Couple Tour U.S. Diners in Search of Real Food

To get on Jane and Michael Stern’s wavelength, think macaroni and cheese instead of squid ink pasta, Jell-O, not aspic, and s’mores instead of sorbets. Forget haute cuisine. Think home cookin’.

Imagine crisscrossing the country, from clam shack to catfish parlor to barbecue pit. Picture a never-ending search for the perfect pig snout sandwich (C&K; BBQ, St. Louis) or the ideal sugar cream pie (Groves Restaurant, Bloomington, Ind.).

The Sterns do this for a living, filing dispatches from places like Mary Bobo’s Boardinghouse (Lynchburg, Tenn.) and Maurice’s Piggy Park (West Columbia, S.C.).

The view from the front lines of American gastronomy is pretty much unobstructed. “I can’t think of a single food writer who travels, except to places like San Francisco or New York, or on junkets with other food writers to other major cities,” says Jane.

“Nobody else just gets in their car and goes to these stinkpot little towns and asks, ‘What’s for dinner?’ ”

It could be tripe soup in Philadelphia, country ham and red-eye gravy in Nashville, Rocky Mountain oysters in Denver, cioppino in Eureka, Calif.

And save room for dessert: Indian pudding in New England, banana pudding in Virginia, bread pudding in Louisiana, persimmon pudding in Illinois. The “pie pan of beans” at Lambert’s in Sikeston, Mo., comes with dessert--a King Edward cigar and a stick of Big Red chewing gum.

Unlike most food critics, anonymous eaters who slip in and out of restaurants incognito, the Sterns aren’t at all shy. There they are, about to dig into breakfast, on their latest book, “A Taste of America,” a compilation of their weekly column published in 200 newspapers.

“In most of the restaurants we go to, when people see us taking notes, they just assume we’re from the health department,” Jane says.

Besides which, there’s little danger of being recognized at, say, Ruth & Jimmie’s Sporting Goods & Cafe in Abbeville, Miss., where diners can stock up on live bait before chowing down on fried okra.

Likewise in the green cinder-block house in Sevierville, Tenn., where customers pay $5 to troop into Gladys Breeden’s kitchen, grab plates from her cupboard and pile them high with whatever she felt like cooking that day.

Make no mistake, though, Jane says. “We wouldn’t hang out in any old greasy spoon. The central charm of a place like Gladys’ is that the food is really good.”

Let other critics fill up on salsa, ceviche and chocolate mousse cake. Michael Stern prefers “a really great tuna casserole,” the kind with crumbled potato chips on top. Jane is partial to that old blue-plate special: the hot turkey sandwich a la Wonder Bread.

Should crushed potato chips seem a trifle passe in this era of sun-dried tomatoes and balsamic vinegar, that doesn’t bother the Sterns. “We’re very obstinate people,” says Michael. “We like going against the grain.”

Consider “Square Meals,” their 1984 cookbook. At the height of nouvelle cuisine, it celebrated “The Miracle of Dry Onion Soup,” “Casseroles--Glamour With a Can Opener,” and “Jell-O, the Chef’s Magic Powder.”

“We got annoyed reading articles claiming that the day of the meat loaf had passed,” Jane says. “We realized that food was getting ridiculous. Food writers were so out of touch.”

Not to mention that nouvelle got on her nerves. “Those tiny little portions, the rare fish, the baby vegetables. The preciousness of it all.”

Ironically, “Square Meals,” an affectionate look at America’s culinary past, proved to be ahead of its time. It ushered in the “comfort food” era, just as “Roadfood,” their 1978 guide to roadside cuisine, presaged a new interest in regional American cuisine.

Not just food, but “food in its cultural context” is what interests the Sterns, whose accounts whet appetites for the flavor of a disappearing America.

They are stories about people and places, department store lunch rooms and Southern boardinghouses, of outmoded ways of fixing outdated dishes, of the joy of finding blue-ribbon pies lurking behind the rusted-shut door to a combination gas station-restaurant that appears to be closed but isn’t.

Places such as the Tick-Tock Room or the This Is It Cafe “really give you a real taste of the region, of the people, of the heritage, of the place,” Jane says. “If you ate at Lutece or Le Cirque, you’d get a taste of France in New York City.

“That may be interesting to many other writers, but it doesn’t have the cultural evocativeness and richness that the Gladys Breedens of the world have.”

Evocative is the word. In “A Taste of America,” a Seattle cinnamon roll is “a vast spiral of pastry with clods of raisins and veins of dark sugar gunk packed into its warm furrows”; the crust of a New Haven white-clam pizza is “a sumptuous mottled ring of pliant bready pillowettes.”

“The problem with being a food writer is, it’s an oxymoron,” says Jane. “Food is so interesting, the writing gets eclipsed. People love our books because we can tell them where to go for a good, inexpensive meal. But we’re also good writers.”

The Sterns also cover non-food topics for The New Yorker, and their literary credits include such varied works as “Elvis World,” a 1987 New York Times best seller; “Trucker: A Portrait of the Last American Cowboy”; and “Amazing America,” a guide to such little-known tourist attractions as The World’s Largest (Or Second-Largest) Ball of Twine.

“The common thread that runs through our work is that we write about things other critics and writers ignore,” Jane says. “We don’t write about what life should be; we write about what is.

“We’re two East Coast, Ivy League, upper-middle-class intellectuals in love with the wrong side of culture,” she says, her pensive expression giving way to a devilish grin. “It gives priggish people the shivers.”

Jane, the only child of a former concert pianist and a Hungarian leather salesman, grew up in Manhattan where “I didn’t see one shred of normal family life.” When she was 10, her parents hired a housekeeper from Alabama, “one of the great Southern cooks. She’d make things like Coca-Cola-basted ham and I thought this was great New York Jewish food. It wasn’t until I moved away that I realized I’d been wrong.”

Michael cut his teeth on elaborate Jell-O creations from his mother’s kitchen in an affluent Chicago suburb, which accounts for his love affair with The Chef’s Magic Powder. His good grades were marred by what passed for a rebellious streak in 1950s Winnetka: He was thrown off the crossing-guard squad for beaning a kid with an eclair. Later, as a teen-ager he joined a gang of marauding suburban youths. “We raised heck.”

They met at that mecca of radicalism and counterculture, Yale.

Jane still buries her face in a pillow when Michael gleefully describes her opening line 21 years ago: “Are you a Scorpio?”

Their courtship consisted largely of movies--so many that Michael dropped out of graduate school to fit them all in. He later got a master’s in film at Columbia University. Jane’s, in fine arts, is from Yale.

When the time came to launch their careers, “I couldn’t figure out how to do galleries, and Michael couldn’t figure out how to go to Hollywood and make movies.” They opted to stay in Connecticut and play volleyball.

While Michael taught at a community college, Jane drove back and forth from their rented house in Guilford to New Haven to read the bulletin board at Yale’s job placement office. En route, she stopped for coffee at a truck stop, where “I got more and more intrigued by the truckers, to the point where I’d take Michael with me.”

For most people, the turning point in life is a meaningful job offer, a relationship with an influential mentor, or a decision to pursue a long-held dream. For the Sterns, it was a routine browse in the 39-cent record bin at Mammoth Mart, where they came upon Red Simpson’s album, “Hello, I’m a Truck.”

“We realized there was a whole subculture, the last cowboys,” says Jane. “But we still didn’t know what to do about it.”

Eventually, a friend suggested they write a book. Eureka! With a $2,500 advance from McGraw-Hill, the Sterns headed off on the trail of the trucker. Their photo essay book came out three years later. As luck would have it, “Trucker” ushered in the CB radio craze.

They moved right on to “Roadfood,” book No. 2.

“We’d always been eaters,” says Michael. “While researching the trucker book, we found all this regional American food. We realized it was all word-of-mouth, that there was no catalogue or listing of great road-food places.”

They set off in June, 1976, with a game plan nothing short of brilliant: Eat in every diner in America, then write about the good ones.

Eight months later, they got to New Jersey.

Time for a new plan.

They began honing their road-food radar, the ability to separate the memorable from the mundane. “We began looking for sheriff’s cars, or pictures of pigs or cows on roofs. That shows personality,” Michael says.

“We said no to big mondo plastic places with mansard roofs, to corporate chains with huge laminated menus. What intrigued us were places that gave evidence of one person’s genius, old places, wacky places, places with handwritten menus or big round tables where everyone knew each other.”

They scanned Yellow Pages, eschewing big ads for tiny ones. They studied billboards, shunning anyplace that said, “Bus Tours Welcome.” They learned to taste rather than gorge, so they could check out 10 restaurants in a day.

The more they traveled, the more they took note of regional specialties: the sour cream raisin pie of East Iowa, “a dairyland dense pack topped with swirling meringue”; the Indian pudding of New England, “a dark duff with centuries of character in every rough-grained spoonful”; the red beans and rice of New Orleans, “each bean a small pillow of creamy silk. . . . “

Such local dishes have become the Sterns’ bread-and-butter, prompting Country Journal to dub them “the heroes of real American food.” The late James Beard called “Goodfood” a book “of the people and for the people.”

After 14 books and countless articles, all written jointly and with a compatibility rare among collaborators, “it’s hard to tell who did what anymore,” Jane says. “We both take credit for the good parts.”

Their biggest difference may be their taste in food. “We rarely eat the same thing for dinner,” Jane says. Lately, all her dinners have consisted of the same low-cal dish: turkey burgers on pita bread, penance for past research. Michael, an exercise addict, diets constantly.

After 15 years on the road, they still love to travel, though their trips tend to be shorter, their tolerance for cheap motels lower. They are also more selective about where and what they will eat.

They concede that the climate surrounding American cuisine is becoming more hospitable, but still, “Nobody is writing about pretzel salad,” Michael says. “It’s amazing how much attention and care is paid to subtleties in regions of Italy and China, but not here.”

Jane blames the traditional purpose of food writers: “To help people climb out of the lower middle class and into the upper middle class, to help people impress others. The same thing is true of decorator books; no one says, ‘Go out and buy a Barcalounger.’ ”