Hometown Appetites

A rollicking biography of a pioneering American woman and one of our greatest culinary figures

In Hometown Appetites, Kelly Alexander and Cynthia Harris come together to revive the legacy of the most important food writer you have never heard of. Clementine Paddleford was a Kansas farm girl who grew up to chronicle America’s culinary habits. Her weekly readership at the New York Herald Tribune topped 12 million during the 1950s and 1960s and she earned a salary of $250,000. Yet twenty years after “America’s best-known food editor” passed away, she had been forgotten–until now.

Before Paddleford, newspaper food sections were dull primers on home economy. But she changed all of that, composing her own brand of sassy, unerringly authoritative prose designed to celebrate regional home cooking. This book restores Paddleford’s name where it belongs: in the pantheon alongside greats like James Beard and Julia Child.