Duncan Hines (26 page)

He referred such queries to parties more capable of giving a proper answer than he could. That he received many more letters like these, however, is demonstration enough that people did not care if Duncan Hines was an expert in a particular subject; all they knew is that he was not a phony and would give them a straight answer.
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If Hines had worked hard during the war, the post-war years taxed his physical and mental abilities to the limit. By the summer of 1946 his publishing venture had mushroomed into such a large enterprise that it was consuming all his time. New copies for all
three books came out in June and had by then sold over 900,000 copies.
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For some proprietors a Duncan Hines recommendation was enthusiastically welcomed but, because of the heavy traffic his endorsement carried, they sometimes wished he had never discovered them. For others, however, his approval was a godsend. For example, Mary N. McKay, an elderly woman who ran the Old Southern Tea Room in Vicksburg, Mississippi, told a reporter for
Life
magazine that if her restaurant were dropped from the Duncan Hines books, she would be forced to close her doors.
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Wrote the
Life
reporter, “For many small restaurateurs, being a member of the Duncan Hines Family means a chance to stay in business, thanks to the customers who place an almost blind faith in the Duncan Hines endorsement sign.”
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The public who possessed this blind trust, she wrote, consisted chiefly of those who were “middle aged, of substantial income, [and] travel for pleasure.” They were “accustomed to certain comforts.” Hines made their travels more enjoyable; but, of course, he did not stop with restaurants. Places to sleep were just as important as places to eat. It was the quality of the place that counted with travelers, Hines said, not its historical significance or some other balderdash. In exasperation with the literally thousands of wayside inns proclaiming to be places where George Washington spent the night, Hines exclaimed, “What do I care if Washington slept there? Do they have a nice, clean bathroom and do the beds have box springs—that's what I want to know.”
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During 19-21 September 1946, columnist and food editor for the New York
Herald-Tribune
and
Gourmet
magazine, Clementine Paddleford, was Hines's guest in Bowling Green. The two had become acquainted while attending food writers conventions, and he invited her to visit him.
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After her three-day visit, Hines and Clara had no idea what shape her article would take. So many questions were asked that Clara said, “she didn't know whether the article…would deal with [Hines's] private life, home, menu experiments or his writings, because all were well covered.”
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When Paddleford's piece was published, everyone liked it. The 12
January 1947 article appeared in the widely-read weekly Sunday newspaper supplement,
This Week.
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So popular was it that
This Week
was deluged with reprint requests. The article not only gave readers tips on how to be better cooks, it also let Hines ruminate on the many things that annoyed him about restaurants. His most popular suggestion, of course, was that diners should enter a restaurant's back door before entering its dining room; if they did not find the kitchen's appearance appealing, they should leave through the front door and never return. “Hines himself,” wrote Paddleford, “after a look at the kitchen, refused to eat in 7,000 of the 9,000 restaurants” he visited.
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He said if patrons duplicated his practices, practically all of America's bad restaurants would vanish within a few months.

Poor kitchen conditions, Paddleford reported, were not the only thing that tried his patience. Hines never failed to fume when he discovered his menu contained misnamed foods. To put it mildly, he was not especially appreciative when the “baby lamb” turned out to be “a grown sheep.” Roared Hines, “Fancy names don't make food taste any better. Call it Terrestrial Cake—but it remains a mud pie.”
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A dish with dressed-up sobriquets was his personal
bete-noire;
it amounted to false advertising. “I steer clear of hashes and meat loaves with fancy names,” he said, “and from dishes disguised with French names that don't mean anything in a Midwest hotel. I always dodge chicken a la king, if it is offered at bargain prices…because that is a sure sign it is leftover or second-rate chicken, whereas real chicken a la king is expensive, being carefully selected cuts of the best-grade fowls.”
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During the course of her visit, Paddleford noticed Clara was not at all intimidated by her husband. She did not have to be. When she was around, Hines was an obedient boy. When asked if her famous mate was hard to please at dinner, she put the notion to rest with a nonchalant wave of her hand, “No, he's easy to please.” She turned to him, and asked, “Dune, what's for dinner today?” After a moment's hesitation, he shrugged his shoulders and said, “Oh, just anything.” Then, after a moment, quickly interjected, “hot biscuits, of course.” Hines told Paddleford, “Clara's biscuits
are the best I ever tasted. That goes for her fried chicken, too.” Clara took the hint; that evening she served a salad, squash, and a plate-load of fried chicken accompanied with hot rolls that were “wading in gravy.” The salad, wrote Paddleford, “was a tomato stuffed with cottage cheese, blended with grated onion and cucumber.” Hines eyed the tomato icily for a moment, then said with a twinkle of a smile, “I like a plain crisp green salad with a French dressing…. This sort of tomato thing I call woman's club chow.” He ate it anyway. Rounding out the dinner was his sister's recipe for apple pie.
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Paddleford was so impressed with the repast and other items made by Clara's skilled hands that she invited her to visit New York for the purpose of sharing her recipes with the
Herald-Tribune
's readers.
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Three months later, Hines and Frank J. Taylor collaborated on an article that was published in the 26 April 1947 edition of
The Saturday Evening Post
. Hines wrote that the “game” of finding a good restaurant was well worth the hunt. He and Clara found it worth their while, he wrote, “not only for the sheer thrill of hitting the jackpot every so often but” also because their “comfort and health” was important to them. He admitted, however, that sometimes their luck in finding good restaurants was still no better than that of other restaurant scouts: “We've found prospecting for good meals great adventure. Often, [however,] we don't hit a vein of good eating until after several tries, even in territory we know.”

In the
Post
article, Hines recounted his misadventures, some of which were ones he had been telling for years—such as the snoozing cat stretched out on the warm bread dough. That there was a gap—sometimes several decades—between the actual occurrence of his many tales and their publication was immaterial; he was not about to let that inconvenient fact get in his way. Besides, since his yarns were, even in 1947, within the realm of possibility, no harm was done. What was important to him was not the exactitude of his stories but the lasting effect they had on the public. If they caused people to question the cleanliness of restaurants, if his anecdotes compelled Americans to demand they remain spotless at all times, they served their intended purpose. His
design was to stir up the public, to agitate them, to motivate them into pressuring restaurants to clean up their act. To a large degree, his article was successful in this objective. In an age when the written word was more respected, an engaging article that reached twenty million readers was impossible to ignore.

In the article, Hines instructed the public to follow his lead. Do as he did when visiting a restaurant and they would rarely go wrong. As a model example, he offered the following story. Once he and Clara were heading north from Bowling Green when they stopped “at a Louisville hotel for lunch. We ordered hot-roast-beef sandwiches, usually a safe choice. When these came, I looked at the unappetizing, razor-thin slices of cold beef on soggy, untoasted bread, smeared with gravy that looked like misplaced billboard paste, and asked the waiter if he ate the hotel food. ‘No, suh,' he replied emphatically. ‘Ah eats down the street.' Hines said, ‘We'll do that too. Bring me the check.'” They “left the food untouched,” and tried another hotel dining room, “where the most promising item on the menu was pork tenderloin.” When the meal was served, Hines immediately noticed “the pork smelled like catfish.” He inquired how this came to be and “learned that it had been fried in a pan in which catfish had been cooked, after which the stale grease had not been cleaned out.” Hines paid the bill without eating it and, once again, they searched for another place to have lunch. This sequence continued until they found a satisfactory place.
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Hines unabashedly proffered a remedy for America's restaurant ills. “I would like to be food dictator of the USA just long enough to padlock two-thirds of the places that call themselves cafes or restaurants,” he exclaimed, adding that about half of those he had in mind also doubled as places of lodging.
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But since he knew he would never be America's food dictator, he hoped his “pet peeves” would become the public's. “Mine is a private crusade,” he proclaimed, but “if I can induce a million [of you] to work with me, we can make America a safe place to eat, quicker than it can be done by laws.” In his
Post
article, Hines suggested that all his readers had to do was “stroll around to the back door of an eating
place before” going through the front entrance, “even if [you] have to walk halfway around the block. A glance and a whiff at the back door tells you in nothing flat whether or not you want to go” inside. “When I go into the front door,” he said, “I look around to see if there is a ‘Keep Out' sign over the door leading to the kitchen. If there is, I keep out of the dining room as well as the kitchen.”

Defending his practices, he said, “they may put me down for a fussy busybody, but I know that if enough customers do that, they will scrub up the kitchen, so that they are not afraid to have it seen.” He understood that some Americans were not brave enough to embrace his suggestions, that they would forever remain passive eaters. But he had some advice for these submissive individuals. “It calls for some nerve to ask to see the kitchen of public eating places,” he said, “but after you have seen one littered with filth, food and garbage exposed to flies, and sloppy cooks dropping cigarette ashes into whatever they are cooking, you find it easy to screw up your courage…. I still have my appetite and health, but it is only because I have been a fussy busybody and have walked out on thousands of places whose kitchens were dirty or emitted rancid odors.”
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Even before 1947 hundreds of thousands had already taken his advice with respect to inspecting restaurant kitchens. The Maramor, a restaurant in Columbus, Ohio, Hines had recommended for years, received so many requests to inspect its kitchen that scheduled tours were “stacked up eight weeks ahead” of time, with a limit of five customers allowed on the premises during the busiest hours. After the
Post
article appeared, those numbers seemed quaint; everyone, it seemed, was asking to inspect restaurant kitchens. The requests became so numerous that the owners of the Rathskeller, in Rockford, Illinois, looked for a way to slow the demand for kitchen tours by “self-appointed kitchen inspectors.” They found their solution by taking one of Hines's repeated suggestions: installing a huge plate-glass window on its premises, one so large it completely separated “the dining room from the kitchen,” enabling their customers to easily “see the chefs and cooks at work.”

Not content to lead the charge for cleaner kitchens, Hines sought other restaurant reforms. Many of his “pet peeves” were still being practiced throughout American restaurants, and he was determined to eliminate as many of them as possible. One annoyance that vexed him endlessly concerned the “oversized portions of poorly prepared and badly served food at low prices.” Whenever Hines discovered a so-called restaurant “bargain,” for example, he instantly became “wary.” His first reaction was characteristically typical: “I want to check the kitchen to see that they are not salvage leftovers from the plates of earlier customers,” of what he was sure was “second-rate food.” He felt justified in having such suspicions. “It isn't in the cards,” he said, “for one restaurateur to be so much smarter than his competitors that he can give twice as much for less money and survive.”
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It also irked him that the large portions he railed against were far more than most customers could possibly eat and, as leftovers, were later thrown away. Exclaimed Hines, “The American people waste enough food every day to feed all of Europe. Just the other day I read about the garbage collector in some Ohio city finding a twenty-four pound unopened sack of flour and half a ham among other discarded foods. Whoever threw away such foods should be compelled to do without any food for a reasonable length of time as a punishment for such wastefulness.” The reckless squandering of foodstuffs horrified him. He pointed out that the sanitation department of New York City carted away an average of 476 tons of edible food each day, an amount equaling one-eighth of a pound per resident, and that the New York Trust Company estimated that Americans wasted food at the annual rate of a billion dollars.
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Much as Hines enjoyed the company of his countrymen, there was one irritating habit they practiced that really provoked his wrath. He was aghast at the rapidity with which they consumed their meals. They could not seem to eat fast enough. No doubt, he was sure, that if the average American could, he would lift his plate above his face, tilt it as he opened his mouth, and swallow it whole as it fell into his ravenous cavity. He had no use for the restaurant patron “who gobbles his food so fast that he scarcely has time to
taste it as it zooms past his tongue.” It alarmed him that many Americans wanted their food served quickly. “We need more dining rooms with the leisurely tempo of California's Santa Maria Inn” or the various New England inns, “where your order is taken in the lounge, and where the table is set with the first course upon it before you are invited to sit down.” In this respect, however, he never got his wish. It was one reform Americans conveniently ignored.
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