meaning soul whose prose was so lush it could have been harvested like hay and baled,” he wrote. “The truth of the matter was, however, that Clementine Paddleford would not have been able to distinguish skillfully scrambled eggs from a third-rate omelet. I am not at all sure that she ever cooked a serious meal in her life. But she had a readership that was estimated at the time of her death as 12 million.”

While Claiborne had youth on his side, he clearly misjudged Paddleford and misunderstood her mission. She never saw herself as a critic of the restaurant world; at least 90 percent of the “How America Eats” series, all 845 columns of it, are about the regional specialties of American home cooks. Her legacy is the definition of “regional American food,” left in what is essentially map form, detailing the dishes, ingredients, and culinary customs and ceremonies of home cooks from Alaska to New York. “How America Eats” is a primer for understanding the foundation of American food—it shows how immigrant cooks adapted their old-fashioned, time-honored recipes with what they found in their new homes. In compiling the material, Paddleford’s intention was to help home cooks figure out, using each other for inspiration, what to cook for dinner—and to tell the stories behind the original recipes. Of key importance is that Paddleford, unlike Claiborne, was not an expert cook—the kind of work she did, and the kind of legacy she left, was not something for the elite. It would not take an expert cook, after all, to translate the stories of home cooks and to show how they made their recipes. What it took was an expert writer who understood the magical way in which good food transforms ordinary mealtimes. And at that, no one could rival the sixty-two-year-old Paddleford.