Duncan Hines (16 page)

When he was pressed by reporters, however, Hines made no secret of his method of investigation. He told them that when he went into a restaurant he never advertised his entry. He just came in and sat down like anyone else. This was easy enough to do. Hines looked like an unremarkable, conservatively-dressed businessman with short, silvery hair sporting wire-rim glasses. He was a solidly-built individual of fifty-eight, with a ruddy complexion, weighing 178 pounds. Some Americans, who knew him only by his photograph, wondered if he were over six feet tall, but in fact he was surprisingly short; Hines stood five feet, eight and a half inches.
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One of his secretaries described him as “a short, squat man,” a physical characteristic also found in most members of his family.
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If his figure displayed any paunch, this was seen only in his later years. Although he was photographed regularly, many restaurateurs did not recognize him because Hines always took off his glasses when the flashbulbs began to pop.

When Hines made a reservation, he always used an assumed name. When he sat down and ordered a meal, he usually chose “two soups, four entrees and at least three desserts.” This alone should have been a tip-off that an unusual patron had entered the premises, but apparently few ever caught on. To the waitresses or the management he was just an unusual guest who could not make up his mind what he wanted to eat. When his meal was served, he sampled a little bit of everything, “usually eating only one dish of each course.” After he paid for his meal, he usually asked to inspect the kitchen. If the restaurant management complied with his
request, Hines was given a personal tour, the manager at his side. If after his careful examination the restaurant was found to have comported itself with his strict standards of both culinary and sanitary excellence, Hines left the premises, never bothering to reveal his real name. If the restaurant passed his inspection, its management was informed a few weeks later by his office that it had become the latest addition of the “Duncan Hines Family” of quality restaurants.
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Some restaurants were not so lucky. If the restaurant refused to comply with Hines's request for a kitchen tour, he paid his bill and left the premises immediately, knowing full well they were hiding something. Hines suspected that if a restaurateur refused to show his customers the kitchen, he was probably shielding some dark horror. If the restaurant possessed some unsavory, unsanitary secret, Hines never discovered it; but, consequently, he never let the public discover the restaurant, either. Sometimes, though, Hines never inspected the restaurants he visited. This honor, of course, was relegated to a small number he had previously listed which had not received a series of customer complaints. When dining in one of these, if he asked to see the kitchen at the conclusion of his meal and was instantly granted access to it, it was all he needed to know, reasoning their open invitation was “evidence [enough] that there was nothing to hide.”
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To understand why the American public developed an almost instant affinity for Duncan Hines, it is necessary to understand the public persona they encountered via newspapers, magazines, and radio. They discovered a man who was, in many ways, quite appealing to the popular imagination: colorful, sometimes eccentric, never dull. He reminded many of them of an uncle they had somewhere in the family tree.

Like many uncles, Duncan Hines was full of opinions, and he espoused them at every opportunity, using the various media outlets of the day as his pulpit. A transcript of his conversation reveals that it was his tendency to flit from one subject to another. An example of this can be found in a 1954 interview with Hines during the preparation of his autobiography. As Milton MacKaye
discovered sixteen years earlier, the subject of Hines's conversation could easily bounce around from one topic to the next. In five minutes or less Hines would cover restaurant sanitation, the proper method for preparing fried chicken, fine wines, and the best way to carve a turkey. There was no apparent explanation for the character of his thought patterns; he was just an impulsive individual with an overactive mind. It is possible that he acquired this speaking trait early in his career as a salesman and had refined it over the years. To a degree, he was almost impossible to interview.

An example of his thought patterns can be found in his interview with MacKaye. At one point in their conversation, Hines remarked that restaurants in America—and the preparation of food and cooking in general—had improved over the past twenty years. He recounted how it was impossible, by the end of World War I in 1918, to find a good cup of coffee anywhere. One of the reasons for this, he declared, was that most people had never tasted good coffee and therefore had no criterion by which to make an evaluation. Hines said that “there can be only two reasons for a poor cup” of coffee—not enough coffee in the pot or brewing it too long. This remark led his mind to wander into a new topic for discussion—a relatively new trend in restaurant food: salads. Hines observed that, over the years, there had grown among the public the general acceptance of salads and “the increasing use and wider choice of fresh vegetables.” Salads somehow led him to think of wild game and steak. Hines noted how the public's penchant for wild game had “retrogressed,” that the supply was very limited, and only a few chefs in America knew how to prepare it with any skill.
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This train of thought led to another nearly unrelated subject; in his estimation, he stated flatly, “the states between the Mississippi River and the Pacific Coast are pretty much the Gobi Desert so far as good cooking in the small towns goes. The worst steaks,” he pointed out, “are always to be found in the cow country, where they butcher grass-fed cattle and have never heard of aging meat.”
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Hines's sometimes contradictory nature surfaced in the next moment. He complained about being unable to find a high quality steak and then turned the conversation toward a subject
that, he said, completely befuddled him: Americans' love affair with meat—particularly steak. “Why should I eat steak in Butler, Pennsylvania, when I can go to the Nixon Hotel and have pure pork sausages, buckwheat cakes and piping coffee served on distinctive china with charming hospitality?”
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It could be that Hines just wanted a good steak
when
he wanted a good steak, regardless of where he happened to be. Nevertheless, this was what it was like to have a conversation with Duncan Hines.

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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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 noon-day 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.
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.”
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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.
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