View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by KU ScholarWorks SENSES OF TASTE: DUNCAN HINES AND AMERICAN GASTRONOMY, 1931-1962 BY Copyright 2013 Damon L. Talbott Submitted to the graduate degree program in American Studies and the Graduate Faculty of the University of Kansas in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. ________________________________ Chairperson, Ann Schofield ________________________________ Ben Chappell ________________________________ Christopher E. Forth ________________________________ Eric C. Rath ________________________________ Iris Smith Fischer Date Defended: June 5, 2013 ii The Dissertation Committee for Damon L. Talbott certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: SENSES OF TASTE: DUNCAN HINES AND AMERICAN GASTRONOMY, 1931-1962 ________________________________ Chairperson, Ann Schofield Date approved: June 5, 2013 iii ABSTRACT Duncan Hines was the first national restaurant critic in American history and a significant tastemaker in popular culture. This dissertation is an accounting of how senses of taste were formed in the middle of the twentieth century in the United States and how Duncan Hines aided this process. Conceiving of taste as a conjoining of physical sensations and cultural sense by mediators, I argue that Hines guided consumers and producers through the practice of making sense of momentous changes in society that influenced Americans’ eating habits as well as their awareness of American foodways. Hines gained and maintained cultural authority because his criticism networked developing mid-century trends including automobility, consumerism, middlebrow criticism, regionalism, suburbanization, the popularity of “eating out,” the professionalization of restaurants, the nationalization of media, the discourse of authenticity, and the continued evolution of technologies for the growing, processing, shipping, selling, and cooking of food. From the farm to the fork, American gastronomy is thus predicated on technology, commerce, and media intersecting to offer mediators, like Hines, resources with which to make sense of the tastes occurring within a context. Since these relationships change, I contend that taste is neither an object to be acquired nor a state of being to be achieved, but instead an on-going and contingent activity, a temporary association of things formed in reaction to the context in which it is configured. iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS To my advisor, Ann Schofield, thank you for being an amazing advisor, always supportive, positive, witty, and critical but constructive. Every graduate student should have someone like you guiding them. I also thank my committee for their efforts: Ben Chappell for mentoring me and supporting my scholarship with sharp suggestions and timely recommendations; Chris Forth for intellectual guidance and inspiration, an opportunity to publish, and fun discussions; and Eric Rath for showing me how to write about food in history. I am further grateful to the many professors whose courses influenced me with great content and even greater criticism: Sherrie Tucker, Don Stull, Barbara Shortridge, Pete Shortridge, Brian Donovan, Bill Staples, Jeffrey Moran, Susan Harris, Sherry Williams, and Christine Jensen Sundstrom and Sally Utech. Last, to the faculty and staff of Amherst College, thank you for providing me with the broadest, deepest, and most useful intellectual foundation anyone could ever ask for. I give thanks to the KU Department of Athletics, Department of American Studies, and Humanities and Western Civilization program for providing employment, financial support, administrative help, and educational experiences that helped me grow as a teacher, live as a student, and find my way through the Ph.D. process. To my colleagues in the AMS graduate program and the HWC cadre of GTAs, thank you for laughs, lessons, and a lifetime of memories. I also deeply appreciate the Hall Center for the Humanities and Richard and Jeanette Sias for their support of my dissertation writing through their generous housing and funding of the Sias Graduate Fellowship. This opportunity was crucial to not just completing my Ph.D. but providing opportunities to begin my work as a scholar and public speaker. A special thanks to Rick Clement for his serendipitous introduction of me to William P. Barlow, Jr. To Bill, I am grateful for your generous time and efforts in aiding my research. Your graciousness and hospitality will never be forgotten. To my Talbott, Humphries, and Freeman family – mother, father, siblings, siblings-in-law, nieces, and nephews – thank you for your constant support and the fun times when we can make them happen. To the Browns, your warm embrace of me into your family and your support of my work are beautiful gifts that I am grateful for. To Alison, you are my everything – soul mate, best friend, artistic role model, counselor, copy editor, designer, fellow adventurer, and so much else I could write another tome on it all. What began in exchanged letters and a trip to the Book Mill will never end. v CONTENTS Abstract iii Acknowledgements iv Introduction 1 Duncan Hines, Then and Now Chapter One 22 “Good taste is an unruly human faculty not easily confined to a single channel”: Making Sense of Taste in the Twentieth Century Chapter Two 69 Ventures in Good Eating: Mediating a Consumers’ Republic of Drivers Chapter Three 116 “The Great Consumer”: Creating and Maintaining Credible Authority Chapter Four 158 Making Duncan Hines™: Developing a Sense of Cake Chapter Five 197 The Place of Taste: Duncan Hines’ All-American Gastronomy Coda 231 Bibliography 241 1 INTRODUCTION: Duncan Hines, Then and Now Before his name became synonymous with packaged cake mixes and frosting, Duncan Hines was the premier restaurant critic in the United States. He attempted to expertly speak about the nation’s network of roads and restaurants by organizing these in a guidebook of recommendations for motorists that also cultivated a gastronomy of American food. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s he drove 40,000 miles or more each year as a traveling salesman, and then drove additional countless miles through his weekend hobby of discovering foods far from home. Decades before mass transportation and consumption created the transnational, multi-billion dollar industry of fast food, Hines became a critic that aided the developing popular culture of eating out and furthered the discourses of American foodways. He sold millions of copies of his guidebooks and was thought of in his era as the authority on American food. While Hines’ best-selling restaurant guidebook for motorists of the 1930s to 1950s, Adventures in Good Eating, was not adventurous by contemporary culinary standards, it nevertheless highlighted the consequences of a reshaping of society. The early to middle twentieth century brought significant changes in the American diet such as industrialization and urbanization, first, and automobility and suburbanization, second. Broadly speaking, the geography of American social patterns, and the infrastructure supporting it, underwent epochal shifts.1 More specifically, the trends of having wider access to both processed foods and regional 1 On the effects of industrialization and urbanization on food consumption, see Harvey A. Levenstein, Revolution at the Table: The Transformation of the American Diet (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988); Hans J. Teuteberg, “The Birth of the Modern Consumer Age: Food Innovations from 1800,” in Food: The History of Taste, ed. Paul Freedman, 234-261 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007). On the effects of automobility and suburbanization, see Joseph Interrante, “The Road to Autopia: The Automobile and the Spatial Transformation of American Culture,” in The Automobile and American Culture, ed. David L. Lewis and Laurence Goldstein, 89-104 2 specialties, eating outside of the home and at chain restaurants, eating quickly, and using automobiles to bring food to market and consumers to restaurants began taking root in the United States in the late nineteenth century, with some of these trends achieving ordinary status before World War II.2 Furthermore, this era saw the first sustained attempts at forming an American “cuisine” based on American tastes, with Duncan Hines joined in this effort by other significant tastemakers, including journalists, critics, and authors such as Clementine Paddleford, Angelo Pellegrini, Sheila Hibben, and Richard O. Cummings. Despite these important influences on Americans’ food consumption and culinary concepts, this period has so far has been judged largely through a presentist and elitist lens. This distorted perspective began with the scholarship of Harvey Levenstein, who argued that in the early twentieth-century “the sorry state of American gastronomy was best typified by Duncan Hines” because he “struck just the right chord for middle-class America.”3 It appears that Levenstein and his followers narrate the past to culminate at a recent peak of what they consider to be elite refinement, a cosmopolitan and gourmet sense of taste supposedly made possible only when Julia Child and her peers erased America’s history of forgettable food.4 For example, David Kamp’s book on Child, James Beard, and Craig Claiborne, The United States of Arugula, focuses on “how food in America got better” once these critics helped Americans reform their (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1983); Warren Belasco,