May 6, 2020 • 34 mins
Meet Clementine Paddleford, the forgotten food journalist who elevated food writing from dull and mundane to a delicious art form. The way we write about food today is largely due to Clementine, the roving reporter who taught herself to fly a plane so she could report on every aspect of food across the country and around the world.
Afterwards, hear Jo’s conversation with Yasmin Khan, the best-selling food writer whose books on middle eastern cooking, The Saffron Tales and Zaitoun, expertly carry on Clementine’s legacy.
Main Sources:
- Hometown Appetites: The Story of Clementine Paddleford, the Forgotten Food Writer who Chronicled How America Ate, by Kelly Alexander and Cynthia Harris
- How to Cook for a Whole Crew by Clementine Paddleford, from the NY Herald Tribune, July 1960
- Vast Drive And Courage Spark Career of Famed Food Editor – By Susan Delight, for the San Diego Union, February 1959
- A Life in the Culinary Front Lines, by R.W. Apple for the NY Times, Nov, 2005
- The Great American Cookbook: 500 Time-Tested Recipes: Favorite Food from Every State, by Clementine Paddleford - a reprint of the original ‘How America Eats’ edited by Kelly Alexander
- A panel sponsored by the Food Studies Program at the New School in New York City titled ‘Clementine Paddleford: America's First Food Journalist’ which took place in June of 2010 (some panelists and guests knew Clementine Paddleford personally and shared anecdotes about her life.)
- Clementine Paddleford’s obituary in the NY Times from November of 1967 titled ‘Clementine Paddleford is Dead; Food Editor of Herald Tribune
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:02):
M h I had asked for it. I dived to
the ocean floor. The wind rushed at me like a
mad bull. I flung to a one rope rail and
then down we go, thirty feet down through a steel
tube like a chimney built for a slim Santa Clause.
(00:25):
The year was nineteen sixty. Clementine Paddleford, the food writer
for the New York Herald Tribune, was sixty one years
old when she descended into the fifty four square foot
galley kitchen of the U. S S. Skipjack. At the time,
it was the world's fastest nuclear submarine. And we're off
five miles into Long Island Sound, operating at eighty to
(00:47):
two hundred feet below the surface. Now to the galley
to see dinner get under way. Clementine wanted to find
out how a Cold War navy cook turned out three
hundred meals a day for sailors living on a submarine
two hundred feet below the surface of the ocean. There
are other challenges taken up by naval ingenuity. Kitchens may
be many sized, but appetites how traditionally be I had
(01:11):
come aboard to see how America eats in what the
crew call our underwater hotel. Every detail is a marvel
inefficiency beneath the wave. She watched, questioned, and furiously scribbled
notes and recipes. She wrote about strawberry shortcake, prime rib
brownies for hundreds, all prepared in a space hardly bigger
than a bathroom. Her subsequent article was read by millions.
(01:37):
When we talk about the titans of food writing, the
names that come up the most are people like Anthony Boording,
Michael Pollen, Julia Child. Most people have never heard the
name Clementine Paddleford. Clementine's legacy on today's food writing is
the celebrity shifts and the other passionate personalities to create
and write about the food we eat and drink. That's
(01:58):
Cynthia Harris, co author of the book Hometown Appetites, the
story of Clementine Paddleford, the forgotten food writer who chronicled
how America ate. And also, I'd like to think that
part of her legacy is the farm to table movement,
because she wrote so much about how the food reached
the table. Before Clementine came along, food writing was dry
and boring. It was a science, but never an art.
(02:22):
Clementine changed all that. She laid the groundwork for the
way every newspaper, every magazine, and the entire food network
writes and talks about food today. And yet her name
has been mostly lost to history. But once you know
her story, you'll start to see her everywhere, from I
(02:48):
Heart Radio and Tribeca Studios. This is fierce. I Can't
Type Women were going to presenting problems. A podcast about
the incredible women who never made it in your history
books and the modern women carrying on their legacies today.
Us to the Lady, the Fair and the Week I
Can't Find Women Worker. Don't mind routine, repetitive work. It
(03:10):
will you make a copy of this naturally. Each week
we're bringing you the story of a groundbreaking woman from
the past who made huge contributions to the present, but
whose name still isn't on the tips of our tongues
for whatever reason, maybe it's because men wrote most of history.
At the end of each episode, I'll be joined by
(03:31):
a woman living today who's standing on the shoulders of
this historical figure, whether she knows it or not. Clementine
Paddleford was a legend in her time. Our w Apple
of the New York Times summed up her influence like this.
(03:53):
Clementine Paddleford was the Nelly blythe of culinary journalism. But
go anywhere, Taste anything, ask everything, kind of reporter who
traveled more than fifty thousand miles a year in search
of stories. In a day when very few food editors
strayed far from their desk, Clementine was instrumental in shaping
how we talk about food the way we do today,
with a language infused with delight, passion, and sometimes even lust.
(04:21):
But long before that, she was a girl born on
a farm in Kansas. Clementine, or Clements, she was known
to her friends, was born on September. She spent her
early years on a two d and sixty acre farm
near Manhattan, Kansas. The family raised pigs and grew staples
of the American kitchen, like corn and strawberries. Clementine once
(04:44):
wrote about making ice cream out of freshly fallen snow.
The Paddlefords were hardy people, descendants of Revolutionary War soldiers.
Her mother, Jenny, came from true pioneer stock right off
the Blue Stem Prairies in Minnesota. Jenny was also in
an emily in her day. She came from a farming family,
but did something very few other women in Kansas were
(05:05):
doing at the time. Attended college in taking classes at
Kansas State, Clementine reade a horse to school, but she
spent her early mornings and evenings helping out on the farm.
That's where she witnessed first hand the backbreaking labor that
both men and women put into growing the food America eight.
(05:26):
She saw how farmers lived and died by the hand
of mother nature. It was Jenny Paddleford who showed Clem
the true joy of gathering around a table, something Clementine
would later infuse into all of her writing. At our
supper table there was family togetherness, plus supper was a
time for laughter, arguments, or forbidden. Jenny had another bit
(05:47):
of sage advice for her daughter growing up on that
farm in rural Kansas. Never grow a wishbone, daughter, where
your backbone ought to be. It's stuck with Clem. As
a girl, and then as a teenager who longed to
be a journalist in a field dominated by men, Clementine
grew her backbone. She strengthened it as an editor at
(06:09):
the college newspaper at Kansas State, earning pocket money freelancing
for Kansas newspapers and farm magazines, writing mostly about livestock
breeding practices. While she was studying journalism, Nobody, I mean
nobody was safe from Clementine Paddleford. Her daily job was
to go to the train depot and ride about, becoming
(06:30):
some goins of the locals. She would also look at
her neighbor and say, what happened at your house since
the last time I talked to you yesterday. She was
just a busy body. She was a busy body. She
knew then, when she graduated from Kansas State University in
nineteen one, that she was going to go to New
York and she was going to be famous. She set
(06:54):
off for New York, where she freelanced for The Sun
and the New York Telegram, starting her career off writing
mostly puff pieces. Today they'd be called click bait. One
article was entitled girl uses a fake limp to get
a seat. Another girl saves her hat in subway crush.
It was embarrassing and unsung work, but those were the
(07:16):
journalism assignments the girls were given, when girls were given
assignments at all. In Clementine's archives, there's this early recommendation
letter that a mail copy editor wrote for Clementine is
an able writer of both imaginative and fact material, a
combination of abilities which I have found rare among women writers.
The puff pieces didn't make her any money, so Clem
(07:38):
tried other waister in cash, from writing press releases and
business reports to babysitting and waiting tables in a theological seminary.
She even slung umbrellas at gimbals. She used what little
money beyond rent she had to pay for journalism classes
at n y U and Columbia. Here's what she wrote
to her mother at the time. Sometimes I fairly hate
New York. That's producer annast for reading Clementine's words from
(08:01):
her biography, the one co written by Cynthia Harris and
Kelly Alexander. Quotes in this episode also come from Clementine's
own article how to Cook for a Whole Crew, published
in The Herald Tribune in July nineteen sixty. Sometimes I
hate everything, down to the last banana skin and stray cat.
But when I think of leaving it, all of the racket,
the dirt, the beauty, the ugliness, all mixed in so
(08:22):
comfortably together, I almost revolted the thought. Even though she
had misgivings about New York. She eventually gained a foothold
at a magazine called Farm and Fireside, editing their women's pages.
Women's pages. These were distinct from men's pages. Men's pages
had news, business finance. Women's pages contains stories about interior design,
(08:46):
curling your hair, mending your shoes, crocheting, how to best
clean a refrigerator in a chicken, all in an hour.
Clementine was practical. As the country slid into the Great Depression,
she realized she'd have to focus her efforts on an
area of journalism that would never go away. She thought
(09:07):
about what people really needed even when times were bad,
and she landed on two things, shoes and food. As
the situation in the country became more serious, This is
how she determined that food writing would be her surest
path to a sustainable career. But Clementine was not content
(09:29):
with the status quo, with doing things the way they've
been done just because that's the way they've always been done.
Clementine decided if she was going to write for women,
she was going to write for real women, and that
meant getting away from her desk and visiting women all
over the country of course, she had to convince her bosses,
and I can't imagine that conversation was easy. But in
(09:50):
the end, Clementine was as persuasive as she was persistent,
and she got the permission to travel, to break away
from her desk, going into homes and kitchens, talking to
real people. That's what made these stories come alive off
the page. But just as she was gathering steam as
a food writer, she suffered a devastating setback. In nineteen one,
(10:11):
at the age of thirty three, Clementine Paddle for developed
throat cancer. She finally went to the doctor who said, yes,
you have cancer, and he gave her two options. They
could remove her entire larynx and that would eradicate all
the cancer, but then Clementine might never talk again. Well
that's not so good for a food writer reporter that
(10:32):
needed their voice to talk to people and to interview them.
The other option risk here in a lot of ways,
was that they'd removed part of the larynx, but that
might not leave her cancer free. Clem's entire career was
based on her voice. She chose the risk ear surgery.
She would end up having to have a track tube.
She would have to put her finger over the whole
(10:52):
of the track tube when she talked, which resulted in
a recipe low whispery type voice. It took her a
year to speak above a way spur, and even then
she needed a special machine inserted into her larynx to
allow her to speak. It was made of sterling silver,
almost like a piece of jewelry. To hide it, she
tied a black ribbon around her neck like a choker.
It held the silver voice box in place, and it
(11:14):
became a kind of signature look to accompany her new
deep and crackly voice. It never slowed paddle for down.
One day she met a lady who said that her
son had a track tube, and Clementine wrote this woman
a letter and said, the only thing that the track
tube stops is me playing tennis and swimming. Tennis I
(11:35):
get out of breath and swimming. If I'd swim, I
would drown. She says, it meant she had to be
more charismatic, seductive, winsome and charming, all with just her eyes.
The recovery beat her down, but eventually she'd laugh about
the surgery and the voice box. She'd come to see
it as an asset because of my voice. People never
(11:56):
forget me. We'll be back with more of clementine story
right after this quick break. By working hard and simply
being better at her job than any other food writer
at the time, Clementine made herself a household name. In
(12:17):
six she began to write for the New York Herald Tribune.
She subsequently picked up a regular column in the newspaper
supplement This Week. Her continued travels ended up taking her
to every single state. Ohio to cover three cornered poppy
seed turnovers perfect for puram or a bridge club supper,
Missouri to cover a family who kept a melting pot
(12:38):
of cheese going for sixteen years. Hawaii, in a trip
that helped put Hawaiian food on the map. Dropping into
the far corners of the country made Clementine an expert,
maybe the country's first expert on regional food. Tell me
where your grandmother came from, and I can tell you
how many kinds of pote you so for Thanksgiving, She
(12:59):
was known to say she had a knack for embellishing
even the lowliest of food, so they seem like taste delights.
In Clementine's prose, Mushrooms became the elf of plants or
pixie umbrellas. Picture that for a moment and think about
how delightful it is a sprightly pixie holding a truffle
(13:22):
or a chantrell to shield themselves from a misty drizzle.
Here's how Clementine felt biting into an apple. The teeth
crack into the brittle flesh, A winey flavor floods the mouth,
the soul of the apple blossom distilled. Staring at a
perfect strawberry shortcake, the juice ran in rivulets, making a
(13:43):
crimson lake on the plate. She once found a chilly
with ribbed sticking qualities that make you young beyond your time.
On coffee, good coffee makes the meal, at least it
makes the good meal perfect and the poor meal possible.
Coffee re eated gives an evil cooking liquid that might
have been brewed out of the dead sea after a
(14:04):
recipe left by the Witch of end Or. One of
my favorite lines of Clems is about a hot and
comforting clam chowder. Chowder breathes reassurance, its steams consolation. So
(14:25):
much of Clementine's magic was focusing on the people behind
the food. That's commonplace now. Profiles of chefs, farmers, competitive eaters.
But it wasn't back then. Back then, food was written
about as if it was something cooked up in a lab,
not something dreamed up by human beings. And one of
the most remarkable things Clementine did was using food as
(14:46):
an entryway into every other story of the day. Food
writing in Clem's day before she started innovating, it was
pretty much precise and how to step by step instructions.
They didn't tell you anything about the street of the
food or anything like that. Clem covered the nineteen forty
(15:06):
Republican National Convention by writing about the importance of scrapple. Scrapple,
for those of you who don't live in Philadelphia, is
a sausage adjacent dish made from slaughterhouse leftovers. Here's what
Clem wrote about it. It's Philadelphia scrapple that offers the
first warm welcome of the day on breakfast plates, a
strengthen her for delegates who need a hearty breakfast under
(15:26):
their belts to tie them through the bed limon oratory
of the opening of the National Republican Convention. When America
entered World War Two in nineteen forty one, Clem made
it her job to report on how the war was
affecting real Americans at their kitchen tables. During World War Two,
there was a battle on the home front to the
tussle with Ritian books, tokens, and stamps. Supplies were short,
(15:49):
and everything from shoes to gasoline was doled out no stamps,
no soul. She began writing about the kinds of food
people were eating in wartime America because she knew it
was important to chronicle heroism and enterprise at home. Let
the American people read about themselves for once while everyone
else was covering what was happening abroad. She showed her
(16:09):
readers had to cook beaver, muskrat, bear, snake, whale, and turtle,
all the substitute for ration beefs Clem wrote, Turtle meat
is red meat in color, tastes something like veal, with
an underlying flavor distinctly its own. One local chef invited
her to try tasting beetles that seemed like it was
(16:29):
going too far. These articles brought people together, showed them
what they had in common through their culinary ingenuity. When
Winston Churchill visited Fulton, Missouri, in nine, Clem described the
meal served while everyone else droned on and on about
the Iron Curtain. It was, of course, a very big
day in the history of Fulton, Missouri, when President Gruman
(16:50):
and Winston Churchill paid that visit. Churchill enjoys home cooked
Missouri meal, screamed Clementine's headline. She wrote that the buffet
included a ham plastered with a paste mustard mixed with
brown sugar, fried chicken twice, baked potatoes asparaguess canned not fresh,
and angel food cake with ice cream. She didn't focus
on Churchill exactly, but rather the wife of the college president,
(17:13):
who was preparing the meal of her demeanor while cooking
for one of the leaders of the free world. Clementine
insisted the home cook was the alpha and omega of
studied calmness. Clem was everywhere at this point. James Beard
once said she was surely the most getting around us
(17:35):
person he'd ever known, besides, of course, Eleanor Roosevelt. Between
ninety in nineteen sixty, she logged more than eight hundred
thousand miles over land and buy air. That's enough miles
to circle the globe thirty times. Her contemporary Susan Delight
noted that she thought nothing of using a weekend to
(17:55):
fly to the West Coast or in one instance, Europe.
Clem was making good money at the Herald Tribute and
also it this week. She was churning out stories like
nobody's business, but traveling on other people's schedules took time.
She often went by commercial airplane, train, car, and sometimes
even mule. But she had so many stories she wanted
(18:18):
to cover. How could she get where she wanted to
go even faster? By learning to fly her own plane.
In her fifties, Clem began studying to learn how to
fly a plane to the navigation classes at night and
on weekends at n y U. Learning to fly gave
her freedom. No one could tell her she couldn't go somewhere,
(18:41):
not when she was the one flying the plane. Clementine
was thoroughly modern and thoroughly her own person in every
sense of the word. She found ways to liberate herself
in both her professional and personal lives. She did get married.
She actually married quite young, but she kept it a
secret so she wouldn't have to abandon her slew of admirers.
(19:03):
This was a radical move. Women during Clem's time not
only lived with their husbands, but they lived for them.
Clem's husband was like a garnish to her life. Like Parsley,
he was never the main course. She eventually divorced him,
but they remained close after that. She had a regular
roster of dates that she'd schedule around her first priority work.
(19:27):
It's even rumored that she once made one of her
male suitors try out an extremely experimental form of the
birth control pill. She never had her own children, but
when a close friend died of cancer, she took in
her twelve year old daughter, adopted her and finished raising
her on her own. She didn't blink an eye, and
it never slowed down her career. We'll be back with
(19:51):
more of Clementine's story right after this quick break. At
the height of Clem's fame in the nineteen fifties and
early sixties, more than twelve million households were reading her columns.
Her piece to resistance was the Christmas nineteen sixty publication
(20:13):
of How America Eats, a comprehensive cookbook featuring eight hundred
recipes gathered into a state by state tour. She researched
it for more than twelve years, interviewed more than two
thousand cooks, and ate every single recipe in the book.
She was a phenomen So why don't we know the
name Clementine Battleford? There are a few reasons. Personally, I
(20:35):
think she was a product of her time. That was
one second. Of all, she had throat cancer, so she
couldn't do radio and television. The third reason, William I. Nichols,
her editor at This Week Magazine, had offered to buy
her name, similar to like Dear Anne or Dear Abbey,
and Clementine refused. Maybe that wasn't a bad thing because
(20:59):
Clementine died in nineteen sixty seven and This Week Magazine
did not last many more years after that, so she
would have probably been lost to history anyway, m Clementine
Paddleford is relevant to any woman working in any field today,
(21:19):
not just food writing. To me, Clems this incredible example
of how if you take your career into your own hands,
you can make anything happen. You can build your own
success just by being unabashedly yourself. You can't open Instagram,
turn on the TV, walk into a bookstore, or open
a magazine without stumbling on someone carrying on Clem's legacy,
(21:43):
the legacy that gave food writing life humor and relevance. Today,
there are so many people writing a Clems spirit and
they don't even realize it. Like my guest food writer
Yasmine Khan. Yas Means the best selling author of two books,
The Saffron Tales, which focuses on Persian food, and zay Tune,
which celebrates Palestinian cuisine. Like Clem, Yasmine was inspired by
(22:07):
her family's farm, only hers was in northern Iran. After
a decade working for human rights nonprofits in the Middle East,
Yasmine realized there was another way she could bring people together,
that she could help them find common ground through food
writing along with recipes. Both her books revealed the humanity
of a region through cuisine. Yasmin's writing, like Clementines, elevates
(22:29):
food is a vital point of personal connection, sparking empathy
that can lead to social change. And yet Yasmine didn't
know anything about Clementine when we started our conversation. She
had no idea she was carrying on Clem's legacy. We
caught up with Yasmine in a studio in London. All right, Hey,
welcome to Fierce. Hi. How you doing so? Have you
(22:50):
heard of Clementine? Paddleford. Before we reached out to you,
I had not that I really wish I had. I mean,
doesn't it say at all about kind of women's rangia
in history that you know? I are, like, I'm pretty
well read about, you know, pioneering women in this genre,
and now I hadn't heard of her. She. I mean,
she sounds so brave and empowering and inspiring. She really was.
(23:12):
I want to ask you a little bit about how
you got into food writing in the first place. How
did you choose food is your beat? It kind of
happened by accident. I did a law degree, I spent
about a decade working for nonprofits, and then, as it
is very common in the industry, I became, you know,
quite burnt out by a lot of the work I
was doing and the stories I was seeing, because so
(23:32):
much of it related to conflict in the Middle East,
that I took a bit of time out than As
part of that trip of trying to recover from my burnout,
I went and spent some time on my family's farm
in northern Iran, which is this beautiful green landscape filled
with rice paddies, tea plantations, you know, incredible fruit trees,
such as pomegranates and kiwi's and apples and oranges, as
(23:54):
well as all the vegetables you'd want to eat, and
surrounded by that incredible produce, I sat and kind of
thought about, Okay, well, maybe I don't want to go
back into the world of nonprofit, but maybe there's something
I can do to share the story of Iran through
a different medium. So it was kind of there in
my grandmother's kitchen in when really intense U S sanctions,
(24:16):
we're hitting your on and we thought there was going
to be a war. I thought, hey, maybe I can
write a book that humanizes the people of Iran and
shares ordinary stories through food. It's really interesting because Clementine
also came from a family of farmers. Really she did. Yeah,
she came from a family of farmers in Kansas and
happened upon food by accident. So I think that that's
(24:36):
a really fascinating connection between the two of you. Will
you end up having a lot of reverence and respect
for food. I think when your family are toilet literally
like toiling in the fields to grow things in order
to make their living, you you really become aware of
the elements and how nature affects livelihoods, but you also
(24:56):
have a lot of fun. I mean, one of my
earliest food memories is milking a cow. Now, looking back,
I feel really lucky that I had that experience. I
think when you have that intimacy with food, you can't
help but love it even more. There's something about just
being able to go down to the garden and literally
dig out an onion and put it in a stew
or a casserole, that there's something kind of magical about it.
(25:19):
And so you decided that you were going to write
a food and travel book to make the stories of
the people in Irand come alive, and you launched a
Kickstarter project. Could you tell us a little bit about that?
Kickstarter had just started, and so I thought, well, you know,
why not test this and see if people would be
interested in it. I feel again so grateful for this.
I think I hit my fund raising target, hit fifty
(25:40):
of it in the first twenty four hours. I was
funded by three hundred very generous people from all over
the globe, many of them non Aranian, who were just
I think connected to this mission that I had of
challenging stereotypes of Iran and using food as a way
of celebrating our common humanity. And why did you think
that food would be able to accomplish that. I was
trying to find a point that would be relatable between
(26:04):
someone sitting in New York City and someone sitting in Tehran.
So I thought, well, hey, Persian foods amazing, there's a
story to be told about Iran. Maybe I can combine
them both. And what was the reaction. I think it
did what I wanted to do and much more. Actually,
just you asked me that, and I think I just
welled up a little bit, because it's really interesting at
this point in my career to look back and think
(26:25):
that just a little idea that I had has kind
of spawned a genre. I mean, the New York Times,
the Guardian, you know, the BBC kind of all called it.
The Wall Street Journal all said it was one of
the cookbooks of the year, which for a debut author
is quite incredible, especially a debut author without a background
in food. And one of the most beautiful things is that,
you know, I go on Instagram now and people send
(26:46):
me pictures from Berlin or Brisbane or Brooklyn, pictures of
food that they've made. Perhaps a regional recipe from the
area where my family are from, and they're making it
for their friends, they're making it for their family. They're
built doing this connection. They're sharing like the joy and
the beauty of the rich tapestry of Persian food with
people around them. And yeah, I can't even tell you
(27:09):
what that makes me feel. I was just getting chills
listening to you, because that's exactly what Clementine did. She
went into real kitchens. She talked to real people with
real stories. How did you think that the stories behind
the food and the humans behind the food would be
the thing that would connect people, not just the recipes.
In terms of Iran and throughout the Middle East, I
(27:30):
think there's a big gulf between what most ordinary Americans
think of Iran and what the reality was that if
I could just offer a window into that, I knew
that people would be hooked. It wasn't easy by any chance.
You know. I didn't have a fixer. This is all
kind of stuff that I spent long periods of time researching.
But that meant that I could get people's trust, to
go up for a cup of tea with them and
(27:51):
explain what I was doing. And then these people I
met were so generous, you know, I got invited into
the homes of teachers and fishermen and hip hop artists
and yoga teachers and designers, business women. I mean, it
was just so varied, and I just felt that sharing
those stories could be such a valuable thing to do.
(28:12):
Did you find that when you told people you wanted
to write about food that they lit up in a
different way? You have absolutely hit the nail on the head.
Many people in the Middle East feel overresearched and another
journalist coming to talk to them about how terrible things are.
But if you get someone talking about the food that
they love, their favorite recipe, maybe sharing food memories, people
(28:34):
light up. But also you forge a connection with the
interviewee and sharing how their communities act, how their infrastructure acts,
how their environment is, and you get this really deep
sense of who a person is. In your travels and
in your writing about your travels, have you found food
to be the great unifier? Well, it's very disarming food.
(28:56):
Even if you're in a kind of tense situation, or
if you're talking to someone out something that's you know,
a little bit fraught, it's really hard to keep that
emotion whilst you're eating something delicious. Your second book, z
Tune its recipes and tales from the Palestinian kitchen. Talk
to me a little bit about how you think food
writing and food broadcasting can help bring about social change.
(29:16):
The starkest examples maybe is whre not. On my tours
or in my books, I talk about the situation in Gaza,
and I talk about this unique food culture that exists
in Gaza. I filled with green chilies and deal and
lots of garlic. But alongside that, I say, well, you know,
we can't talk about Gaza and cuisine and this holy
trinity of ingredients they have and their unique seafood. We're
actually also talking about the blockade. It's the fact that
(29:39):
for the last almost twelve years now, the people of
Gaza have been living under siege. How of the water
is undrinkable there according to Amnesty International, about how people
who live there are dependent on U N food A
just to survive. But you know, someone picking up an
article and reading that in the new section, maybe they
might not want to do it. But if you approach
(30:01):
it through culture, I think this is where the power
of the arts are so strong. It just enables these
subjects that can be quite tough to feel more digestible,
and that's where I think the really power of it comes.
And I think one of the things that has a
really struck me is actually the different approach that we're
seeing now that we have more women involved. I think
up until Ruth Rachel, food writing on the mainstream anyway
(30:25):
was much more about the slightly elitest, kind of slightly
snobby critiquing of restaurants or dishes. You know, it felt
very distant from ordinary people's lives, was what we've seen.
I think in the last few decades, is the genre
really developing and being like, hey, actually no, we're going
to look at the coal totality of the human experience,
(30:46):
but we're just going to look at it through food.
It's a really exciting community to be part of at
the moment. Tell me a little bit about your advice
for women who want to break into food writing today.
What is your advice for getting to do what Clementy
did and what you're doing now. I always recommend people
the book Will Write for Food by Diane Jacob. If
you're even thinking broadly of getting into the food writing world,
(31:07):
then you really want to start with that. And then
my other thing is I believe that anybody can become
good at anything, but you just really have to put
the practice in. I when I was transitioning over to
being a food writer, I sat and did lots of exercises,
lots of writing exercises, really kind of trying to find
my voice, got some coaching, you know, really invest in that.
(31:29):
I think there is a little bit of a tendency
to think, especially with social media culture, Oh, I'm just
going to post lots of pictures and become an Instagram
star and then that's my way into a food writing legacy.
But I don't think actually there's a legacy necessarily in that.
So you have to really find your voice and your
contribution first, and from there you just, yeah, you have
to dream big. Because if there's one thing I've learned
(31:51):
from my Kickstarter and my transition is that, you know,
really anything is possible in this world. You just have
to believe that you can do it. Thanks so much
to our guests, biographer Cynthia Harris and author Yasmine Khan.
Fierce is hosted and written by Joe Piazza, produced and
directed by me Anna Stump. Our executive producers are Joe Piazza,
(32:13):
Nicky Etor, Anna Stump, and from Tribeca Studios, Lea Sarbiebe.
Male voices in this episode by Hamilton Lighthouser. This episode
was co produced by Michelle Lands, edited and soundscaped by
Anna Stump. Our associate producer is Emily Maronoff, fact checking
by Austin Thompson, researched by Lizzie Jacobs. The Fierce theme
song was written by Hamilton Lighthouser and Anna Stump. Our
(32:34):
very sincere thanks to Mangesha Tikadoor for making this series possible,
and we want to mention that there have been multiple
moments as we've made this series where one thing or
another that we wanted to do look like it was
going to be impossible, and it was Nikki Etor who
always came through and made those things happen, and for
that we will be forever grateful. Sources for this episode,
Hometown Appetites the story of Clementine Paddleford, the forgotten food
(32:55):
writer who chronicled How America Ate by Kelly Alexander and
Cynthia Harris. How to Cook for a Whole Crew by
Clementine Paddleford from The New York Harold Tribune July x
Vast drive and courage sparked career of famed food editor
by Susan Delight for the San Diego Union February nineteen nine.
A Life in the culinary front lines by R. W.
Apple for The New York Times November. The Great American
(33:17):
Cookbook five hundred time tested Recipes Favorite Food from Every
State by Clementine Paddleford, a reprint of the original How
America Eats, edited by Kelly Alexander. A panel sponsored by
the Food Studies Program at the New School in New
York City titled Clementine Paddleford America's First Food Journalist, which
took place in June. Clementine Paddleford's obituary in The New
York Times from November of nineteen sixty seven titled Clementine
(33:40):
Paddleford Is Dead, Food Editor of Harold Tribune. Thank you
for listening. For more podcasts for my Heart Radio, visit
the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you
listen to your favorite shows.
M h I had asked for it. I dived to
the ocean floor. The wind rushed at me like a
mad bull. I flung to a one rope rail and
then down we go, thirty feet down through a steel
tube like a chimney built for a slim Santa Clause.
(00:25):
The year was nineteen sixty. Clementine Paddleford, the food writer
for the New York Herald Tribune, was sixty one years
old when she descended into the fifty four square foot
galley kitchen of the U. S S. Skipjack. At the time,
it was the world's fastest nuclear submarine. And we're off
five miles into Long Island Sound, operating at eighty to
(00:47):
two hundred feet below the surface. Now to the galley
to see dinner get under way. Clementine wanted to find
out how a Cold War navy cook turned out three
hundred meals a day for sailors living on a submarine
two hundred feet below the surface of the ocean. There
are other challenges taken up by naval ingenuity. Kitchens may
be many sized, but appetites how traditionally be I had
(01:11):
come aboard to see how America eats in what the
crew call our underwater hotel. Every detail is a marvel
inefficiency beneath the wave. She watched, questioned, and furiously scribbled
notes and recipes. She wrote about strawberry shortcake, prime rib
brownies for hundreds, all prepared in a space hardly bigger
than a bathroom. Her subsequent article was read by millions.
(01:37):
When we talk about the titans of food writing, the
names that come up the most are people like Anthony Boording,
Michael Pollen, Julia Child. Most people have never heard the
name Clementine Paddleford. Clementine's legacy on today's food writing is
the celebrity shifts and the other passionate personalities to create
and write about the food we eat and drink. That's
(01:58):
Cynthia Harris, co author of the book Hometown Appetites, the
story of Clementine Paddleford, the forgotten food writer who chronicled
how America ate. And also, I'd like to think that
part of her legacy is the farm to table movement,
because she wrote so much about how the food reached
the table. Before Clementine came along, food writing was dry
and boring. It was a science, but never an art.
(02:22):
Clementine changed all that. She laid the groundwork for the
way every newspaper, every magazine, and the entire food network
writes and talks about food today. And yet her name
has been mostly lost to history. But once you know
her story, you'll start to see her everywhere, from I
(02:48):
Heart Radio and Tribeca Studios. This is fierce. I Can't
Type Women were going to presenting problems. A podcast about
the incredible women who never made it in your history
books and the modern women carrying on their legacies today.
Us to the Lady, the Fair and the Week I
Can't Find Women Worker. Don't mind routine, repetitive work. It
(03:10):
will you make a copy of this naturally. Each week
we're bringing you the story of a groundbreaking woman from
the past who made huge contributions to the present, but
whose name still isn't on the tips of our tongues
for whatever reason, maybe it's because men wrote most of history.
At the end of each episode, I'll be joined by
(03:31):
a woman living today who's standing on the shoulders of
this historical figure, whether she knows it or not. Clementine
Paddleford was a legend in her time. Our w Apple
of the New York Times summed up her influence like this.
(03:53):
Clementine Paddleford was the Nelly blythe of culinary journalism. But
go anywhere, Taste anything, ask everything, kind of reporter who
traveled more than fifty thousand miles a year in search
of stories. In a day when very few food editors
strayed far from their desk, Clementine was instrumental in shaping
how we talk about food the way we do today,
with a language infused with delight, passion, and sometimes even lust.
(04:21):
But long before that, she was a girl born on
a farm in Kansas. Clementine, or Clements, she was known
to her friends, was born on September. She spent her
early years on a two d and sixty acre farm
near Manhattan, Kansas. The family raised pigs and grew staples
of the American kitchen, like corn and strawberries. Clementine once
(04:44):
wrote about making ice cream out of freshly fallen snow.
The Paddlefords were hardy people, descendants of Revolutionary War soldiers.
Her mother, Jenny, came from true pioneer stock right off
the Blue Stem Prairies in Minnesota. Jenny was also in
an emily in her day. She came from a farming family,
but did something very few other women in Kansas were
(05:05):
doing at the time. Attended college in taking classes at
Kansas State, Clementine reade a horse to school, but she
spent her early mornings and evenings helping out on the farm.
That's where she witnessed first hand the backbreaking labor that
both men and women put into growing the food America eight.
(05:26):
She saw how farmers lived and died by the hand
of mother nature. It was Jenny Paddleford who showed Clem
the true joy of gathering around a table, something Clementine
would later infuse into all of her writing. At our
supper table there was family togetherness, plus supper was a
time for laughter, arguments, or forbidden. Jenny had another bit
(05:47):
of sage advice for her daughter growing up on that
farm in rural Kansas. Never grow a wishbone, daughter, where
your backbone ought to be. It's stuck with Clem. As
a girl, and then as a teenager who longed to
be a journalist in a field dominated by men, Clementine
grew her backbone. She strengthened it as an editor at
(06:09):
the college newspaper at Kansas State, earning pocket money freelancing
for Kansas newspapers and farm magazines, writing mostly about livestock
breeding practices. While she was studying journalism, Nobody, I mean
nobody was safe from Clementine Paddleford. Her daily job was
to go to the train depot and ride about, becoming
(06:30):
some goins of the locals. She would also look at
her neighbor and say, what happened at your house since
the last time I talked to you yesterday. She was
just a busy body. She was a busy body. She
knew then, when she graduated from Kansas State University in
nineteen one, that she was going to go to New
York and she was going to be famous. She set
(06:54):
off for New York, where she freelanced for The Sun
and the New York Telegram, starting her career off writing
mostly puff pieces. Today they'd be called click bait. One
article was entitled girl uses a fake limp to get
a seat. Another girl saves her hat in subway crush.
It was embarrassing and unsung work, but those were the
(07:16):
journalism assignments the girls were given, when girls were given
assignments at all. In Clementine's archives, there's this early recommendation
letter that a mail copy editor wrote for Clementine is
an able writer of both imaginative and fact material, a
combination of abilities which I have found rare among women writers.
The puff pieces didn't make her any money, so Clem
(07:38):
tried other waister in cash, from writing press releases and
business reports to babysitting and waiting tables in a theological seminary.
She even slung umbrellas at gimbals. She used what little
money beyond rent she had to pay for journalism classes
at n y U and Columbia. Here's what she wrote
to her mother at the time. Sometimes I fairly hate
New York. That's producer annast for reading Clementine's words from
(08:01):
her biography, the one co written by Cynthia Harris and
Kelly Alexander. Quotes in this episode also come from Clementine's
own article how to Cook for a Whole Crew, published
in The Herald Tribune in July nineteen sixty. Sometimes I
hate everything, down to the last banana skin and stray cat.
But when I think of leaving it, all of the racket,
the dirt, the beauty, the ugliness, all mixed in so
(08:22):
comfortably together, I almost revolted the thought. Even though she
had misgivings about New York. She eventually gained a foothold
at a magazine called Farm and Fireside, editing their women's pages.
Women's pages. These were distinct from men's pages. Men's pages
had news, business finance. Women's pages contains stories about interior design,
(08:46):
curling your hair, mending your shoes, crocheting, how to best
clean a refrigerator in a chicken, all in an hour.
Clementine was practical. As the country slid into the Great Depression,
she realized she'd have to focus her efforts on an
area of journalism that would never go away. She thought
(09:07):
about what people really needed even when times were bad,
and she landed on two things, shoes and food. As
the situation in the country became more serious, This is
how she determined that food writing would be her surest
path to a sustainable career. But Clementine was not content
(09:29):
with the status quo, with doing things the way they've
been done just because that's the way they've always been done.
Clementine decided if she was going to write for women,
she was going to write for real women, and that
meant getting away from her desk and visiting women all
over the country of course, she had to convince her bosses,
and I can't imagine that conversation was easy. But in
(09:50):
the end, Clementine was as persuasive as she was persistent,
and she got the permission to travel, to break away
from her desk, going into homes and kitchens, talking to
real people. That's what made these stories come alive off
the page. But just as she was gathering steam as
a food writer, she suffered a devastating setback. In nineteen one,
(10:11):
at the age of thirty three, Clementine Paddle for developed
throat cancer. She finally went to the doctor who said, yes,
you have cancer, and he gave her two options. They
could remove her entire larynx and that would eradicate all
the cancer, but then Clementine might never talk again. Well
that's not so good for a food writer reporter that
(10:32):
needed their voice to talk to people and to interview them.
The other option risk here in a lot of ways,
was that they'd removed part of the larynx, but that
might not leave her cancer free. Clem's entire career was
based on her voice. She chose the risk ear surgery.
She would end up having to have a track tube.
She would have to put her finger over the whole
(10:52):
of the track tube when she talked, which resulted in
a recipe low whispery type voice. It took her a
year to speak above a way spur, and even then
she needed a special machine inserted into her larynx to
allow her to speak. It was made of sterling silver,
almost like a piece of jewelry. To hide it, she
tied a black ribbon around her neck like a choker.
It held the silver voice box in place, and it
(11:14):
became a kind of signature look to accompany her new
deep and crackly voice. It never slowed paddle for down.
One day she met a lady who said that her
son had a track tube, and Clementine wrote this woman
a letter and said, the only thing that the track
tube stops is me playing tennis and swimming. Tennis I
(11:35):
get out of breath and swimming. If I'd swim, I
would drown. She says, it meant she had to be
more charismatic, seductive, winsome and charming, all with just her eyes.
The recovery beat her down, but eventually she'd laugh about
the surgery and the voice box. She'd come to see
it as an asset because of my voice. People never
(11:56):
forget me. We'll be back with more of clementine story
right after this quick break. By working hard and simply
being better at her job than any other food writer
at the time, Clementine made herself a household name. In
(12:17):
six she began to write for the New York Herald Tribune.
She subsequently picked up a regular column in the newspaper
supplement This Week. Her continued travels ended up taking her
to every single state. Ohio to cover three cornered poppy
seed turnovers perfect for puram or a bridge club supper,
Missouri to cover a family who kept a melting pot
(12:38):
of cheese going for sixteen years. Hawaii, in a trip
that helped put Hawaiian food on the map. Dropping into
the far corners of the country made Clementine an expert,
maybe the country's first expert on regional food. Tell me
where your grandmother came from, and I can tell you
how many kinds of pote you so for Thanksgiving, She
(12:59):
was known to say she had a knack for embellishing
even the lowliest of food, so they seem like taste delights.
In Clementine's prose, Mushrooms became the elf of plants or
pixie umbrellas. Picture that for a moment and think about
how delightful it is a sprightly pixie holding a truffle
(13:22):
or a chantrell to shield themselves from a misty drizzle.
Here's how Clementine felt biting into an apple. The teeth
crack into the brittle flesh, A winey flavor floods the mouth,
the soul of the apple blossom distilled. Staring at a
perfect strawberry shortcake, the juice ran in rivulets, making a
(13:43):
crimson lake on the plate. She once found a chilly
with ribbed sticking qualities that make you young beyond your time.
On coffee, good coffee makes the meal, at least it
makes the good meal perfect and the poor meal possible.
Coffee re eated gives an evil cooking liquid that might
have been brewed out of the dead sea after a
(14:04):
recipe left by the Witch of end Or. One of
my favorite lines of Clems is about a hot and
comforting clam chowder. Chowder breathes reassurance, its steams consolation. So
(14:25):
much of Clementine's magic was focusing on the people behind
the food. That's commonplace now. Profiles of chefs, farmers, competitive eaters.
But it wasn't back then. Back then, food was written
about as if it was something cooked up in a lab,
not something dreamed up by human beings. And one of
the most remarkable things Clementine did was using food as
(14:46):
an entryway into every other story of the day. Food
writing in Clem's day before she started innovating, it was
pretty much precise and how to step by step instructions.
They didn't tell you anything about the street of the
food or anything like that. Clem covered the nineteen forty
(15:06):
Republican National Convention by writing about the importance of scrapple. Scrapple,
for those of you who don't live in Philadelphia, is
a sausage adjacent dish made from slaughterhouse leftovers. Here's what
Clem wrote about it. It's Philadelphia scrapple that offers the
first warm welcome of the day on breakfast plates, a
strengthen her for delegates who need a hearty breakfast under
(15:26):
their belts to tie them through the bed limon oratory
of the opening of the National Republican Convention. When America
entered World War Two in nineteen forty one, Clem made
it her job to report on how the war was
affecting real Americans at their kitchen tables. During World War Two,
there was a battle on the home front to the
tussle with Ritian books, tokens, and stamps. Supplies were short,
(15:49):
and everything from shoes to gasoline was doled out no stamps,
no soul. She began writing about the kinds of food
people were eating in wartime America because she knew it
was important to chronicle heroism and enterprise at home. Let
the American people read about themselves for once while everyone
else was covering what was happening abroad. She showed her
(16:09):
readers had to cook beaver, muskrat, bear, snake, whale, and turtle,
all the substitute for ration beefs Clem wrote, Turtle meat
is red meat in color, tastes something like veal, with
an underlying flavor distinctly its own. One local chef invited
her to try tasting beetles that seemed like it was
(16:29):
going too far. These articles brought people together, showed them
what they had in common through their culinary ingenuity. When
Winston Churchill visited Fulton, Missouri, in nine, Clem described the
meal served while everyone else droned on and on about
the Iron Curtain. It was, of course, a very big
day in the history of Fulton, Missouri, when President Gruman
(16:50):
and Winston Churchill paid that visit. Churchill enjoys home cooked
Missouri meal, screamed Clementine's headline. She wrote that the buffet
included a ham plastered with a paste mustard mixed with
brown sugar, fried chicken twice, baked potatoes asparaguess canned not fresh,
and angel food cake with ice cream. She didn't focus
on Churchill exactly, but rather the wife of the college president,
(17:13):
who was preparing the meal of her demeanor while cooking
for one of the leaders of the free world. Clementine
insisted the home cook was the alpha and omega of
studied calmness. Clem was everywhere at this point. James Beard
once said she was surely the most getting around us
(17:35):
person he'd ever known, besides, of course, Eleanor Roosevelt. Between
ninety in nineteen sixty, she logged more than eight hundred
thousand miles over land and buy air. That's enough miles
to circle the globe thirty times. Her contemporary Susan Delight
noted that she thought nothing of using a weekend to
(17:55):
fly to the West Coast or in one instance, Europe.
Clem was making good money at the Herald Tribute and
also it this week. She was churning out stories like
nobody's business, but traveling on other people's schedules took time.
She often went by commercial airplane, train, car, and sometimes
even mule. But she had so many stories she wanted
(18:18):
to cover. How could she get where she wanted to
go even faster? By learning to fly her own plane.
In her fifties, Clem began studying to learn how to
fly a plane to the navigation classes at night and
on weekends at n y U. Learning to fly gave
her freedom. No one could tell her she couldn't go somewhere,
(18:41):
not when she was the one flying the plane. Clementine
was thoroughly modern and thoroughly her own person in every
sense of the word. She found ways to liberate herself
in both her professional and personal lives. She did get married.
She actually married quite young, but she kept it a
secret so she wouldn't have to abandon her slew of admirers.
(19:03):
This was a radical move. Women during Clem's time not
only lived with their husbands, but they lived for them.
Clem's husband was like a garnish to her life. Like Parsley,
he was never the main course. She eventually divorced him,
but they remained close after that. She had a regular
roster of dates that she'd schedule around her first priority work.
(19:27):
It's even rumored that she once made one of her
male suitors try out an extremely experimental form of the
birth control pill. She never had her own children, but
when a close friend died of cancer, she took in
her twelve year old daughter, adopted her and finished raising
her on her own. She didn't blink an eye, and
it never slowed down her career. We'll be back with
(19:51):
more of Clementine's story right after this quick break. At
the height of Clem's fame in the nineteen fifties and
early sixties, more than twelve million households were reading her columns.
Her piece to resistance was the Christmas nineteen sixty publication
(20:13):
of How America Eats, a comprehensive cookbook featuring eight hundred
recipes gathered into a state by state tour. She researched
it for more than twelve years, interviewed more than two
thousand cooks, and ate every single recipe in the book.
She was a phenomen So why don't we know the
name Clementine Battleford? There are a few reasons. Personally, I
(20:35):
think she was a product of her time. That was
one second. Of all, she had throat cancer, so she
couldn't do radio and television. The third reason, William I. Nichols,
her editor at This Week Magazine, had offered to buy
her name, similar to like Dear Anne or Dear Abbey,
and Clementine refused. Maybe that wasn't a bad thing because
(20:59):
Clementine died in nineteen sixty seven and This Week Magazine
did not last many more years after that, so she
would have probably been lost to history anyway, m Clementine
Paddleford is relevant to any woman working in any field today,
(21:19):
not just food writing. To me, Clems this incredible example
of how if you take your career into your own hands,
you can make anything happen. You can build your own
success just by being unabashedly yourself. You can't open Instagram,
turn on the TV, walk into a bookstore, or open
a magazine without stumbling on someone carrying on Clem's legacy,
(21:43):
the legacy that gave food writing life humor and relevance. Today,
there are so many people writing a Clems spirit and
they don't even realize it. Like my guest food writer
Yasmine Khan. Yas Means the best selling author of two books,
The Saffron Tales, which focuses on Persian food, and zay Tune,
which celebrates Palestinian cuisine. Like Clem, Yasmine was inspired by
(22:07):
her family's farm, only hers was in northern Iran. After
a decade working for human rights nonprofits in the Middle East,
Yasmine realized there was another way she could bring people together,
that she could help them find common ground through food
writing along with recipes. Both her books revealed the humanity
of a region through cuisine. Yasmin's writing, like Clementines, elevates
(22:29):
food is a vital point of personal connection, sparking empathy
that can lead to social change. And yet Yasmine didn't
know anything about Clementine when we started our conversation. She
had no idea she was carrying on Clem's legacy. We
caught up with Yasmine in a studio in London. All right, Hey,
welcome to Fierce. Hi. How you doing so? Have you
(22:50):
heard of Clementine? Paddleford. Before we reached out to you,
I had not that I really wish I had. I mean,
doesn't it say at all about kind of women's rangia
in history that you know? I are, like, I'm pretty
well read about, you know, pioneering women in this genre,
and now I hadn't heard of her. She. I mean,
she sounds so brave and empowering and inspiring. She really was.
(23:12):
I want to ask you a little bit about how
you got into food writing in the first place. How
did you choose food is your beat? It kind of
happened by accident. I did a law degree, I spent
about a decade working for nonprofits, and then, as it
is very common in the industry, I became, you know,
quite burnt out by a lot of the work I
was doing and the stories I was seeing, because so
(23:32):
much of it related to conflict in the Middle East,
that I took a bit of time out than As
part of that trip of trying to recover from my burnout,
I went and spent some time on my family's farm
in northern Iran, which is this beautiful green landscape filled
with rice paddies, tea plantations, you know, incredible fruit trees,
such as pomegranates and kiwi's and apples and oranges, as
(23:54):
well as all the vegetables you'd want to eat, and
surrounded by that incredible produce, I sat and kind of
thought about, Okay, well, maybe I don't want to go
back into the world of nonprofit, but maybe there's something
I can do to share the story of Iran through
a different medium. So it was kind of there in
my grandmother's kitchen in when really intense U S sanctions,
(24:16):
we're hitting your on and we thought there was going
to be a war. I thought, hey, maybe I can
write a book that humanizes the people of Iran and
shares ordinary stories through food. It's really interesting because Clementine
also came from a family of farmers. Really she did. Yeah,
she came from a family of farmers in Kansas and
happened upon food by accident. So I think that that's
(24:36):
a really fascinating connection between the two of you. Will
you end up having a lot of reverence and respect
for food. I think when your family are toilet literally
like toiling in the fields to grow things in order
to make their living, you you really become aware of
the elements and how nature affects livelihoods, but you also
(24:56):
have a lot of fun. I mean, one of my
earliest food memories is milking a cow. Now, looking back,
I feel really lucky that I had that experience. I
think when you have that intimacy with food, you can't
help but love it even more. There's something about just
being able to go down to the garden and literally
dig out an onion and put it in a stew
or a casserole, that there's something kind of magical about it.
(25:19):
And so you decided that you were going to write
a food and travel book to make the stories of
the people in Irand come alive, and you launched a
Kickstarter project. Could you tell us a little bit about that?
Kickstarter had just started, and so I thought, well, you know,
why not test this and see if people would be
interested in it. I feel again so grateful for this.
I think I hit my fund raising target, hit fifty
(25:40):
of it in the first twenty four hours. I was
funded by three hundred very generous people from all over
the globe, many of them non Aranian, who were just
I think connected to this mission that I had of
challenging stereotypes of Iran and using food as a way
of celebrating our common humanity. And why did you think
that food would be able to accomplish that. I was
trying to find a point that would be relatable between
(26:04):
someone sitting in New York City and someone sitting in Tehran.
So I thought, well, hey, Persian foods amazing, there's a
story to be told about Iran. Maybe I can combine
them both. And what was the reaction. I think it
did what I wanted to do and much more. Actually,
just you asked me that, and I think I just
welled up a little bit, because it's really interesting at
this point in my career to look back and think
(26:25):
that just a little idea that I had has kind
of spawned a genre. I mean, the New York Times,
the Guardian, you know, the BBC kind of all called it.
The Wall Street Journal all said it was one of
the cookbooks of the year, which for a debut author
is quite incredible, especially a debut author without a background
in food. And one of the most beautiful things is that,
you know, I go on Instagram now and people send
(26:46):
me pictures from Berlin or Brisbane or Brooklyn, pictures of
food that they've made. Perhaps a regional recipe from the
area where my family are from, and they're making it
for their friends, they're making it for their family. They're
built doing this connection. They're sharing like the joy and
the beauty of the rich tapestry of Persian food with
people around them. And yeah, I can't even tell you
(27:09):
what that makes me feel. I was just getting chills
listening to you, because that's exactly what Clementine did. She
went into real kitchens. She talked to real people with
real stories. How did you think that the stories behind
the food and the humans behind the food would be
the thing that would connect people, not just the recipes.
In terms of Iran and throughout the Middle East, I
(27:30):
think there's a big gulf between what most ordinary Americans
think of Iran and what the reality was that if
I could just offer a window into that, I knew
that people would be hooked. It wasn't easy by any chance.
You know. I didn't have a fixer. This is all
kind of stuff that I spent long periods of time researching.
But that meant that I could get people's trust, to
go up for a cup of tea with them and
(27:51):
explain what I was doing. And then these people I
met were so generous, you know, I got invited into
the homes of teachers and fishermen and hip hop artists
and yoga teachers and designers, business women. I mean, it
was just so varied, and I just felt that sharing
those stories could be such a valuable thing to do.
(28:12):
Did you find that when you told people you wanted
to write about food that they lit up in a
different way? You have absolutely hit the nail on the head.
Many people in the Middle East feel overresearched and another
journalist coming to talk to them about how terrible things are.
But if you get someone talking about the food that
they love, their favorite recipe, maybe sharing food memories, people
(28:34):
light up. But also you forge a connection with the
interviewee and sharing how their communities act, how their infrastructure acts,
how their environment is, and you get this really deep
sense of who a person is. In your travels and
in your writing about your travels, have you found food
to be the great unifier? Well, it's very disarming food.
(28:56):
Even if you're in a kind of tense situation, or
if you're talking to someone out something that's you know,
a little bit fraught, it's really hard to keep that
emotion whilst you're eating something delicious. Your second book, z
Tune its recipes and tales from the Palestinian kitchen. Talk
to me a little bit about how you think food
writing and food broadcasting can help bring about social change.
(29:16):
The starkest examples maybe is whre not. On my tours
or in my books, I talk about the situation in Gaza,
and I talk about this unique food culture that exists
in Gaza. I filled with green chilies and deal and
lots of garlic. But alongside that, I say, well, you know,
we can't talk about Gaza and cuisine and this holy
trinity of ingredients they have and their unique seafood. We're
actually also talking about the blockade. It's the fact that
(29:39):
for the last almost twelve years now, the people of
Gaza have been living under siege. How of the water
is undrinkable there according to Amnesty International, about how people
who live there are dependent on U N food A
just to survive. But you know, someone picking up an
article and reading that in the new section, maybe they
might not want to do it. But if you approach
(30:01):
it through culture, I think this is where the power
of the arts are so strong. It just enables these
subjects that can be quite tough to feel more digestible,
and that's where I think the really power of it comes.
And I think one of the things that has a
really struck me is actually the different approach that we're
seeing now that we have more women involved. I think
up until Ruth Rachel, food writing on the mainstream anyway
(30:25):
was much more about the slightly elitest, kind of slightly
snobby critiquing of restaurants or dishes. You know, it felt
very distant from ordinary people's lives, was what we've seen.
I think in the last few decades, is the genre
really developing and being like, hey, actually no, we're going
to look at the coal totality of the human experience,
(30:46):
but we're just going to look at it through food.
It's a really exciting community to be part of at
the moment. Tell me a little bit about your advice
for women who want to break into food writing today.
What is your advice for getting to do what Clementy
did and what you're doing now. I always recommend people
the book Will Write for Food by Diane Jacob. If
you're even thinking broadly of getting into the food writing world,
(31:07):
then you really want to start with that. And then
my other thing is I believe that anybody can become
good at anything, but you just really have to put
the practice in. I when I was transitioning over to
being a food writer, I sat and did lots of exercises,
lots of writing exercises, really kind of trying to find
my voice, got some coaching, you know, really invest in that.
(31:29):
I think there is a little bit of a tendency
to think, especially with social media culture, Oh, I'm just
going to post lots of pictures and become an Instagram
star and then that's my way into a food writing legacy.
But I don't think actually there's a legacy necessarily in that.
So you have to really find your voice and your
contribution first, and from there you just, yeah, you have
to dream big. Because if there's one thing I've learned
(31:51):
from my Kickstarter and my transition is that, you know,
really anything is possible in this world. You just have
to believe that you can do it. Thanks so much
to our guests, biographer Cynthia Harris and author Yasmine Khan.
Fierce is hosted and written by Joe Piazza, produced and
directed by me Anna Stump. Our executive producers are Joe Piazza,
(32:13):
Nicky Etor, Anna Stump, and from Tribeca Studios, Lea Sarbiebe.
Male voices in this episode by Hamilton Lighthouser. This episode
was co produced by Michelle Lands, edited and soundscaped by
Anna Stump. Our associate producer is Emily Maronoff, fact checking
by Austin Thompson, researched by Lizzie Jacobs. The Fierce theme
song was written by Hamilton Lighthouser and Anna Stump. Our
(32:34):
very sincere thanks to Mangesha Tikadoor for making this series possible,
and we want to mention that there have been multiple
moments as we've made this series where one thing or
another that we wanted to do look like it was
going to be impossible, and it was Nikki Etor who
always came through and made those things happen, and for
that we will be forever grateful. Sources for this episode,
Hometown Appetites the story of Clementine Paddleford, the forgotten food
(32:55):
writer who chronicled How America Ate by Kelly Alexander and
Cynthia Harris. How to Cook for a Whole Crew by
Clementine Paddleford from The New York Harold Tribune July x
Vast drive and courage sparked career of famed food editor
by Susan Delight for the San Diego Union February nineteen nine.
A Life in the culinary front lines by R. W.
Apple for The New York Times November. The Great American
(33:17):
Cookbook five hundred time tested Recipes Favorite Food from Every
State by Clementine Paddleford, a reprint of the original How
America Eats, edited by Kelly Alexander. A panel sponsored by
the Food Studies Program at the New School in New
York City titled Clementine Paddleford America's First Food Journalist, which
took place in June. Clementine Paddleford's obituary in The New
York Times from November of nineteen sixty seven titled Clementine
(33:40):
Paddleford Is Dead, Food Editor of Harold Tribune. Thank you
for listening. For more podcasts for my Heart Radio, visit
the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you
listen to your favorite shows.
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