Book review: Duncan Hines - how a Travelling Salesman Became the Most Trusted Name in Food, by Louis Hatchett
This newly published biography, which painstakingly traces Duncan Hines' journey from restaurant critic to cake-mix spokesman, is in fact a repackaging of Louis Hatchett's out-of-print 2001 book.
This newly published biography, which painstakingly traces Duncan Hines' journey from restaurant critic to cake-mix spokesman, is in fact a repackaging of Louis Hatchett's out-of-print 2001 book.
The timing of the new edition's appearance is apt: the prospective book purchasers of 2014 include a fresh batch of millennials who are both intensely interested in food and ignorant of the fact that Hines was a real person, renowned in his heyday not for canned frosting but for his bestselling, frequently updated, self-published guides to American restaurants and inns.
Although Hines' books were a massive success in the 1930s, '40s and '50s, it's easy to imagine that he'd fare even better in the internet age. His writing was chatty, self-important and marketing-friendly: if he lived today, Hines would be the world's most famous food blogger.
As the book's subtitle - How a Travelling Salesman Became the Most Trusted Name in Food - notes, while a travelling salesman for a direct-mail advertising firm, Hines began taking notes about the best places to eat across America; his search for decent restaurants soon became an all-consuming hobby.
As Hines found himself inundated with requests for recommendations from friends and acquaintances, he published a pamphlet of his endorsements, which was so popular it morphed into a book, Adventures in Good Eating, in 1935, which soon spawned other books about cooking, eating and travelling.
