Clementine Paddleford's Easter Buffets
Clementine Paddleford arguably was the best-known and most admired food journalist of the day. In addition to her daily column for the Herald Tribune and monthly column in Gourmet, the intrepid journalist had a weekly feature in the Herald Trib’s Sunday magazine, This Week, a supplement that was syndicated nationally, like Parade is today. The Kansas-born reporter considered herself more a journalist than a cook and was praised for her ability to evoke the taste and aromas of the foods she wrote about. The newspaper had a staff of home economists to test and tweak the recipes Paddleford brought back from her trips around the city and across the country. In March 1946, she scored a coup by flying to Missouri to get the recipes for the home-cooked meals that were served to Winston Churchill on his visit.
She was a colorful character who wore a scarf around her neck to cover the scar left by an operation for cancer of the larynx, which also destroyed her natural speaking voice. She lived with her cats and her ward, the daughter of an old friend. She was a mentor and supporter of an emerging transformative group of foodies clustered around James Beard, who in 1946 was television’s first chef, appearing on a program co-hosted by Elsie the Cow, the Borden’s spokes-animal, that aired after the Madison Square Garden fights, at a time when most TV sets were in bars or showroom windows.In The United States of Arugula, David Kamp says Beard and his cohorts liked Paddleford but sometimes questioned her knowledge of food.
In the April 14 issue of This Week, Paddleford presented three Easter buffets from leading New York party planners. She led off with Eggs Thermidor from a caterer who called herself Nata Lee and began her career, according to Miss Paddleford, making cookies for the neighbors. “It’s the smooth, flawless sauce that’s the big event of the dish,” Paddleford wrote. “An all-purpose sauce; it goes well with chicken, turkey or lobster.” It bears little resemblance to a classic lobster thermidor sauce. For her creation, Miss Lee sautéed chopped onions and green pepper in a stick of butter and then simmered the vegetables in ketchup, adding at intervals chili sauce and then sweet cream. This sauce was poured over hard-boiled eggs (an ubiquitous ingredient) that were held erect inside toasts. The whole thing then went into the oven for baking. Miss Lee only boiled the eggs for 10 minutes rather than the then-customary half-hour before submitting them to the oven. To make a meal, she recommended adding a green salad, hot biscuits, a grapefruit juice starter, and ham strips that had been dunked into thick Russian dressing and rolled in chopped nuts. She finished the meal with open-faced fruit tarts and coffee, of course.
A Viennese fish goulash made with fillet of sole, sour cream and paprika, among other ingredients, was the contribution of Ritz Carlton caterers Gertrude and Paul Gottlieb, refugees from Vienna said by Miss Paddleford to be “the party rave with Broadway’s theatrical folk.” The goulash was served with a rice ring filled with buttered green peas and edged with sliced, buttered carrots. Buttered hard rolls, a green salad and a yeast coffee cake served with coffee rounded out the meal.
Wedding expert Kathleen Kelly shared her recipe for Ham and Chicken a la King, which she said was her “most successful main dish for all New York weddings.” Except for the addition of diced ham, it is a conventional recipe of a ladies’ luncheon staple with green pepper and pimiento strips.