Columnist at the Table

For a sensitive approach to food This writer is the smartest For Clementine's not merely good She's both gourmet and artist.

Such outbursts of approval as this one in the letters column of the New York Herald Tribune last week are not at all unusual for the Trib's Food Editor Clementine Paddleford. Her daily Trib columns and Sunday column in This Week (circ. 10,638,00) have brought in thousands of letters (one-third of them from men), and made her the best-known food editor in the U.S. "Nobody writes about food," says Claudius Philippe, food boss of Manhattan's Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, "with more enthusiasm and literary quality."

In her column, a new dish is seldom simply "good"; instead, when it was put before her, "a happy little moan escaped the lips." She can embellish even the fluffiest souffle with her brandied prose: "It came perfumed of the hot sugared fruit and toned with the magic of some liqueur . . . The waiter's spoon dipped in. and the souffle responded with a rapturous, half-hushed sigh as it settled softly to melt and vanish in a moment like smoke or a dream."

Apple Perfume. Sampling souffles in fancy restaurants (where she pays her own way) is only part of Clem's work. She spends long hours in food markets, has been to maple-sugar-on-snow parties in New England, road-tested barbecue stands in Texas, gone sardine fishing off the coast of Maine, reported Danish markets, shopped Les Halles in Paris, donned a sou'wester at 3:30 a.m. to see how mackerel are caught off Long Island. She sometimes ladles out such unembellished advice as "remember lamb breast and shank today" or "snap beans are a vegetable buy," and always provides basic food facts on price, quality, recipes and tastes for everyone from the meat-and-potato man to the high-living gourmet. But mushrooms are not just mushrooms in her column, they are likely to be "pixie umbrellas" or the "elf of plants," and she discovers apples "with flesh so fragrant . . . they can perfume a dining room."

Columnist Paddleford. who can smell a food story behind any big news, toured England at coronation time ("Fluids are hissing, greases are sputtering . . . foods are en masse, the raw and the cooked awaiting the administering hands of the experts"), traveled to Fulton, Mo. in 1946 to hear Churchill's famous Iron Curtain speech (where she interviewed a grocer who said that there were so many dinners given in honor of the event that he sold "enough parsley to decorate the gymnasium"). One New Year's Day. she appropriately headed a column "Some Morning-After Cures" (samples: twelve dashes of Angostura bitters in a glass of soda, a whisky sour, stay in bed and drink the juice from canned tomatoes, or--for a real bad hangover--an extra-dry Martini).

Wiggle in the Tail. Born on a farm in Kansas, she majored in journalism at Kansas State College, worked as a staffer on Farm & Fireside before going to the Trib 17 years ago. Ever since. Columnist Paddleford has been writing for the Trib six times a week, has never missed a working day, and now makes around $30,000 a year. Her hard-working day starts every morning at 5:30 a.m. when she makes out a daily schedule for herself, often beginning with an early-morning stop at the food markets. At her East Side Manhattan apartment (where the maid does almost all the cooking), she stocks 3,000 cookbooks, keeps ten filing cabinets full of notes ("If I'm writing on blueberries, I look into my file. Robert Frost. If I want to quote. I can quote"), is now working to complete a book of her own titled How America Eats. Clementine knows the subject well because she often jumps around the country, poking into other people's kitchens, writing about everyone from a sausage stuffer to the late Mrs. Henry Ford (in an article on her "Model T cookies"). Her office at the Trib, next door to the testing kitchen, is stuffed with all kinds of sample foods from German wild boar roast, smoked shrimp paste and bite-size saltless matzoth to dehydrated soups and lobster royal ("cooked with a wiggle in its tail").

She scrawls her column in longhand that only her secretary can read, usually rewrites her This Week column five or six times. Clem speaks in a hoarse whisper as a result of an operation in which part of her larynx and vocal cords were removed 20 years ago (it took her a year to learn to talk again). In her summer home in Redding. Conn., she likes to cook in the open fireplace over the coals. "I think I cook a nice meal," she says modestly, prefers simple curries, baked beans and brown bread, spaghetti. One night a week at New York University, she studies aerial navigation, has soloed an Aeronca but has still to get her pilot's license. On the ground, in the kitchens of the U.S., she has no trouble finding her way around. "American tastes," says Clem, "are moving toward greater simplicity. Now one really good dish plus a good vegetable and a salad makes a dinner. Salads have come into great popularity--there's hardly a meal without them." To make a salad is simple. Take a radish, not just an ordinary radish "but a tiny radish of the passionate scarlet, tipped modestly in white . . ."

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