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The late Clementine Paddleford, who was food writer for The New York Herald Tribune, wrote a valuable book on regional cookery, How America Eats. In an interview with Horace Sutton of Saturday Review, [Craig] Claiborne said: "I had been to school in Europe, and I knew all the sauces...Clem knew not one thing about food." Well, Claiborne did not then, nor does he now, know all his sauces. As for Clem, whatever her shortcomings, she was a good reporter...she liked people and she had a good ear. She quotes, for example, a Dr. Coffin saying, "You must know the history of every lobster you cook. But if you must pick your lobsters at teh local market, the only alternative is to get them lively. Cook in Maine sea water." She goes on to give his recipe for Maine Lobster Stew, one of America's truly great dishes. She tells also of a Miss Sue, no longer young, who "used to cater two flossy events in a day and cook everything myself...I'm old-fashioned with my pie cooking, never use store stuff and I want lard in pie crust and fresh apples. Now Addie here uses all the new fangles and she has good luck, but I couldn't, never will." Alas, Clem's ear was better than her editor's taste; there is no mention of lard in the recipe that follows -- it must have gotten kitchen tested out by the home economists.

The book is now out of print but the publishers have put out a new version; they changed the name, dropped the attractive regional approach, took out every word of Clem's wonderful chitchat with the friends she made everywhere. What did they want to do that for?

       -- John L. Hess and Karen Hess, The Taste of America

We all have hometown appetites. Every other person is a bundle of longing for the simplicities of good taste once enjoyed on the farm or in the hometown they left behind.

          -- Clementine Paddleford, in a a 1949 interview with the Saturday Evening Post

Never grow a wishbone, daughter, where your backbone ought to be.

          -- Clementine Paddleford's mother, from Paddleford's essay "A Flower for My Mother"

Because R.W. Apple, Jr. didn't make the plea in an otherwise compelling article about Clementine Paddleford in this week's New York Times Dining In/Dining Out section, I will do so here. Dear Scribners, a division of Simon & Schuster, won't you please consider bringing How America Eats back into print? Dear Other Publishers, if Scribners won't do it, will you? Will you please contact the Chase Manhattan Bank, executors of the estate of Clementine Paddleford, and do what it does to bring this book back to us?

I'll admit to a bit of churlish self-interest -- self-interested churlishness? -- in this application. I was born the year that Clementine Paddleford died, and the year after the newspaper for which she wrote for over 30 years (The New York Herald Tribune) ceased publication, but I had heard her name evoked by other food writers with admiration and affection for years. When I acquired my copy of The Taste of America in 2000, the Hesses' words filled me with a brimming desire to get my hands on a copy of How America Eats and experience Ms. Paddleford's meticulously-researched, good-humored prose firsthand. It's too bad that that desire didn't translate into a phone call to Kitchen Arts and Letters, which conducts free book searches for as long as it takes to find your book, and which won't require you to buy the book if you change your mind in the course of the search. Had I been smart, I would have asked them to search early and search often, but I was not smart. In 2001 Saveur ran a cover story about Paddleford and mentioned Kitchen Arts as a possible source of How America Eats, and within days there was a waiting list *this* long for it. I'm on the list, but I have the feeling that it will be years before a copy will be found for me. For a brief happy moment I thought I had found it in a used bookstore in Providence, but what I had found was The Best of American Cooking, the excised, bowdlerized version.

Ms. Paddleford was a born-and-bred Kansas girl, studying journalism at Kansas State University in Manhattan, Kansas before continuing her studies at New York University, and I would guess that the Hale Library at KSU would have a copy of How America Eats in their collection. The KSU Archives are home to the Paddleford Collection, 363 boxes of Ms. Paddleford's books, papers, correspondence and ephemera such as menus and press releases, and I am not at all ashamed to admit that right now my idea of the perfect vacation would be to sit in the Hale Library, turning over every single piece of paper in those boxes. It only takes a paragraph, a few sentences, even, of Ms. Paddleford's prose to make me want to read more of it. From R.W. Apple's article, I read her description of the oyster stew at Grand Central Oyster Bar: "...a milky, sea-fresh smell curls up through the warm air," and I wonder why I'm not spending every lunch hour at the Oyster Bar, which is a less-than-fifteen-minute walk from my office. As much as I try not to lift entire paragraphs from the Times, I'm going to quote this paragraph of Apple's, which is largely composed of Paddleford quotes, because they are just too good:

Her thing was describing foods and their flavors. She once famously spoke of "a tiny radish of scarlet, tipped modestly in white." She rejoiced in the harvest-time "scent of apples down orchard lanes, a drowsy winy scent permeating the country cellar, spreading across the market place." And when she traveled to Fulton, Mo., in 1946 for Winston Churchill's famous Iron Curtain speech, she wrote that the great man was served a souffle that arrived in front of him "with a rapturous, half-hushed sigh as it settled softly to melt and vanish in a moment like smoke or a dream."

At least once a year I read some article that decries the saturation of the cookbook/foodwriting market, proclaiming that there are just too damn many foodie books out there, but I can't help but think that there is room for food writing that is both brainy and accessible, meticulous without being daunting, friendly without being cloying. This is writing that deserves another generation reading it. Scribners, are you listening?