Duncan Hines by Louis Hatchett Page B

$500 I spent on this project. But for the author who wants to investigate this subject further, this is a good place to start.
    22 March 2001
Henderson, Kentucky

F OREWORD
    Today, everyone’s a restaurant critic. In 1936, when Duncan Hines first published
Adventures in Good Eating
, he defined the job. Into a nation where eating on the road could be a genuine health hazard and where the few city guides were puffery financed by the restaurants they reviewed, Hines blazed a trail of honesty, reliability, and, most important of all, discovery. His groundbreaking achievement, brilliantly described in this book—which is so much more than simple biography—is as significant in the world of food as Thomas Edison’s is in lighting.
    Starting as nothing more than a hobby of jotting notes about the superior eating places he found during his work as a traveling salesman, Hines’s penchant for ferreting out good meals gained such a reputation among colleagues, friends, and friends of friends, all of whom sought him out for dining tips, that he decided to summarize and disseminate his notes along with his 1935 Christmas cards. The plan was for his little list to get all the advice seekers off his back so he could pay more attention to his real job. But as you will read in the following pages, “Hines had created a monster. Everyone, it seemed, wanted his restaurant list.”
    In an era long before television could create instant fame and blog posts could go viral, Hines’s singular way of recommending restaurants transformed him into a celebrity almost overnight, making him “America’s most authoritative voice on the best places to eat.” He was a man who had clearly found his destiny, for his unique gift was an ability to use simple, minimal verbiage to not just enumerate an eating place’s virtues but do it in a way that conveyed the flavor of the food and the feel of the dining experience.There have been many talented restaurant critics since Duncan Hines, but we know of none with such self-effacing skill.
    Louis Hatchett, himself a respected authority on regional American food, notes that Hines’s great contribution wasn’t only to tell people where to eat, but also to demonstrate that interesting meals could be the highlight of a road trip. His discoveries were exactly right for a population that had begun to see automobile travel as a privilege of life in America. While many of the places he recommended were big-city landmarks, his signature discoveries were more the rural tea rooms or pancake parlors, the small-town taverns or out-of-the-way country inns (as well as Colonel Sanders’s original fried-chicken café). Prior to his inventing the job of itinerant restaurant reviewer, travelers who strayed off the beaten path risked, at best, lousy meals or, worse, food poisoning. But a hungry nation soon learned that if Duncan Hines recommended a place, you could count on it. To follow him was to realize something that most of us now take for granted: eating out can be a great adventure. To read this book is to share in that adventure, as lived by a true culinary pioneer.
    Michael and Jane Stern

    Roy Park and Duncan Hines at Sales Executive Club, Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, New York City, September 24, 1951.

    Left to right: Ruth Wakefield, Duncan Hines, Kenneth Wakefield, Clara Hines, The Toll House Restaurant, Whitman, Massachusetts, October 14, 1950.

    Duncan Hines in Hines-Park’s Test Kitchen, Ithaca, New York, October 13, 1953.

    Duncan Hines at work in his office. Bowling Green, Kentucky, April 23, 1951.

    Clara Hines at home, Bowling Green, Kentucky. Notice portrait of Duncan Hines above her (circa 1915), April 23, 1951.

    Left to right: Willard Rutzen, Marian Odmark of
This Week in Chicago
, and Duncan Hines in front of birthday cake, 10th annual Duncan Hines Family Dinner, Morrison Hotel, Chicago, Illinois, May 8, 1951.

    Duncan Hines Day, Palm Crest Hotel, Haines