Duncan Hines (39 page)

My reaction to Europe is I should have tried it twenty years ago. Clara and I met some fine people over there. Their eating habits may be different from ours, but that doesn't necessarily mean they're worse. The same goes for their food…. People in Europe eat a lot of bread, and the bread is tasty. Beef, lamb, and chicken are good. Butter is good and unsalted. Asparagus is served in stalks about eight inches long and about three inches around the base. Generally, there's no drinking water on the table unless you order it by the bottle and pay extra for it. There's no bourbon in Europe, either, so I drank Scotch. Mrs. Hines tried what they call aperitifs.

Hines said that the most “delectable” dish he encountered on his tour of the European continent was something not served there at all but on the ocean liner Liberte: “tiny French peas. It was the seasoning that made them something to remember throughout my
life in this and the next world.” Later, commenting on the food he found in France, Hines said,

I found that the French were apt to use too much sauce on things. They'd douse it over meat in a way that would contaminate everything else on the plate. One lunch I went to in Paris started at one and ended at four-thirty. The squares of butter had flower decorations in red in the center. Jelly, but pretty. In Nice, the butter came in fluted ribbons, and we had five waiters serving our table. The coffee cups at breakfast held half as much again as our American cups. Wherever we went, I avoided ground up meats. Also, I was careful to see that the meat we did eat was thoroughly cooked. I wasn't going to take a chance on the raw flesh of some varmint I didn't even know the name of.
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He confessed that he did not appraise the European restaurants as severely as he did those in America, stating, coyly, that he restrained himself when he had an urge to visit a restaurant's back door “to see if they throw their garbage to the neighborhood dogs.” His European restaurant tour was primarily charted, he said, by the advice given him from well-traveled friends, ones thoroughly trustworthy in matters of European gastronomy. When asked if he could read French, he said he could not, but that, when in doubt, he always asked the headwaiter what it was—a practice he had entreated Americans to exercise for the past two decades. It did not matter if Americans could not read the menu, he said. It “might have twenty-two letters and turn out to be gull. Matter of fact there were gull eggs on the menu of the Queen Elizabeth. If you're not sure of the cookin', order ham and eggs. And if the yoke don't stand up above the white like the morning sun, those eggs are no good, see?”

After displaying for the press the number of wristwatches he had strapped to his arms, he pulled out of his trouser pocket a new timepiece, a wristwatch he had bought in Switzerland that was made of glass on both sides and displayed a dozen wheels silently
clicking away but bringing him the time. “Took two men three months to make this,” he said. “Cost a bit, but it saves me money. I'm so dad-blamed busy winding these watches up I don't have time to buy drinks for some blamed redhead.”

The conversation returned to food. Comparing the cuisine on the French and English ocean liners, Hines said that the “French spend so much time making it look pretty. On the English boats the food is very good, but they don't doll it up so.” He parted with one last critique of France's food. “Over there the vegetables are swimming in sauce and you can't taste the flavor of the vegetables. Next time I go, I'm going to take me a little boat to put the sauce in.”
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When all but one reporter had left, the moment Hines had been waiting for had finally arrived: his first meal in America after having been away from its cuisine for eight solid weeks. And Duncan Hines knew exactly what he wanted. He went to a nearby restaurant, sat down at a table, and consumed a hearty, robust meal of ham and eggs. It was the perfect way to end his trip.
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Said Hines, with a wink, “I'd almost forgotten how good they can be!”
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In 1955 the Duncan Hines Institute published two volumes. The first was Duncan Hines' Dessert Book, a collection of Hines's favorite after-dinner recipes; it was followed later in the year by the ever-so-slightly autobiographical Duncan Hines' Food Odyssey.
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The Dessert Book was a standard paperback book. As was Adventures in Good Cooking, the Dessert Book was compiled from recipes submitted by restaurants and Hines's many friends and family members. As was the case with the older book, blank areas were filled with household hints, suggestions, admonitions, and an assortment of Duncan Hines homilies. The book contained a total of 555 recipes, which made it a comprehensive range of sugary confections guaranteed to satisfy anyone with a craving for something sweet to eat.
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The book was distributed through Pocket Books, a mass-market paperback publisher, and an initial print-run of 250,000 copies was ordered, thus enabling it to reach “a much broader cross section of the country” than
Adventures in Good Cooking
ever had. The volume is still a treasured volume in the libraries of hundreds of cooks.
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Later that year
Duncan Hines' Food Odyssey
hit bookstore shelves. Originally titled
There's No Accounting For Tastes
, it was touted as an autobiography; but with the exception of the first two
chapters, there was little autobiography in it. A more appropriate title should have been
Duncan Hines' Travelogue
, the book, an entertaining read, was essentially a tour of the many restaurants Hines had visited over the years, accompanied by a short discussion of his recent activities with the Duncan Hines Institute.
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On 9 May 1955, at the 14th Annual Duncan Hines Family Dinner in Chicago, attended by approximately 300 members of his restaurant and lodging listings,
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Hines predicted, presciently, that “by 1975 the average homemaker will spend an average of only 15 minutes a day [preparing food] in the home compared to the 90 minutes she spends today.”
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But he spent most of his time speaking at great length of his recent travels. He told the crowd that, earlier in the year, he and Clara had covered 10,000 miles in their automobile in three months. As they were driving through Texas, he said, they stopped in Beaumont. As was the case more often than not, it was not long before a newspaper reporter showed up. When Hines mentioned that he was on his way to Mexico, he was asked if he was carrying a pistol.

“NO!” Hines said, adding that he “would not know how to use one.” Within twenty-four hours Beaumont's citizens presented him with a Stetson hat instead of a gun so he would not seem out of place upon his arrival. Hines liked the hat so much that he wore it during the entire time he was in the country and said that because of it, he had no trouble with the Mexican natives or anyone else.

While they were traveling through Mexico, he said that he and Clara had to watch what they put in their mouths. “In Mexico,” he said, “we ate no unpeeled fruit and no uncooked vegetables, thus no illness.” They encountered few unsatisfactory edibles during the course of his trip. On two occasions, however, they slipped up. At one forgotten spot on the map, they attempted to eat some frijoles—or Mexican beans. Said Hines, “I like beans, but what I was served had been pulverized and apparently mixed with axle grease, so I ate none. One taste was enough.” Another time, in Metamoras, Mexico, just across the Rio Grande from Brownsville, Texas, he and Clara were invited by a friend to try Mexican quail at
the Cucaracha Cafe, the name meaning Cockroach. When he saw it, Hines roared with laughter. “What a name for a restaurant!” Of the meal itself, he said that “the quail turned out to be our common black-bird. The breast was black as pitch.” After their meal, he and Clara made no plans to return to the Cucaracha Cafe; being served blackbird had quenched their curiosity. Later, when they saw a billboard advertising the delights to be consumed at the Striped Skunk Restaurant, they did not even bother to stop—or slow down; they figured that, after consuming “Mexican quail,” there was no telling what “regional favorite” that questionable restaurant would dump onto their dinner plates.
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Hines was a creature of habit. Although he enjoyed traveling, he did not like to upset his daily routines, and he could become quite annoyed if he could not fit his quotidian rituals into his schedule. One ritual he insisted on was going to bed at nine o'clock. When attending a dinner party while in the company of others and nearing the hour when his body demanded rest, he had several stratagems for getting to bed when he wished. One of these was to wear two or three different wristwatches on his arm, the alarm for each set a few seconds apart. Therefore, when he was seated at the dinner table and the hour was growing late, it was not unusual for one of his wristwatches to suddenly blast into action, making loud, disruptive, easily heard noises. When, moments later, another of his timepieces shattered the evening's congenial atmosphere, those in his party knew that he had something better to do.

On one occasion, while he was a guest on a radio program, Hines decided he did not care for the line of questioning. Therefore, as he spoke, he surreptitiously reached into his coat pocket full of watches. Suddenly, one of the wristwatch alarms began emitting an annoying, irritating sound. While the radio technicians turned numerous dials and flipped an army of switches in an effort to keep the cacophony off the air, Hines furiously turned the timepiece over and over in his hands and shook it as he pretended not to know how to turn it off. Within a few seconds his spot on the show was cut short and, as he had hoped, he was quickly dismissed by the show's host.
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Sales of Duncan Hines products continued to soar. Not only was Hines-Park, Inc. involved in marketing quality foodstuffs, it was also carving out a niche for itself in the food appliance arena; by the end of 1955 it had licensed over fifty kitchen items brandishing the Duncan Hines name, “from cooking ranges to a Duncan Hines coffee-maker.”
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In September 1955, speaking before the southern district of the Advertising Federation of America in Alabama, Roy Park reported that gross “sales of Duncan Hines foods at the retail level amount[ed] to about $50,000,000 a year,” and proudly stated there were now over ninety licensed food manufacturers in the program “with advertising appropriations totaling approximately $3,000,000 annually.”
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He also told them about a year-old enterprise his company had inaugurated, the Duncan Hines Signet Club. Park described this as “a travel and credit service,…with some 50,000 members whose credit cards [were] honored by 2,300 Duncan Hines-recommended eating, lodging and vacation places in Canada, Mexico and points of interest in the Caribbean,” as well as in the United States. Members could essentially “eat at the best restaurants” in America and “pay for their meals at the end of the month.”
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Hines liked the idea and wished something like it had been available fifty years earlier.
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As the end of 1955 rolled around, Duncan Hines had quite a bit to be proud of. Twenty years had passed since he had mailed that unique 1935 Christmas card to keep others from pestering him. As he dropped his cards in the mailbox, he had no idea what he was setting into motion. He had never wanted to be famous, let alone a public icon—although he certainly did not mind the adulation and attention he had since received. Initially, he had only wanted to give the public a publication they could use so they would stop irritating him with questions. Twenty years later his name was revered, respected and better known than most Americans. Over 100 million products bearing his name were now sold throughout the world. Sometimes, being irritated paid off.
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On 7 May 1956, at the annual Duncan Hines Family Dinner in the Grand Ball Room of Chicago's Sheraton Hotel, Hines remarked
on his role in raising restaurant and lodging standards when he said, “You know, I have been called a crusader by some of my good friends in the press, radio and television. They are referring to my crusade for good food, good service and good accommodations. If what I have been doing is called a crusade, then I will continue to be a crusader.” He would continue his crusade, he said. But just around the corner was an accolade that proved to be the ultimate honor, one that vaulted his fame far beyond that which he had already achieved and continues to this day.
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Three months later, on 17 August 1956 the Duncan Hines Institute and Hines-Park Foods announced their merger with the Procter & Gamble Company, a large corporation based in Cincinnati, Ohio, whose main product lines at the time were “soaps, detergents, drug products and shortenings.”
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Some months earlier, P&G had decided to expand its line of grocery products, specifically flour-based mixes, and chose to purchase Nebraska Consolidated Mills, which manufactured the Duncan Hines cake mix products. J. Allan Mactier, president of Nebraska Consolidated, announced that the corporate giant's direct purchase of his company included all research and production facilities, and that capital funds created by the sale would be used to continue the company's bakery flour and mixed-feed divisions.
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Simultaneously, Procter and Gamble also announced it had acquired not only exclusive rights to use Duncan Hines's name but also, through an exchange of stock for an undisclosed price, both the Duncan Hines Institute and Hines-Park Foods, which Roy Park would continue operating from Ithaca as its president.
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As part of the deal, Park became one of Procter & Gamble's vice-presidents, no doubt to protect his interests. The acquisition also included an agreement that P&G would not harm or hamper the smaller company's guidebook and credit card business.
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Explaining his company's friendly acquisition, Procter and Gamble executive vice-president, Howard J. Morgens, said that “since housewives are showing an increasing interest in buying shortening already mixed with flour, sugar, and other ingredients, it seems quite logical for Procter and Gamble to extend its interest to prepared mix
products.”
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Morgens added that the company was gratified by “Hines' confidence in the ability of Procter & Gamble to protect and extend the reputation of high quality foods which is associated with his name.”
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And P&G had big plans for that name; by the end of 1956 the corporate giant had introduced twelve mixes in their new line of Duncan Hines baking products: flapjack, buttermilk pancake, blueberry muffin, hot roll, yellow cake, spice and coffee cake, sponge cake, marble cake, white cake, angel food cake, burnt sugar cake, and fudge brownie.
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