CHAPTER 6
What Men Eat on Submarines
Growing up on her family’s farm in the Blue Valley of Kansas, Clementine Paddleford had outsize dreams—of becoming a famous writer and traveling the world, of being a household name, of being rich. At age sixty-two in 1960, she had achieved all of this. Where was there left to go? Thirty feet below sea level in a narrow steel tube, of course.
In July 1960, Clementine Paddleford did something that she likely never dreamed she would. She boarded the USS Ship-jack , then the fastest nuclear submarine in the world, docked in the Thames River in Connecticut, for a day-long stay that included a submerging in Long Island Sound. Paddleford was as on-mission as ever, but this was unlike anything she had ever been on. As she climbed aboard, gripping the hem of her skirt as it threatened to swirl over her head, she must have looked a fright. “I had asked for it—a dive to the ocean floor,” she would later report (in This Week on July 10, 1960). “The wind rushed at me like a mad bull. I clung to a one-rope rail, walked the narrow ramp from State Pier, New London, Conn., to the curved top of a mighty whale. It looked like a whale, but it was a different kind of fish.”
The naval cadets all smiling and greeting her warmly must have found this curmudgeonly older woman, a food writer nonetheless, quite an amusement—here was Paddleford, thick gray fringe of bangs framing her wide-open face, cape draped over shoulders, notebook in hand. If she seemed silly to the young men in uniform, she could not have cared less.
“I had come aboard . . . to see how America eats in what the crew call ‘our underwater hotel,’ ” but even for one willing to go to extremes, she couldn’t help but find the experience harrowing. “I was clothed in darkness—and in gooseflesh. ‘Who cares,’ I thought to myself, ‘what men eat on submarines?’ ” She was bound to have felt uneasy among the most powerful weapons the world had ever seen.
Still, she stood by the Navy chefs as they showed her around the tight quarters and narrow passageways of the six-foot-by-nine-foot “capsule kitchen” where they prepared three meals a day for seventy-five to one hundred men. Despite her protestations, Paddleford cared deeply about what men ate on submarines—and perhaps more important she understood that spending time on such a vessel would give readers an unexpectedly delicious vicarious thrill. Masking her fear as much as possible, she witnessed what likely was both the most unusual kitchen she’d ever been in and the most organized. No fish was left flipping around: From storage solutions—“Everything is compressed, even flour, always a bulky item aboard a ship, has been compressed to one-fourth its normal volume without loss of quality”—to various convenience-based innovations—“a one-pound can of dehydrated orange juice crystals which will reconstitute to a one gallon beverage, with a space saving of 75 percent”—to the touchy issue of garbage disposal—“It is packed in sacks weighted down, put in a projector like a miniature torpedo tube, and fired out to the fish.”
The Skipjack column attests to her ingenuity. In it, she answers every question a reader didn’t know he had about culinary life on a submarine. The two recipes Paddleford picked to use “are in quantity amounts, with the thought that these might be useful when planning a community meal”—brownies to feed eighty, and hamburger pie for one hundred. Whether or not her readers ever put those mammoth recipes to use, they had to admire Paddleford’s willingness to go to any length to report on food.
Maybe it was her swirly-twirly clothing, or maybe it was her florid prose that morphed mushrooms into umbrellas, or maybe her generally eccentric attitude—by this point Paddleford had well earned what the writer David Kamp referred to in his 2006 book about the rise of American food culture, The United States of Arugula, as a reputation for being an “endearingly loopy” character. Still, boarding the Skipjack was no publicity stunt.
It had taken her more than a year of finagling to get clearance to board the Skipjack, and she had worked so hard for the story that her tenacity impressed her friend James Beard. In a letter to Helen Evans Brown, the noted Californian chef and food writer, in December 1959, Beard wrote: “Clementine was down here the other night for her annual story-getting session. She was in fine form and is hoping now to go out for a cruise on an atomic submarine to see how they all eat. She is surely the getting-aroundest person I have ever known, except for Eleanor Roosevelt.”
A careful observer might have noted, though, that despite the splashiness of the Skipjack article, Paddleford was not traveling as much as usual—the breakneck pace of the early years of “How America Eats” had slowed to the point that she spent a whole month—mid-August through mid-September of 1960—without a dateline on her columns.
Resting a bit on her oars meant that Paddleford devoted her articles to perennial seasonal classics: “Summer Salads, All Dressed Up” was about innovations in the salad dressing aisle and required little more than a trip to the supermarket and a call to some publicists. “Less than a decade ago salad dressings exceptional numbered under a hundred,” she wrote. “Today there must be 20 big firms with complete lines of any kind of dressing you care to name. Some of these are ready mix packaged in envelopes, others ready to serve, to pour from the bottle. Why should a woman ever turn a hand to making salad dressing with such choice unlimited?” She goes on to tell the story behind the development of Wishbone’s, Kraft’s, and General Foods’ lines of dressings, and to give three salad recipes, including a chicken-avocado version, that readers should try.
Later that month she turned her attention to “the many splendored squash,” offering up a primer on “the Buffalo Bills of the vegetable bin” that “gallop into market with tough, hard exteriors hiding hearts of gold.” As usual, she dipped her toe into the gourds’ history (“The word squash comes from the Massachusetts Indian word Askutasquash. Spanish explorers took squash back to the old world . . . Navigators used a hollowed out calabash squash to sight the stars”) before suggesting six ways, including the comfort food staple of a casserole of baked summer squash and cheese, to enjoy the stuff.
As summer wound down, the Tribune column of September 16, 1960, was given over to the country’s “bountiful harvest of grapes” for which September through November is the big season. Here she elaborates on the several kinds of table grapes sold in markets (“starting with the little Perlette from Coachella Valley, then that red grape the Cardinal, followed by the flame Tokay and Red Emperor and finally the Almenia, a pale green grape”). Four recipes are included, from a humble grape cobbler to an haute hollandaise-topped trout Vernonique; these were “treasured recipes from the Herald Tribune’s Kitchen Collection”—repeats—since Paddleford hadn’t visited any new kitchens.
A brief break was certainly permissible for someone like Paddleford. Moreover, at this point in history she was one of the few people that America trusted for cooking advice. But to keep herself on top, she’d need something more enduring than a newspaper column. It would be the publication of How America Eats, a collection of columns written for This Week between 1948 and 1960, that put the frosting on her career.
How America Eats was long in the making—the columns spanned twelve years of Paddleford’s career, and the publication of the book took years instead of the months that it might take to produce a cookbook today. The process began in 1957 when Paddleford sold the rights to her column collection to Charles Scribner’s—the same publishing house that in 1937 delivered to eager homemakers the seminal America’s Cookbook, compiled by the Home Institute of the New York Herald Tribune with a foreword by Mrs. William Brown Meloney. Scribner’s was experienced in handling and marketing cookbooks; as usual, Paddleford chose her collaborators wisely—and the Scribner people were pleased, too.
042
Chicken Avocado Salad
3 cups cooked chicken, in large chunks
1 teaspoon grated onion
½ cup diced celery
2 tablespoons light cream
½ cup mayonnaise (preferably homemade)
¾ teaspoon salt
Dash of black pepper
1 tablespoon lemon juice
1 medium avocado, peeled, pitted, and diced
 
In a large bowl, combine chicken, onion, and celery. In a small bowl, blend cream with mayonnaise, salt, pepper, and lemon juice. Toss to taste with chicken mixture—you may not need all the dressing. Lightly toss in avocado. Chill.
Yield: 4 servings
043
Escalloped Squash Casserole
1½ to 2 pounds yellow summer squash,
6 to 8 squash
1 medium onion, chopped
Salt, to taste
1½ cups white sauce, hot (see next page)
1 cup grated cheddar cheese
2 eggs, lightly beaten
1 cup dry bread crumbs
1 cup butter, melted
2 tablespoons grated parmesan cheese
 
Preheat oven to 325 degrees.
 
Slice squash into rounds ½-inch thick. Combine with onion. Place in boiling salted water to cover. Simmer 2 to 3 minutes, or until crisp-tender. Drain well. Combine hot white sauce and cheddar cheese: stir until cheese melts. Stir small amount of hot mixture into eggs; add to remaining sauce. Fold in squash.
 
Turn into a baking dish 10 inches by 10 inches, or any pan that will hold all of the squash in a layer 3 inches deep or less. Combine bread crumbs and butter; sprinkle over squash mixture. Sprinkle with grated parmesan cheese. Bake, uncovered, 35 to 40 minutes, or until lightly browned.
Yield: 6 servings
 
White Sauce
1½ tablespoons butter
1½ tablespoons all-purpose flour
1½ cups hot milk
Salt, to taste
 
In a small, heavy saucepan, melt butter over low heat. Stir in flour with a wooden spoon. Continue stirring and cook for about 2 minutes; do not let the flour brown or color. Gradually whisk in hot milk, a little at a time, waiting after each addition for all milk to be absorbed. Bring to a simmer to thicken and salt to taste.
044
Trout Veronique
6 trout fillets, about 6 ounces each, from 3 fish
4 cups dry white wine
2 lemons, thinly sliced into rounds
Salt
12 to 18 seedless green grapes, each sliced into 4 rounds
1½ cups Hollandaise Sauce (see next page)
 
Preheat broiler.
 
In 1 or 2 heatproof baking dishes or a nonreactive roasting pan large enough to hold the 6 fillet pieces in a single layer, bring the wine and lemon slices to a gentle simmer; do not boil. Season fillets to taste with salt. Slide fillets into simmering liquid, cover pan with foil, and remove from heat. Check for doneness in 2 or 3 minutes. Gently remove fillets when still slightly underdone and pink and place them skin-side down on a heatproof platter.
 
Distribute grape pieces over top of fillets and pour about 4 tablespoons of the sauce on each. Place under the broiler until golden brown, 3 to 4 minutes.
 
Yield: 6 servings
 
Hollandaise Sauce
1 cup butter, clarified
2 tablespoons white wine vinegar
1 tablespoon water
1 tablespoon minced onion
3 peppercorns
 
4 egg yolks
Juice of ¼ lemon
 
Salt
 
To clarify butter: Slowly melt butter. Let stand until clear part can be skimmed off easily. Reserve.
 
In a small saucepan place vinegar, water, onion, and peppercorns. Cook over very low heat to reduce liquid to 1 teaspoon. Remove peppercorns. Cool.
 
Put egg yolks and reduced vinegar in a medium metal bowl over a medium pan of water on a very low simmer and whisk constantly until it is lemon-colored. Continue to whisk while slowly drizzling in clarified butter. Add lemon juice at the end and then salt to taste. Adjust the texture if necessary by adding a little water; the sauce should be pourable but still fairly thick. Pour over fillets immediately.
Yield: about 2 cups
“I was delighted to hear from William Nichols that you will be able to take time off this summer to devote yourself entirely to How America Eats,” Burroughs Mitchell, an editor at Scribner’s, wrote to Paddleford in early June 1957. “I am writing now just to tell you that our interest and confidence in the book haven’t lessened in the least, and to remind you that we are ready to pay an advance any time you want it.” The advance, $1,500, was deposited into Paddleford’s account at Chase Manhattan later that summer, and indeed there were two months in the autumn of 1957 when Isabel McGovern and Guin Hall wrote all of the food articles for the Herald Tribune in Paddleford’s stead, although there was no mention of her absence in the paper and her byline continued to appear sporadically in This Week, in columns filed in advance.
The so-called sabbatical was put to good use. Finally Paddleford’s columns were organized geographically. When the book went into the stores in time for Christmas 1960 at $10 a copy, it was an immediate hit. Most of the credit goes to the variety of recipes, of course, but there was also an especially winning foreword, a short essay by Paddleford describing not only what readers would find inside but also laying out her assessment of eating in America. It is arguably the most stirring writing of her career, the kind of muscular prose that hooks readers and drags them along on what Paddleford called a “voyage of discovery” into the world of food.
“This book has been twelve years in the writing,” it begins, establishing immediately the fact that shoe-leather reporting and serious scholarship have been involved. Next, Paddleford lays out her methodology: “It was in January 1948 I started crisscrossing the United States as roving Food Editor for This Week Magazine—my assignment, tell ‘How America Eats.’ I have traveled by train, plane, automobile, by mule back, on foot—in all over 800,000 miles,” she asserts. That is more than three times the distance from the earth to the moon, all in the service of food, over twelve years.
“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,” she writes. “I have collected these recipes from a wide variety of kitchens: farm kitchens, apartment kitchenettes, governors’ mansions, hamburger diners, tea rooms and from the finest restaurants with great chefs in charge. 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.”
What was left to explain was quality control: How did Paddleford ensure, with all the foods she had tasted, that each recipe was the genuine article? Paddleford plunges in: “This book is based on personal interviews with more than 2,000 of the country’s best cooks. And I have eaten every dish in the book at the table where I found it. I have eaten each dish again when the recipes were tested by home economists in This Week’s kitchen.”
Of course, This Week’s office had no ovens and no home economists; the Herald Tribune provided both. Rather than explicate the arcane financial arrangements between the magazine and the newspaper, Paddleford simplified them. For instance, it would not have been a selling point for people reading This Week in, say, the Cincinnati Enquirer, to learn that the recipes were tested at the New York Herald Tribune. Because the finances meant that the ninth-floor domain at the Trib was as much the This Week kitchen as the Trib kitchen, readers of the book were not being deceived. This situation merely highlights the murkiness of the This Week-Herald Tribune relationship. For instance, some editors who worked only on the Herald Tribune edition were paid by This Week in its corporate guise as the United Newspapers Magazine Corporation; however, they also got small Herald Tribune payments for picture layouts and other work for the beefed-up edition distributed with the Herald Tribune . National advertisers in This Week who were based in New York thought that their ads appeared everywhere in the same plump magazine they saw in New York; however, the national advertisers who were based in Cincinnati would have seen their ads in a rather thinner magazine. No one lied exactly, but no one strained to tell the truth.
Further in her introduction to How America Eats, Paddleford meets the question of the title: How does America eat? And at this point, her question reaches the rich, rotund level where her writing has always been: America, she said, eats on the fat of the land, in every language.
“For the most part, however,” she continues, “even with the increasingly popular trend toward foreign foods, the dishes come to the table with an American accent. From the very beginning, American dishes came from many countries, made from recipes German, Swedish, Italian, ad infinitum. . . . In some regions these dishes have kept their original character. But more often, over the years, they have been mixed and Americanized.
“The pioneer mother created dishes with foods available. These we call regional. It is these, perhaps, I have given the greatest emphasis here. However, I am not given to food favorites, hold no food prejudices. Good food is good food, wherever you find it. Many of these recipes were salvaged from batter-splashed, hand-written notebooks. The great majority had never been printed until they appeared in This Week. They are word-of-mouth hand-downs from mother to daughter. To get such recipes takes ever-lasting patience, and a dash of effrontery, too.”
Here is likely the first published definition of regional American food; before that, there was considered to be no such thing—food was French or Italian or German, but never, ever American. It took Paddleford to come along and explain how a dish like Hungarian goulash, if it was made in someplace like Cincinnati, was just as American as it was Magyar.
In this book, Paddleford documented the way in which immigrants influenced the American table, and she did this by spending quality time in the kitchens of people like Mrs. Norvin H. Vaughan, who every Christmas baked traditional German sweets like schokoladeplatzchen (pronounced as shokoladepletzheeyen, or little chocolate drops); Mrs. Eliot Fletcher, who hailed from a family of cigar makers who left Cuba for Tampa and served up a killer Spanish boliche (eye roast stuffed with olives, lime juice, ham, and garlic); Mrs. Carl Stewart, the former food editor of the Des Moines Register, who made vinegary barbecued pork; and Mrs. Thomas W. Jensen of Salt Lake City, whose apple dumplings put those of her eight daughters-in-law to shame.
045
Schokoladeplatzchen (Little Chocolate Drops)
¾ cup blanched almonds
3 egg whites
1⁄8 teaspoon salt
½ cup sugar
4 ounces German sweet chocolate, finely grated
 
Preheat oven to 275 degrees.
 
In two batches, process almonds in food processor until nuts are a fine powdery mixture; take care not to overprocess. Remove any large pieces of nuts that remain. In a large bowl, beat egg whites with salt to firm, moist peaks. Add sugar slowly, beating constantly, until mixture becomes slightly glossy. After adding last of sugar, beat 2 minutes more. Fold in processed almonds and grated chocolate.
Drop by heaping teaspoonfuls onto a lightly greased baking sheet. Bake 35 to 40 minutes, or until dry enough to remove from sheet.
 
Yield: about 50 cookies
046
Boliche
8 strips salt pork, each strip about 1 inch by 3 inches by ¼ inch
3½- to 4-pound brisket of beef
8 strips ham, each strip about 1 inch by 3 inches by ¼ inch
32 pimiento-stuffed olives
4 cloves garlic, finely chopped and crushed
to a paste-like consistency
4 tablespoons olive oil
¼ cup lime juice
½ cup white wine
¼ cup chopped parsley
1 cup coarsely chopped onions
1 teaspoon salt
2 cups homemade beef stock or canned low-sodium consommé
 
Simmer salt pork in water for about 2 minutes; remove and set aside. Remove silver skin and fat from beef and wipe with damp cloth or paper towels.
 
Take a sharp, slender knife and, holding it at a 45-degree angle from meat, make 16 deep incisions, wide enough to accommodate the strips of pork and ham, almost through the meat from end to end. Fill incisions with strips of salt pork and ham. Make 8 more incisions and fill with olives. Force fillings in with fingers. Mix garlic with 1 tablespoon oil, rub over meat. Place in shallow pan. Squeeze lime juice over meat; add wine, parsley, onions, and salt. Let meat stand, covered, in this marinade in the refrigerator at least 8 hours or overnight. Turn occasionally so that all sides are marinated.
 
When ready to cook, preheat oven to 325 degrees. Remove meat from marinade, scraping off all onions. Reserve marinade. Pat brisket dry. Brown on both sides in 3 tablespoons of oil in a Dutch oven with a tight lid. Pour marinade back over meat, adding beef stock, enough to cover meat about halfway. Cover tightly. Bring to a simmer. Remove from stovetop and place in oven for 3½ to 4 hours, or until fork-tender. Remove meat, skim excess fat from gravy, and strain into bowl, or purée with the onions. Slice meat across grain in ½-inch slices and serve on warm platter.
 
Yield: 6 to 8 servings
047
Apple Dumplings
1 cup sifted all-purpose flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
¼ teaspoon salt
2 eggs
1⁄3 cup light cream
2 cups boiling water
3 medium apples, peeled, cored, and cut into 12 slices each
(about 6 cups sliced apples)
¼ cup butter
½ cup sugar
1 teaspoon lemon juice
 
Into a medium bowl, sift flour, baking powder, and salt together. Beat eggs and light cream together; add flour mixture. Whisk together.
 
In a shallow saucepan 10 to 12 inches in diameter, combine water, apples, butter, sugar, and lemon juice; bring to a boil and allow sugar to dissolve. Allow apples to cook 2 to 3 minutes more, or until slightly softened.
 
Form dumplings with 2 spoons using about ¾ tablespoon batter for each, yielding about 18 dumplings. As each dumpling is formed, drop it into sauce in between the apples. Cover pan. Cook over low heat for about 5 minutes. Remove from heat and let sit for 5 to 10 minutes to absorb most of the remaining liquid. Serve just warm and still juicy with plain cream, whipped cream, or lemon sauce.
Yield: 6 servings
 
 
These are all regular people, cooks who show us that home cooking is what is meant by “American food.” In each chapter of How America Eats, Paddleford gives pronouncements about what she’s found in a particular region. For example, “New England dishes are as devoid of fuss and feathers as a Puritan’s hat.” She also paints vivid pictures of the cooks she meets, spicing them with her dry wit. Take this line: “In Bethel, Vermont, I met a princess, a wonderful woman, the late Anna Maria Schwartzenberg. She invited me to dinner to try her pot roast. All the way there I kept saying to myself, ‘What a crazy idea to go to Vermont to eat a Viennese pot roast.’ What was good enough for Grandma is good enough for me, I thought. For my New England grandma and her league certainly could go to bat any day with one of those fellows in a tall white hat—French, Viennese, or a Princess for that matter.”
Once again, Paddleford gives her opinion, an opinion that today would be taken as fact, that where a dish is eaten and where it originated are different things and should both be treated with respect, whether it’s pot roast in Vermont, pot roast in Vienna, or pot roast in Kansas. Paddleford’s compellingly readable style is straightforward, authoritative, breezy, and obviously infused with a grand passion for food. In her, readers meet a writer who spun gold from the simple wisdom of American recipes. Without actually saying “melting pot,” Paddleford created a portrait of the distinct phenomenon that is American food: We are a melting pot culture and our food is tied not to one tradition but to many. This is an idea we take utterly for granted today but that was not yet a cliché in Paddleford’s day.
The book was reviewed—uniformly glowingly—all over the country. In these reviews, different aspects of Paddleford’s mission and methodology were highlighted. For instance, in North Carolina’s Chapel Hill Weekly, Paddleford is referred to as “the eminence in the sift-and-fold-in set,” and praised for her desire to “leave no Stollen unturned,” her willingness to “give credit where credit is due—to the hundreds of housewives all over America,” and her inclusion with each recipe of “an interesting report on the hows and whys of the sleuthing that took Miss Paddleford from one home to the next, from plate to sate.”
The Sunday Patriot-News of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, no surprise, took special note of the recipes included from the home state: “Residents of Central Pennsylvania with their Pennsylvania Dutch background will read with special interest the pages of the book which tell of Miss Paddleford’s visit to Hershey, Kutztown, Hungerford, and Allentown. The recipes she gives for sauerbraten, sweet sour beans, and bombeera fillas, among others will strike a familiar note. And of course there is the inevitable and tasty shoo-fly pie in its three variations—wet, dry, and cake-type.”
048
House of Schwartzenberg Pot Roast
3½ to 4 pounds chuck roast
Salt and pepper, to taste
2 tablespoons vegetable oil
1 carrot
1 stalk celery
8 small sprigs parsley
1 bay leaf
2 tablespoons butter
1 medium onion, sliced
3 shallots
3 medium tomatoes, peeled and cut into large dice
2 cups beef stock
2 cups white or red wine
½ cup cognac or whisky
1⁄3 cup dry sherry wine
1 medium head green cabbage, cut into 8 wedges
3 tablespoons heavy cream
 
 
Preheat oven to 325 degrees.
 
Wipe meat with clean cloth or paper towel, sprinkle generously all over with salt and pepper and allow to come to room temperature. Heat vegetable oil in a Dutch oven or casserole over medium heat. Sear the meat on all sides to a deep golden brown. Then add carrot, celery, parsley, and bay leaf.
 
In a separate pan, melt butter. Add onion and shallots and sauté until golden. Add to meat with tomatoes, beef stock, wine, cognac, and sherry. Cover tightly and bring to slow simmer.
 
Put casserole in oven and continue to cook for 3½ hours, or until meat is fork-tender. About 10 to 15 minutes before it’s done, add cabbage and re-cover. When cabbage is just tender, remove meat and cabbage to a warm platter. If liquid remaining is more than 3 cups, reduce to roughly that amount, strain, then return to a simmer. Add cream and stir well; adjust seasoning.
Yield: 8 servings
049
Sauerbraten
Marinade:
1½ cups cider vinegar
½ cup red wine
1 cup water
12 peppercorns
2 tablespoons sugar
2 large onions, peeled and sliced
4 bay leaves
12 whole cloves
1 teaspoon mustard seed
2 teaspoons salt
 
3½- to 4-pound round or rump of beef
2 tablespoons all-purpose flour
1½ teaspoons salt
Dash pepper
¼ cup vegetable oil
1 onion, sliced
½ teaspoon mustard seeds
6 whole cloves
½ teaspoon peppercorns

1⁄3 cup all-purpose flour
1⁄3 cup finely crushed gingersnaps, about 7 cookies
 
Two to 4 days before serving, combine marinade ingredients in a large plastic bag. Place beef in this mixture and let stand for two to four days in the refrigerator. At the end of marinating remove meat and dry on paper towels.
 
Combine the 2 tablespoons flour, salt, and pepper and coat meat on all sides with this mixture. Brown on all sides in vegetable oil in Dutch oven. Strain marinade and add to meat with additional sliced onion, mustard seeds, cloves, and peppercorns. Cover and simmer 3½ hours, or until meat is fork tender. Remove meat to heated platter, slicing beforehand, if desired. Strain liquid from pot. Mix the 1⁄3 cup flour and crushed gingersnaps in Dutch oven and slowly re-add liquid. Simmer, stirring constantly, until thickened. Pour some of this gravy over meat. Serve remainder at table.
Yield: 6 to 8 servings
 
 
The Orlando Evening Star reprinted the book’s recipe for lime chiffon pie from an area woman, along with the advice that the book is “well worth the ten bucks it sells for” thanks to “regional recipes and pleasant little human interest stories about the people and places” from “probably the best known food writer in the world.”
The Berkeley Daily Gazette in California went further. After writing a brief review of the book, the reporter Ken Carnahan came back with a second column on the subject. “I told you about a new cookbook called How America Eats in my Christmas check list but I didn’t really tell you enough about it,” he begins. “Clementine Paddleford, who writes the weekly column about food for This Week magazine, has written a cookbook which is not only full of excellent recipes but which really gives a picture of life in our United States.”
The reach of How America Eats is difficult to calibrate, given the recent history of publishing houses. (In 1978 Scribner’s merged with Atheneum to become The Scribner Book Companies, which in turn merged into Macmillan in 1984, which was purchased by Simon & Schuster in 1994. At that time, only the trade and reference book operations bore the Scribner name. The former imprint, now simply “Scribner,” was retained by Simon & Schuster; the reference books went to Thomson Gale in 1999.) What patchy records there are for this title, housed today with the Scribner’s archives at Princeton University, indicate that it was a hit: one thousand copies were made for a first print run; these sold out and another thirty-two hundred were ordered; a third printing was for five thousand more. The Cookbook Guild had sold an additional five thousand copies by 1962. The title became a Book of the Month Club selection, and The Escoffiers, Inc., used the book as a mailing for their Gourmet and Travel Book Club.
Other valuable outlets existed, too: How America Eats was distributed by American Mineral Spirits Company, a subsidiary of the Pure Oil Company (which no longer exists), which often printed books in special leather-bound editions as gifts for executives and clients. The Scribner’s archive also shows that a representative from the Dole Corporation wrote to inquire about using the book as a premium with their products, but that Paddleford rejected the idea because she felt this commercial association might cheapen her work. Nevertheless, the publication of a second edition shows that publishers considered it solid material.
The reason is clear. Carnahan, in Berkeley, was able to express succinctly not only Paddleford’s appeal as a writer but also her significance: She was using food to tell the stories of our lives. He recognized her work as the embodiment of the philosophy of Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, the French lawyer, politician, and author of what is perhaps the most noted gastronomic tome, Physiologie du goût (The Physiology of Taste), published in 1825. Brillat Savarin’s most famous and quoted mot is: “Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you what you are.” Paddleford’s work did that: She knew that what women chose to make for dinner in their own homes and even the foods they fantasized about, such as the cheesecake from Lindy’s restaurant on Broadway spoke volumes about what they considered important. Nowadays the preparation of food is exalted as artistry, but in Paddleford’s day it was barely paid attention to; what you ate for dinner was not considered a mirror of your soul.
Even in this exciting time, Paddleford managed to turn out her regular columns—some of them groundbreaking. A February 1960 column titled “Happy Cooks of Napa Valley” for This Week was set in St. Helena, California, at the home of two wine-making brothers whose father, owner of a fruit packing business, had bought for them the oldest winery in the valley, Charles Krug, established in 1861. The brothers were Peter and Robert Mondavi. “One important thing I learned in this two hours of sight-seeing—fine wines of the world are the result of infinite care and an in-born respect for the wine itself,” Paddleford wrote before detailing a meal prepared by the sisters-in-law Blanche Mondavi and Marjorie Mondavi: prosciutto-wrapped pineapple cubes (“a delicious hors d’oeuvre; one you may like to try”) and salmon gnocchi in shrimp sauce.
As usual, Paddleford was ahead of her time—this time in recognizing the charms of the Mondavis. Today, of course, Robert Mondavi, aged ninety-four, is considered a pioneer of the California wine industry, an innovator in the technical improvements and the positive marketing of American wines. He split from his brother and Krug in 1965 and established the winery that bears his name, now among one of the most successful in America. One of his chief accomplishments was advocating labeling wines by the grape variety instead of some fanciful name.
Back in 1960, he was a young buck trying to make his father proud. After Paddleford had recognized his family’s potential in print, he sent her a note offering his “heartfelt thanks for being again mentioned in your distinguished column,” calling her visit “one of the real high lights of our year” and requesting the pleasure of her company “at any future time you may be out our way.”
Another Paddleford subject who would go on to become a food-world luminary was Paul Keene, a farmer from Central Pennsylvania. Keene was an organic farmer who got started in the mid- 1940s, when the idea of growing crops without chemical fertilizers and insecticides was “viewed as eccentric, if not downright un-American,” as Margalit Fox put it in Keene’s obit in The New York Times in 2005. Keene operated Walnut Acres Farm, which produced and packaged an array of foods available in health food stores and by mail order—including their signature apple butter, called Apple Essence, which was cooked in iron kettle over an open fire. It was this product that caught Paddleford’s attention. She mentioned Apple Essence, sold for a dollar a quart, in a column, and the rest was history: “Miss Paddleford rhapsodized, and Walnut Acres was inundated with letters and visits from eager customers,” Fox reported. By 1994 Keene’s annual sales totaled nearly $8 million. In 2000, Walnut Acres was acquired by the Hain Celestial Group, a natural-foods conglomerate.
As she was bringing the Mondavis and Keenes to world attention, Paddleford was aware that she was no longer the only serious food reporter in town. Two blocks north, at The New York Times, Craig Claiborne was hot on Paddleford’s heels, assimilating her beat into his as a food writer. The forewarning of Claiborne’s gradual eclipse of Paddleford came in a review of How America Eats, this one published in Playbill magazine in 1961. The review in the magazine theatergoers get wrapped in with their programs was by Barbara Kafka. Kafka, today a noted food writer and author of five major cookbooks, began her career as a student of James Beard, eventually becoming an assistant and, later in his life, adviser. Early in her career, when the Playbill review was written, Kafka had heard many tales about Paddleford from her friend Beard.
“Well, of course one knew about her,” Kafka reports. “I never met her personally. But there were wonderful stories.” One tale Beard told her involved flying: “Although she was a licensed pilot, she had no idea of navigation and she flew around using a roadmap which she kept on her lap.”
As a result of her own career and her association with Beard, Kafka was familiar with Paddleford’s mission, and in her review, laid it out plainly: “Some of the best recipes are not usually found in books; they are found in the Sunday editions of good newspapers and, as Clementine Paddleford, food writer for This Week and the Herald Tribune, would contend, in old family collections. These sources tell us what America eats and what it has traditionally eaten.”
However, the review goes on to extol not just How America Eats but another new cookbook based on collected recipes of the nation’s cooks: The New York Times Cookbook, published in 1961 carrying Craig Claiborne’s name as author. “The recipes, as readers of the Times will know, are easy to follow, sound and interesting,” Kafka writes. “The Times tells us that America, at least New York, is a lot more sophisticated than she used to be and draws recipes from all over the world.” By contrast, Kafka noted, “Miss Paddleford, whose book takes a folksier view of the American kitchen . . . has collected a great number of regional recipes from all over the country. The recipes are authentic, and, if you are either a devotee of or not fazed by the indomitable prose style, you should find lots of dishes you would enjoy making and much local history and information.”
The general public, faced with competing titles published a year apart containing recipes from home cooks, might not have made the distinction so easily as Kafka. Despite its success, How America Eats was out of print by 1969. Claiborne’s cookbook, however, went on to achieve legendary status, and is in print today (with the name of Claiborne, now dead, carried forward on the revised edition).
It was the first time the Times put its famous logotype on the subject of food in hard covers; as Claiborne himself pointed out in his autobiography A Feast Made for Laughter, the cookbook was successful enough to launch a series of Times books, including such successful and money-making titles as The New York Times Natural Foods Cookbook. This book, published in 1971, was ahead of the curve on natural foods. It was created by Jean Hewitt, a British home economist working at the paper who, according to Betsy Wade, was “smart, genteel, careful . . . and bought herself a huge, beautiful house near Watch Hill, R.I., with the proceeds.” Paddleford’s book launched no subsequent editions; Kafka put it succinctly: “Craig Claiborne stole her thunder.”
The steamroller of the Times overwhelmed Paddleford’s newspaper as well as her cookbook. In an article about rediscovering Paddleford’s legacy carried in The New York Times in 2005, R. W. Apple Jr., then close to the end of his life, cited the charm of How America Eats. Nonetheless, he wrote: “The New York Times Cookbook by Craig Claiborne, published in 1961, eventually eclipsed How America Eats, helped by the fact that his newspaper stayed in business while hers folded in 1966.” And that is it in a nutshell: In the early 1960s, Claiborne’s paper was waxing prosperous while Paddleford’s was fading.
The Tribune battled the Times, particularly its fat, glossy Sunday insert, The New York Times Magazine, to get and keep big advertisers. Although the magazine had been in existence since 1896, it achieved its prominence as a home for serious reporting about politics and “soft” subjects such as furniture and food, under the helm of the intimidating editor Lester Markel. Markel directed the magazine, and indeed all the material in the Sunday paper other than the news sections, from 1923 to 1964.
A “dominating and terrifying” presence at the paper, Markel was consumed with hard news, according to Betsy Wade, but he had the wit to realize that such subjects as fashion were important in at least one key way: They made money. As a result there were big fashion supplements in the magazine at least twice a year. The bra and clothing co-op advertisements, often humorously described as soft-core pornography, were what made the magazine. The bulky publication enriched the entire paper, paying bills for its costly international reporting. This was not only one reason Markel was held in such awe, but also one reason the Tribune went down. As Kluger notes in The Paper, there was the strong possibility that the New York department stores, the garment district and all its connected parts, were eager to reduce the number of papers they had to advertise in. So they settled on the Times and starved the Trib out. There were only so many New York-based papers that advertisers like Maidenform were going to pay to be in, and the Times Magazine became their choice.
The Tribune didn’t take the increasing dominance of the Times Magazine passively. To fight it, in 1963 the publisher founded its own in-house Sunday supplement, glossy New York magazine. Edited by the now-legendary magazine editor Clay Felker, it was smart, modern, and cutting-edge—showcasing the work of many popular Tribune writers, including Tom Wolfe, Jimmy Breslin, and Judith Crist. With this innovation, the Tribune dropped This Week magazine out of its Sunday combo.
Felker is today credited with having invented the “city magazine”—a glossy insiders’ guide devoted to news and service material (where to find the best locksmith, the top Italian restaurants, etc.). The early days of New York magazine definitely helped keep the Tribune afloat. However, there was no place in it for a writer like Paddleford, cozy with her readers, country-raised and friendly. New York’s name became wedded to food writers like Gael Greene, Mimi Sheraton, and, later, Molly O’Neill—critics with an insiders’-only voice who play to a more aspirational crowd, assuming every reader knows an Eastern Shore oyster from a Long Island one.
But she may not have wanted to move, either: Paddleford’s Sunday byline was part of the fabric of This Week, which paid her handsomely and rewarded her with plenty of plaques for her mantelpiece. Any time she had ever threatened to leave, This Week—and the Tribune, too—had immediately increased her pay. However, despite all, both publications were becoming irrelevant.
The displacement of This Week in the Sunday Tribune by New York magazine and the increasing muscularity of the Times Magazine had a devastating impact on This Week. “When Clay Felker started New York magazine as a supplement in the Tribune in 1963, that washed out This Week,” said James Boylan, an editor at This Week from 1951 to 1956, who later founded the Columbia Journalism Review. “The Tribune was looking around for something new to make it competitive with the Times, and this was one of several things they did to make themselves livelier.
“The new supplement got a lot of attention; Felker had Tom Wolfe writing for it,” Boylan continued. “New York magazine was one key weakness for This Week thereafter; the magazine was not being seen by consumers in the New York market.”
This Week was able to survive for a while, though the Tribune was not. The sixties were hard for New York newspapers, and along with the decline in advertising, the Trib just couldn’t withstand such losses as the famous strike led by the printers union, which began on December 8, 1962, and lasted for 114 days. Paddleford crossed no picket lines—she had This Week business to keep her alive, so she was better off financially than most other reporters. (She was also, conveniently, in the hospital with pneunomia from December 31 to January 17.) The long strike, and others that followed, plus a decision by the Tribune owner to join in a merger with two afternoon papers, were death blows. The final edition of the New York Herald Tribune was published April 24, 1966. Paddleford’s last column for the paper, titled “A Five-Gazpacho Day,” had run fourteen days earlier.
Everyone except the publisher of The New York Times mourned the passing of the Tribune. The folding of the paper, for which she was unequivocally a major star, must have been particularly hard for Paddleford.
But as before, when the going got tough she worked. Only now the options were a bit curtailed. If she was tempted at this time, or earlier, to leave for greener shores, she left behind no evidence. New York magazine turned out to be a powerful launching pad for food journalism everywhere but Paddleford at her age would most assuredly not have stepped on to a wobbly raft, leaving the loyalty and guaranteed check of This Week behind. As for joining the victor in the newspaper war, it is also assuredly true that the Times seldom made a practice of seeking out talent. Instead, it was much more what Boylan and others refer to as “the Times way,” which is to hire writers and editors only after the talent had approached the paper. “The style of the Times in the fifties and sixties was such that you had to be humble and petition them,” Boylan said. Paddleford—who had spent her early career petitioning just about every major news organization in America except the Times—probably considered going hat in hand to the Times significantly beneath her. Hence the resentment toward Claiborne, who had chosen the luckier horse, and also the curious choices she made after the end of the Tribune.
In the twilight of her career and in possession of clear evidence that both of her major outlets were on the decline, she pressed on. John Hay Whitney, who had bought control of the Tribune from the Reid family in 1958, was in control at the time and joined the Hearst-owned New York Journal American and the Scripps-Howard owned New York World-Telegram & Sun to form the World Journal Tribune, whose nickname, The Widget, was another cold wind.
For the eight months the hybrid survived, Paddleford wrote occasional columns under the rubric “Clementine Paddleford: Food in the News.” These rarely contained recipes and were about such things as the new design of the Betty Crocker corporate kitchen (“New Kitchens Take in a Whole World”).
But This Week was still going, and it was to this magazine that Paddleford dedicated the most time in her later years. Harking back to her coming of age as a reporter in the early 1930s writing about church ladies’ suppers and offering those readers stipends for winning recipe contests, in 1965 she even began a new recipe challenge—this time for younger people. “Looking for ‘cook young’ ideas for my ‘How America Eats’ series in This Week Magazine, I introduced a nationwide recipe swap of time- saving dishes,” she wrote when a collection was published. “These came from children under twelve, teenagers, career girls, young brides, mothers, grandmothers.” The collection, 153 of these recipes, appeared in 1966 as Clementine Paddleford’s Cook Young Cookbook, published by Pocket Books.
The point of this series wasn’t merely age; it was also an attempt to embrace modernity. Paddleford was apparently making a big effort to show that she was changing with the times, and that she understood the altered needs of her home-cooking readers: The other focus of the series was time management. “Now there is a young revolt in the ways of cooking, as in the manner of clothing,” she wrote. “Cooking is done the easy way, with convenience foods as the timesaving ingredients.” Gone were the days, Paddleford asserted, when “it was considered hush-hush to own a can opener” because now “women put together three meals a day in about 90 minutes” whereas “two decades ago it took five hours.” Paddleford married these two burgeoning trends—younger kids in the kitchen, and the vast array of time-saving products hitting grocery shelves—in the “Cook Young” series with an extremely popular result. She spoke of the responses she got to her request for submissions. “In all, there were over 50,000 recipes,” she wrote, “every one using short-cut ingredients—meaning those convenience foods that account for more than 15 percent of today’s food sales. Whatever science has developed to make cooking easier ‘is for us,’ the letters said.”
Paddleford’s focus was the same: reporting regional recipes. Only now, she found that these had changed, too. “Today even the regional dishes are being updated to a faster time tempo,” she wrote. She still traveled, but this series, in which readers wrote to her rather than her seeking them out, meant she had to visit only the most interesting of her respondents: the breakneck pace slowed.
She also had to contend with people’s anxiety over weight, something never dealt with in columns focused on food as celebration. “Now that the world has gone calorie mad,” she wrote, “the fresh vegetable tray of crunch items appears with increasing frequency by the dip bowl.” She even deigned to include a “lowcal cheese dip,” which consisted of one pint of cottage cheese beaten with two teaspoons of garlic salt and served with celery sticks. Other recipes were less monastic, like Syrian beet salad, a jellied beet mold that is a kitschy example of the melding of convenience and aspiration—aspic, in this case—that typified the home cooking of the early 1960s. This from Mrs. Karl Cole of Osawatomie, Kansas, a small prairie town in the rolling hills of the eastern part of Paddleford’s state. Some of her respondents for the “Cook Young” series, Paddleford noted to readers, were not so much technically young as they were “young at heart,” and therefore felt free to send in their recipes, too—Mrs. Cole must have been among them.
Putting this series together not only consumed her in a project that fitted her general mission of recipe-sharing across the country, but introduced her byline to a whole new set of readers—a shrewd move. It gave her the chance to agitate and inspire, to send curious minds into the kitchen, if only in hopes of seeing their own names published in a magazine.
Throughout this period of hard work, Paddleford was suffering. Perhaps because of her earlier ill health and throat ailments, she was not a “young sixty.” Photos from this period show that Paddleford had aged dramatically. As early as 1958, a shot of her in the test kitchen, pencil in hand, shows her hair more salt than pepper, and her waistline significantly rounded. Of course, some things never changed: A voluminous scarf is wrapped around her neck, her voice device still in a black velvet choker, and a full skirt flaring. The image suggests that old age came fast, and infirmities with it.
050
Syrian Beet Salad
4 cups water
½ teaspoon salt
2 large beets (about 1¼ pounds)
1 envelope (½ tablespoon) gelatin
2 tablespoons sugar
2 tablespoons prepared horseradish
1 tablespoon fresh lemon juice
2 tablespoons white vinegar
 
In a medium saucepan, bring water to a boil and add salt. Scrub beets and add them whole to the pot. Slowly simmer for 30 to 40 minutes or until tender but still firm. Reserve 2 cups cooking liquid, drain the beets, and discard the remaining liquid.
 
In a small bowl, cool ½ cup of liquid over ice and use it to soften gelatin. Cool, peel, and julienne beets, yielding 4 cups. Add softened gelatin to hot beet liquid and then add the remaining ingredients. Add the beets and adjust the seasoning if necessary.
 
Pour the mixture into a medium (2-quart) bowl or mold, chill at least 6 hours or overnight before unmolding by dipping the bowl in very hot water for a few seconds at a time until it loosens.
 
Serve as a side dish alongside braised beef or as an appetizer with smoked fish, such as trout, and a garnish of crème fraiche.
 
Yield: 6 to 8 appetizer or side dish servings
 
 
Paddleford was not going to slow down unless she had to, of course. In the summer of 1962, she fulfilled yet another dream: traveling to Russia. Her files show that she had long been fascinated with Russia, and had been saving clippings since 1941. At the Tribune, Isabel McGovern filled in for some of Paddleford’s columns for the couple of weeks she was abroad. But Paddleford also filed nine columns for the newspaper about subjects both expected, such as “Vodka: Russian Versus American,” in which she visited the largest Moscow vodka distillery, which produced 600,000 bottles of 80-proof a day, and unusual, like the story “Red Farms Cultivate Thousands of Acres,” in which she finagled a trip to a state-owned farm. “A visit to a collective farm and a state-owned farm was a ‘must’ on my schedule for Russia. I was put off and put off until the day my visa expired. Then came the word—GO! Fly to Kharkov, and by car to the farms. I had the visa extended,” she began. For This Week was a long feature, “Inside a Russian Kitchen.” The work was much the same as her usual: Visiting homes and reporting on what was cooking, being taken around by Charlotte Staples, wife of a U.S. Consul in Russia, as she went to collective markets and state-owned stores. Helping her arrange visits was a press agent named Irene Urin, who was employed by Intourist, the Moscow-based official Soviet government travel agency. An Intourist contact was essential then for any private person traveling in the Soviet Union. Paddleford sent a thank-you note to her in October 1962, with a postscript reading: “Wish I could order caviar for breakfast today.”
Paddleford’s trip to the Cold War enemy was covered by Newsweek. “Better Bread Than Dead” ran the headline in an August 1962 issue. The story opens by quoting Paddleford on the conditions of the women she met: “Almost no one wears a girdle! And almost everyone is 30 pounds overweight by our standards. Fat soups, fat meats, and sausages aren’t helpful to svelte figures.”
“So much for Russian women, as observed by New York Herald Tribune Food Editor Clementine Paddleford on a two-week tour of the Soviet,” the newsmagazine continued. She was also quoted this way: “Russians eat like trenchermen with great gusto. They bite off a piece of buttered bread as if it might be the last bite of the last supper.”
That trip would be one of several last hurrahs of Paddleford’s career, as her health began to fail. One dramatic crisis occurred later in 1962, when Paddleford was sidelined for more than a month with pneumonia in New York Hospital. Eloise Davison had re-entered the picture, and was there with her. Jorgensen, however, was tied down in Maine with her three young children. “I am so sorry I wasn’t in when Eloise was trying to reach me from your room yesterday,” she wrote. “I play with the idea of coming down. . . .I know Eloise said you didn’t want me to come and I am not flapping around making plans to come. If it works out easily I will.” The rest of the letter is a report on life on the farm, probably meant to cheer. Mostly the news was about animals, especially the cats. “Pussy sits on the back of Mark’s chair and of course Henry sleeps on the table,” Jorgensen wrote. “I tell the children this just isn’t done, and they mustn’t tell anyone. But the animals are good and really want attention more than food.”
Paddleford’s prognosis was serious enough that it prompted a heartfelt letter from Nichols at This Week. He wrote that Ed McCarthy, editor of the New York Herald Tribune edition of This Week, “has just told me your news, and it upsets me, as does anything which touches anyone I love.”
“Ed and I agreed that people live and get well who have the will to live and get well, and no one we know has a greater will than you,” he continued.
Nichols goes on to make what he called a “proposal” to Paddleford, in order to proceed with their business arrangement “as though everything were completely normal” as they entered 1963. “In other words, by this letter,” he wrote, “I am renewing for another year, your guarantee of $15,750.00, and this will be paid, however long it takes you to get completely well, on the understanding that if necessary during this period Mary Lyons will work with you and prepare materials to appear, subject to your approval and under your name, in the magazine.”
After assuring Paddleford of her paycheck—and letting her know that Lyons, a former copyeditor of Paddleford’s This Week column, was on standby for ghostwriting, Nichols goes on to suggest what looks like a step to protect a valuable property.
“This matter of name is important,” he wrote, “because it is the basis of continuity, and it can be a basis of security, too. For, looking a long way into the future, I would like to suggest that we think now of some way that your name can be protected and used, in effect, as the trademark for all our food material for the magazine. This could be the basis of some kind of continuing payment to you or to your estate, and it is something I hope you and Ed will think about and discuss together.”
In proposing to obtain the rights to “By Clementine Paddleford,” he envisioned having her column carried on by others well into the future. The idea of a house byline was not without precedent. The most famous example was “Dorothy Dix,” the nom de plume of a lovelorn columnist, Elizabeth Meriwether Gilmer. The column continued long after Gilmer’s death, with various writers at the helm. Today the most famous examples are “Dear Abby” and “Ann Landers,” both of which have had writers other than their creators.
Nichols’s suggestion might be what routed Paddleford from her sickbed. According to Jorgensen, Paddleford was not about to let another writer carry on with her own life’s work, no matter how lucrative the arrangement. Whatever Nichols’s intentions, both well-meaning and self-serving, he was turned down flat.
Paddleford managed to get herself better and back on the job, but the days of breakneck work were done. “It will be impossible to attend the National Peach Council meeting because I am taking it very easy until at least April,” Paddleford wrote to Lora Stone in a letter to the organization in January 1963. “But I am interested in a fresh peach story for This Week Magazine some time next summer.”
By May of that year she was well enough to plan an ambitious trip to Hawaii and on to China, where she had promised to attend the opening of a couple of Hilton Hotels. A China press representative, Ellen J. Swan, whose office was in Hong Kong, had invited Paddleford to appear on several radio programs, but this was out of the question. “I can be of no help to you regarding radio panel discussions,” Paddleford wrote to Swan. “I have but half or less of my vocal chords and speak in a ‘whiskey tenor.’ Interviewing, telephoning, etc, is fine, but no public speaking.” The trip to China yielded at least two feature articles for This Week and eight for the Herald Tribune, including one about Hong Kong street food in which the author discovers tofu. “Eat dangerously (fool you may be) sampling strange tidbits at street market stalls. Have you ever had snake soup? We tried tou-fui, a soya bean curd, like a thick custard cut into cubes.”
At the end of summer 1963, Paddleford traveled to Mexico. Her beloved cat Pussy Willow was left with the Jorgensens, who were spending the month at Paddleford’s place in Redding. Continuing proof that animals were a bond between Paddleford and Jorgensen shows in a letter Jorgensen sent her adoptive mother on August 21, 1963. The letter imitates a girls’ camp report, only the “camper” was a cat.
Jorgensen divided the letter into categories including “Aptitude Tests” (“She spends many hours each day in pure contemplation, either under the great pine trees, on our back stairs where she sits quietly and observes things known only to her, or on a favorite rock outcropping”), “Crafts” (“She neither embroiders, nor does she spin or sew”), and “Eating Habits” (“Her tastes are finicky; she does not like the same food served twice in succession and insists on Saturday and Sunday ingesting only a delicacy called fresh chicken livers. She also tries to convince her Counsellor that every weekday is Saturday and Sunday”).
By this time in her career, Paddleford was a kind of éminence grise of journalism—her fame came from writing about food, but she had transcended the women’s pages to become one of the country’s top reporters. As she traveled the country—in her later years and even on a reduced schedule—she still made good copy. A profile of her in the Charlotte Observer in North Carolina in October 1964 was carried with a photo of a worn-looking Paddleford who, despite gray hair and wrinkles, still managed a twinkly smile at her overladen home desk flanked with Pussy Willow. The quotes recorded by Eudora Garrison, the homemaking editor, are equally sassy. “Looking back over her remarkable career, Clementine admits she wanted to write novels and short stories at the beginning. ‘I also wanted to be sure of a living,’ she says with artless candor. ‘In Kansas we always believed in paying our debts.’ ”
The folks in Charlotte weren’t the only ones who got to know Paddleford as a freestanding celebrity. The September 26, 1964, issue of The New Yorker contains a cartoon by the eminent Peter Arno. It depicts a couple perusing their Sunday paper under a shaded umbrella in their backyard with their dog nearby. The caption reads: “I’m getting pretty fed up with teeth marks on Clementine Paddleford.”
To be paid a visit by Paddleford at this point was to be in the presence of a bona fide celebrity, according to Marianne—Mimi—Strong, the New York City-based literary agent to whom Paddleford devoted a column in the autumn of 1964. At that time, Strong had her own publicity agency and was a social figure of some standing, married to Stephen Van Rensselaer Strong, whose family were New York State pioneers and lawmakers and the founders of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Strong was one of a long line of Harvard men, and every other year he and Marianne held tremendous buffet parties in honor of the Harvard-Princeton game at their country home in Piscataway Township, New Jersey, thirteen miles from Princeton. (Upon her husband’s death, Strong sold the home, called Ivy Hall, to the state of New Jersey; today it’s an historic museum.) Paddleford somehow got wind of these tony buffet parties and called and asked Strong if she could attend one.
“I was really excited when Clementine called me,” Strong says. “You can talk about The New York Times from here to hell and back but the Herald Tribune was a more respected paper . . . and she was highly respected, and very well liked.” Paddleford arranged to come down to New Jersey a day before the party and to bring a photographer. “It was a little bit nerve-wracking,” Strong says, “but she was not at all intimidating—anything but.” Paddleford came over and took a tour of the house, and the following day Strong had set up the dishes in tureens for Paddleford to sample before the guests arrived. “She had a great time coming over,” Strong reports, and was full of fun, and Strong’s guests thoroughly enjoyed mingling with her, although she did not stay for the entirety of the event. “Her personality was glowing . . . she was magnetic.”
What Strong says she most appreciated about Paddleford’s visit to her party was how easygoing the reporter was. “She did not talk down to me,” Strong says. The only negative words Paddleford had for anyone were reserved for Craig Claiborne, whose name apparently came up in conversation. “She sort of made fun of him,” Strong says, “he could be very snotty to people and Clementine was not about that.”
“Touchdown Supper for 80” came out in the November 15, 1964, Herald Tribune, detailing the Strong’s party in which “50 were invited, 80 came”—to cheer on their team. Paddleford reserved special praise for Strong’s party-planning strategies: “To serve 80 people in a 10-room house requires ingenuity. Mimi solves the problem by removing the bed in one guest room and adding two tables, each seating eight. Another room had been cleared of furniture and a long party hanger installed to take care of the coats. We expected to a see a raccoon coat revival: not one appeared.” A recipe for Strong’s father’s beef stew was included.
“People always call you when a story comes out,” Strong says, but a story by Paddleford yielded more attention than any—and Strong was flattered and buoyed by the descriptions of herself as a hostess extraordinaire. What she remembers most about Paddleford was her energy. “I think you have to say that she was not Marilyn Monroe, but she was a charismatic woman. Sometimes charisma is more important than looks, that’s important to know about her.”
Indeed, sources found that Paddleford, even with the graying bob and expanding waistline of a sixty-six-year-old, glowed from the inside. “Something sparkles about Clem. Part of it is her blue eyes, but more is her wit, her sense of fun,” wrote Dorothee Polson, the food editor of The Arizona Republic in the issue of May 2, 1965. The occasion for Polson’s profile was Paddleford’s trip to Honolulu to serve as one of the twenty-three judges for the Kaiser Foil For Men Only Cookout Championship. This turned out to be the last big public relations shindig of her career. Polson’s story gives a neat outline of Paddleford’s accomplishments: “For 24 years she has been food editor of This Week, the magazine supplement which appears with Sunday’s Arizona Republic. And for 27 years she has been food editor of the New York Herald Tribune . . . wherever she goes she is recognized by her readers, who number millions. Many spoke to her, greeted her by name, even snapped her picture as we strolled together today beneath the banana trees.”
Polson also noted that Paddleford had collected more than five thousand cookbooks, and that she had “two secretaries, two writing assistants, two maids and two test kitchens.” She also got Paddleford to spell out her secret: “She credits her success to ‘our tremendous circulation and the fact that I write about people, not just recipes.’ ”
A great deal of correspondence from Kaiser and its advertising agency, Young & Rubicam, was created by this cook-off. If the heavy underlining of her notes is any indication, Paddleford was attracted to the subject because “over four billion dollars were spent on outdoor living last year”—reason to jump on the trend if ever there was one. After a five-hour cook-off, Dr. Gail S. Erbeck, a thirty-one-year-old dentist from Cincinnati, took the $10,000 prize for his “Luau Pork Ambrosia” and won a mention in Paddleford’s column; Joan Crawford presented station wagons to runners-up.
Ever resourceful, Paddleford, “hearing it said that Joan Crawford, when at her home in New York City, does the family cooking,” made it her business to follow up on the rumor. The result was a feature on the great—and fearsome—actress for This Week called “Joan Stars in the Kitchen,” which ran with a picture of Mommy Dearest herself showing her teenage twins Cindy and Cathy a box grater. Crawford may have been an imposing figure to some celebrities, but Paddleford took her on with ease. The accompanying article begins quite humorously, with Paddleford detailing the way in which Crawford began their interview by applying her makeup. “Can you really cook?’ I bluntly asked. Miss Crawford propped the make-up kit for a better view. Her enormous eyes fastened on the job at hand. ‘I can certainly cook,’ she said in her forthright way. ‘I started to cook when I was nine years old to pay my tuition at the St. Agnes Academy in Kansas City.’ ”
The two women warmed to each other, and the rest of the short story makes the point that Crawford, “in her present status as actress, widowed mother and business woman,” gives “home parties” in her apartment in New York “where she lives between acting chores.” Her “pet buffet” recipe was for meatloaf, which she supplied Paddleford. “What about a fancier dish?” we asked. ‘Simplicity is a lovely thing,’ she said.”
After the Crawford column ran, Paddleford heard from the actress several times—once when she was invited to a Pepsi-Cola reception by Crawford, whose late husband Al Steele had been the president of the board (Paddleford respectfully declined, citing “appointments that couldn’t be broken”), and again after the column ran. “You just don’t know the amount of mail I am getting on the article you did for This Week,” Crawford, no stranger to vast amounts of publicity, wrote. Crawford told Paddleford that she advised all of her culinary admirers to go out and buy copies of How America Eats, a book that she felt “cannot be equaled.”
When it came to her official duties as a cook-off judge, Kaiser now hoped to have Paddleford make the trip to Hawaii as an annual event. The next one, the 1966 edition, was to be part of something new that Paddleford had dreamed up and Nichols had agreed to: a series for This Week called “How the World Eats.” This would widen the scope of her previous work, and give her a chance to carry on with her favorite sort of work. For copy like that, the avenues were narrowing: With the Tribune having met its expected demise, and no chance of begging for a job at the Times, Paddleford had to channel all of her energy into This Week.
First, Paddleford let Nichols know that she was planning to remain loyal. The previous December, she had written to Nichols: “In business ‘inside notes’ there have been (as of course you know) rumors of consolidation of papers. If this comes about I will leave the Tribune, which would give me enough time to do a bang-up job for This Week . . . I like to interview people, kneecap to kneecap.” Nichols must have been thrilled at the news that he’d finally have the name reporter all to himself. The 1966 plans, however, did not unfold as Paddleford hoped
In a letter to an Eastern Airlines representative, Sandra Hart, dated May 23, 1966, Paddleford laid it out. “I am still interested in the Mexico City restaurant and Eastern, as we discussed earlier,” she wrote. “But I had promised to be a judge at the Kaiser Cookout in Honolulu, and was going from there to Australia and New Zealand. Not a vacation, but to get material for This Week’s ‘How the World Eats’ stories. None of this came off. I was half packed, had ticket in hand, money in pocket, when I came down with pneumonia and ‘emergencied’ to New York Hospital. Was there for six weeks and am just home.”
Two serious attacks of pneumonia at her age meant that Paddleford barely survived another year. Jorgensen says that by the beginning of 1967 doctors discovered Paddleford had cancer “everywhere.” By the fall of that year, she had become a permanent resident of New York Hospital. Jorgensen also said that when Paddleford was dying, Bill Nichols came to pay his respects—and to ask once more if she’d consider selling her name. And once more, Paddleford refused.
On November 13, 1967, Clementine Paddleford died. Her obituary was carried in all of the country’s major newspapers. The unsigned obituary in The New York Times was reported by Joan Cook and Betsy Wade, two of Paddleford’s earlier colleagues at the Tribune.
“Clementine Paddleford is Dead; Food Editor of the Herald Tribune,” was the headline; the copy was four columns long, and consisted of the kind of detailed character observations that would have impressed even the subject. Her accomplishments came first and were succinctly enumerated: “As food editor of the New York Herald Tribune from 1936 to until its demise in 1966 and of This Week Magazine, the Sunday supplement, from 1940 to her death, Miss Paddleford wrote for a weekly readership estimated at 12 million.”
Her writing style was analyzed: “Although a brisk, matter-of-fact woman, she had a knack of embellishing even the lowliest foods so that they seemed like taste delights. An ordinary radish was not just a radish but ‘a tiny radish of passionate scarlet, tipped modestly in white.’ Mushrooms were the ‘elf of plants’ or ‘pixie umbrellas.’ ”
Her most important rival was given a chance to pay his respects: “Clem was a dear woman with rare courage, a strong lust for life and a rollicking sense of humor. She was also indefatigable. Wherever I go in this old globe, someone is certain to say, ‘Clem was here,’ ” was the quotation from Claiborne.
Perhaps the most fitting tribute of all, though, ran in the November 19 issue of This Week. It was Paddleford’s last column, published posthumously. It was part of the “Cook Young” series and dedicated to one of Paddleford’s favorite subjects: holiday desserts.
“It’s time to reorganize the recipe files for the big stretch of holiday entertaining that looms ahead. We discovered an extravaganza dessert last month that rates star billing for ease and elegance. A Pancake Apple Torte, towering 12 layers high, crowned with soft swirls of whipped cream and giant walnut halves, was the grand finale at a buffet party we attended,” she began. Paddleford encouraged readers to use a mix for the pancakes and to compose the tower a day ahead of time. “But,” she cautioned in the last line, “be prepared for second requests!”