Duncan Hines

by Louis Hatchett

  The 1938 edition of Adventures in Good Eating listed about 1,800 restaurants that conformed with Hines’s exacting standards of cleanliness and excellence. By his estimation he had visited 70% of them, with the remaining 30% being comprised of recommendations that had withstood the critical examination of his dinner detectives.273 Adventures in Good Eating may have been a guide to the nation’s best restaurants, but a few critics charged it was not necessarily a guide to eating cheaply. Although the audience Hines had in mind when he conceived the book was a clientele who could afford to travel and eat well, one criticism it received was that it was of little use to travelers with limited food budgets. While the book had a scale of menu prices with each entry, some critics were not mollified. One claimed that in 1938 that Hines listed only those restaurants that charged more than seventy-five cents per meal. Anyone who opened a copy of Adventures in Good Eating knew this was untrue. While his guidebook listed many restaurants with prices above seventy-five cents, it also listed a great number which offered meals under that figure. Overall, the average price for a recommended meal in the 1938 guidebook was $1.25.274

  Critics apparently overlooked the case of a restaurant run by Mary Rowton. In the 1936 edition of Adventures in Good Eating, Hines wrote: “Once in a while I encounter a sixty-cent meal for two dollars. But I have never had a two-dollar meal for sixty cents.” Not long after its publication, Hines received three letters, “one from San Francisco, one from New York and one from Memphis.” Each said Hines was wrong, “that at Paris, Arkansas, in the Ouachitas, a two-dollar meal could be had for not sixty but fifty cents.”275 To see if this was true, Hines drove there to investigate. When he arrived, he “met Mary Rowton, a seventy-year-old Irishwoman, who” served “meals in her home. Hines had a noon dinner. The price was fifty cents. The food was plain, but good.” At this sitting Hines sampled “radishes, onions, chicken, country ham, whipped potatoes, candied sweets, macaroni, baked beans, spinach, rice, Southern cabbage, stuffed eggs, cottage cheese, three kinds of pickles, homemade relish, coleslaw, two kinds of cake, mince pie, grape pie, custard pie, [and] ice cream.”

  After pushing himself away from the table, Hines turned to the proprietor and exclaimed, “My dear Miss Rowton, you can’t make money selling such a meal for only half a dollar.” She nodded in agreement. “No,” she said. “As a matter of fact, I owe about twenty-seven dollars in back taxes now.” He observed the diners who filled the dining room, then remembered the many out-of-state license plates he had seen in the parking lot. He observed that more than a few had come many miles to enjoy her cooking. “They were well-dressed travelers, drawn there by the food and not by the price.” He tried to reason with her, all the while trying to understand the reason for her stubbornness. All she had to do, he said, was raise her prices to $1.50. “It’s worth it,” he said. “You won’t lose a single customer.” She still declined. She explained “three local men had been her boarders since she started business.” She charged “them thirty-five cents a meal” and “if she raised her price, she would lose them.” This seemed nonsensical to Hines who reasoned she would make up the lost revenue with the payment from a single customer. Then came Miss Rowton’s admission. “The truth is that I don’t care whether I make money or not. I’ve been in business forty years and I am too old to change. The only things I care about in the world are cooking and going to church.” There were more than a few restaurant proprietors in his little red book who shared similar sentiments. They cooked for the love of it.276

  In Hines’s day, as now, the cuisine of New England was noted for its clams, lobster and chowder. One delectable place he never tired of visiting, after he discovered it in 1937, was a restaurant near Boston in Whitman, Massachusetts that was owned by Ruth and Kenneth Wakefield. They called it the Toll House.

  Ruth Graves Wakefield was a high school cooking teacher and dietician and her husband, Kenneth, worked in a meat packing house when they decided to open a restaurant dedicated to serving plain, hearty food superbly cooked. In August 1930 the Wakefields bought an old 1709 Cape Cod house, which was first a stagecoach way station, then a home to a succession of families and then, finally, was an unsuccessful tea room. After purchasing it, they immediately went to work fixing it up. Within a few weeks they opened their doors to the public, crossed their fingers, and prayed they would not quickly deplete their bank account’s accumulated savings of fifty dollars. The couple almost lost everything on the first day. “On opening day a woman ordered luncheon for a number of guests; the Wakefields spent thirty dollars on supplies. The lunch was served and the hostess walked out without paying,” which left them with twenty dollars in the cash register.277 The following day “the Toll House opened for business with eleven dollars in the till.” They had spent nine dollars earlier that morning for the procurement of more food. As the noonday meal approached, they became anxious. Finally “two elderly people from Pennsylvania” became their first “tourist guests.” They had driven to Whitman to see the house in which they had grown up in as children and remained for lunch when they discovered it had become a restaurant. After their guests departed, the Wakefields became depressed over the fact that no one else had visited them for lunch. The rest of the day proved fretful. The Wakefields, “the lone waitress, and Jack, the young chef, sat around and worried all afternoon. Every time a car slowed, they would all run to the window to see if it was going to stop.” They wondered if their efforts were nothing more than a fool’s errand. But their luck changed within a few hours. “That evening eleven more people came to dinner.” By evening’s end, after they had shut their doors, they breathed a sigh of relief as they counted their small but tidy profit. There was money enough to pay their help and buy food for the next day. Egged on by hope, they prayed they would be in business for many years to come.278

  Their hope crystallized into a bright reality. By 1938, the Wakefields had ninety employees serving guests at sixty-four tables. The place became so popular that reservations for a Thanksgiving Day dinner there had to be made by 15 May. These Thanksgiving Day meals were not ordinary affairs by any stretch of the imagination. When a turkey was served, the bird weighed no less than twelve pounds. As an extra courtesy, when guests left the restaurant they were “handed a basketful of cold remnants of turkey” to nibble on after they arrived home.279 By 1955 the restaurant’s original building had been transformed into a lounge, and on weekends it was not unusual for the Wakefields to feed a hungry crowd of between 1500 to 2500 guests.280

  It was the Toll House that gave rise to Hines’s oft-quoted remark, the full text of which is “It makes my mouth water to think of the baked Injun Porridge as it is prepared at Toll House, in Whitman, Massachusetts. That’s the kind of dessert that makes a fellow wish for hollow legs.”281 Baked Injun Porridge was not the only dish Hines devoured when he ate at the Toll House. He liked everything they served. He wrote, “Every year I go to this charming place, which becomes more attractive each time. They have added several dining rooms, and in the summer you may also dine outside amid flower gardens, shrubs and trees. The real emphasis here is on their noted food; such good things as Ruth Wakefield’s famous onion soup and chicken soup, broiled live lobster, boneless fried chicken, charcoal broiled steaks and salads that taste as good as they look, lemon meringue pie and many other tempting desserts. This is indeed one of my particular favorites.”282 Ruth Wakefield may not be widely known today, but one of her recipes is still an American favorite. Indeed, her restaurant’s name is embedded in it. Nearly everyone has tasted a Toll House cookie.283

  One question that Hines consistently found himself answering concerned the location of America’s best restaurant. He responded that there was no such place. It all depended on what one wanted to sink his teeth into. The Middle West was the best place to find a pie. “The best doggone lemon pie in the world,” Hines declared, was made at Stone’s Restaurant in Marshalltown, Iowa, a dining facility that had been in operation since around 1905.284 Hines wrote of thi
s “quaint little dining room,” which made its first appearance in his guidebook’s 1937 edition. “Don’t be dismayed by the obscure location—almost under a viaduct ‘down by the winegar woiks.’ One bite of Queenie’s angel food pie—and you won’t care where you’re eating. The restaurant is unpretentious but for fifty years Stone’s has been searched out by transients.”285

  Mrs. Anna Stone, the proprietor and widow of the founder’s son, made valiant efforts to keep the restaurant as clean as her own kitchen. A few years later, when America’s entry into the Second World War commenced and wartime rationing, food shortages, and the lack of manpower ensued, Mrs. Stone, like all Americans, tried to cope as best as she could. But in early 1945 she temporarily closed her doors rather than compromise her ideals and the restaurant’s integrity. When most of the wartime domestic problems created by the war subsided, she reopened in April 1946, much to Duncan Hines’s delight. Stone and Hines remained close friends for many years, and Hines did all he could to let others know about her operation. Stone’s Restaurant was just one of many roadside dining facilities Hines could recommend to his critics; travelers could purchase a meal there for under seventy-five cents. But that is not why he dined there. For him the attraction was still that mile high lemon pie in the middle of Iowa, and it brought him back to the Midwest repeatedly.286

  The slow disappearance of the tea room in the 1930s saddened Hines. Milton MacKaye, in his Post article, described his own irrational knee-jerk tendency when he saw one: “Many men—and I number myself among them—have what may be described as spinning-wheel trouble—that is, when they approach an inn with a spinning wheel or a couple of green glass bottles in the front yard, they step on the throttle. Hines says that this phobia against tea rooms, as such, makes many men miss a lot of good eating. Some of the best inns are cluttered up with antiques and collections of Aunt Sarah’s quilt designs, and if one will brave the whimsy, he may find the finest type of home cooking.” One of the most famous tea rooms of this character, still in existence, was the McDonald Tea Room in Gallatin, Missouri, a town about 60 miles from St. Joseph, Missouri, and about 80 from Kansas City.

  Its proprietor was a woman Hines admired greatly. In about 1920, Virginia Rowell McDonald became very ill and stayed in bed for nearly eight years. In 1928 she became well enough to lift herself from her sickbed, and from that moment forward she made the most of the remainder of her life. In the years that encompassed her illness, she had consumed her husband’s collected savings. She felt obliged to somehow repay him for his sacrifice, but she was stuck for an idea as to how to do it. She recalled that her mother was deemed by many as a great cook; Virginia, however, believed her own cooking skills surpassed that of her mother. One day in the summer of 1928, Virginia announced she was going to open her own restaurant. Her husband, a realist, pointed out that no one in Gallatin patronized restaurants, that they were several miles off a main highway, that they had no place for a restaurant, and that they had no silver or dishes. But Mrs. McDonald had answers. Tourists would drive off the highway for good food, she could borrow dishes from friends, and there was an old blacksmith shop that would serve nicely, if he would put a floor in it and build the tables and chairs. On a Monday they were ready to open. Mrs. McDonald suggested that her husband shave and put on a clean pair of overalls and go downtown and ask every traveling salesperson he saw to come to the tea room and eat free. It was a shrewd move. Dyspeptic salesmen [were] always hunting for a good place to eat, and they spread the good news among their fraternity.

  After a few weeks “a sizable number were finding their way to Gallatin and to” Virginia McDonald’s Tea Room. By 1938, her tea room was a tremendous success, serving more than 250 customers at a time. Particularly famous were her relishes and corn muffins. It was through his friends in Chicago that Hines first learned of her legendary kitchen skills. Always ready to check out a good tip, Hines “drove four hundred miles over to Gallatin one day just to see if the food was really as good as everyone said it was.”287 Many years later, Hines said he never regretted the trip. In time, her tea room expanded into “a fine, modern restaurant.” Hines liked her corn muffins so much he printed the recipe for them in his autobiography.288

  Another of Duncan Hines’s favorite restaurants was “in the hill country of central Florida,” four miles north of Lake Wales off U. S. 27 in a beautiful triple-leveled hotel and restaurant “ten minutes away from the famous Bok Singing Tower.”289 This was the Chalet Suzanne, “a rambling structure set in the midst of 230 rolling acres of orange trees and lily pools near the shore of little Lake Suzanne.”290 Its architecture was not Swiss but, rather, featured “a potpourri of architecture and decorations from all over the world. The tables in the dining room [were] of tile from Mexico, Spain, Egypt [and] Italy. The patios, hung with Spanish moss and bright with bougainvillaea,” suggested “Spain or the tropic isles of the Caribbean. The furniture [was] English, the crystal Egyptian.”291

  Hines marveled at the human spirit behind this unusual place and championed it as frequently as possible. The Chalet Suzanne was a one-woman enterprise run by Mrs. Bertha Hinshaw. She began her business from the rubble of a series of personal misfortunes. She and her husband “lost almost everything they had in the market crash of 1929 and spent their few remaining dollars trying vainly to raise rabbits for a living. Then Mr. Hinshaw died suddenly of pneumonia, and [Bertha] was left to face the depression and the raising of two children with no assets but her resourcefulness and a background of gracious living. She thought she might put the latter to work for her, since in her travels with her husband she had collected a number of unusual and outstanding recipes and some lovely furnishings. She thought she might combine these in an unusual guest house and restaurant.” Since there was no money for an architect, she became her own.292

  On the day she was ready for business in 1931, “she trudged” four-hundred yards “from her home to the main road and posted a small, hand-painted sign that read: MEALS SERVED. The cars, however, whizzed on by. Then one day a man and his wife ventured up the driveway. Mrs. Hinshaw served them. A week later the wife returned with four companions. At the same time two of Mrs. Hinshaw’s friends telephoned and asked for dinner. “But I can’t cook properly for more than five people,” she said, “agonizing over this sudden rush of business.”293 Through sheer determination, however, she survived the next few months. As word of her marvelous cooking skills spread among the transient public, her qualms about feeding large numbers of peoples dissolved. When she realized the public would gladly travel long distances just to eat her meals and sometimes sleep in her guest house, Bertha Hinshaw hauled her two children into her car “and headed north on the existing roads, tacking up Chalet Suzanne signs along the main highways.”294 Before long those who had tasted her cooking told others of her culinary abilities, and word of this remarkable woman spread rapidly, first throughout the state, then beyond its borders. Afterward, her home grew into the Chalet Suzanne which—even today—is by far Florida’s most eclectic and enchanting restaurant-inn. Bertha Hinshaw literally built it herself, adding “room after room” in her spare time. She personally laid the tiles which paved her restaurant’s lovely patio. By 1938 her guest house had blossomed into a 25-room affair which featured boating and bathing for patrons who took advantage of the nearby white sandy beach.295

  It was the food, though, that made Bertha Hinshaw’s restaurant famous, and its popularity eventually brought Duncan Hines to her doorstep. So charmed was he by the fairy-tale exteriors which surrounded him as he enjoyed his wonderful meal he kept returning over the next two decades to relish the experience. His favorite dishes included baked grapefruit and steaks with mint ice; and he always swooned when he devoured their orange souffle.296 Guests seldom saw Mrs. Hinshaw because, despite her enormous success, she insisted—even decades later—on personally preparing the meals.297

  Hines had many other favorite restaurants, ones which he treasured for good eating experiences above the
rest. One of these was Crane’s Canary Cottage at Chagrin Falls, Ohio, which was located in a residential home twenty miles south of Cleveland. “I doubt you will find more delicious food in the country,” he wrote.298 Expounding on this culinary find nearly ten years after its discovery, Hines told Phyllis Larsh of Life magazine why he was so enthusiastic about it: “First,” he said:

  they bring in these crisp, hot little finger rolls and you think you are just going to eat a dozen of them, they’re so good. But before you get started, they’ve brought in the watermelon pickle—the best in America—and three kinds of soup. You have to keep moving back from the table to disguise the loosening of your belt. They serve a salad—it’s so doggone beautiful you hate to destroy it. The dressing has lumps of Roquefort cheese the size of the end of your little finger. Oh, honey, that’s the one place where you absolutely bust.299