Book review: Duncan Hines - how a Travelling Salesman Became the Most Trusted Name in Food, by Louis Hatchett

by Louis Hatchett
The University Press of Kentucky
2.5 stars
L.V. Anderson

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.