The Sterns:
Now you have me going crazy. The only one I know of your books are the Sterns. Used to read their column in the paper.
From Wikipedia:
Jane Grossman Stern and
Michael Stern (both born 1946) are American writers who specialize in books about travel, food, and popular culture. They are best known for their
Roadfood books, website, and magazine columns, in which they find
road food restaurants serving classic American regional specialties and review them. Starting their hunt for regional American food in the early 1970s they were the first food writers to regard this food as being as worthy to report on as the
haute cuisine of other nations.
Since the Sterns began documenting regional American food in the 1970s many other writers and television personalities have used their pioneering work as inspiration. In addition to their early work with regional American food the Sterns' book
Square Meals (Knopf 1985) put "
comfort foods" like mac and cheese, meatloaf, and mashed potatoes on the culinary map.
Square Meals did an audacious reverse spin on the tricked up and precious nouvelle cuisine that was beloved by food critics at that time.
After a short stint of producing documentaries for WNBC, a teaching job at
Hunter College and another at
Wesleyan University they began work on the book that eventually became the first
Roadfood. The book was conceived as a book on "truck-stop dining," funded with an advance from a publisher. The Sterns set out in their car to travel through the United States and eat up to 12 meals daily at diners and local cafes.
[1] The resulting first edition of
Roadfood was published in 1977; the most recent edition was released in 2017.
I only have one of their books:
A Taste of America, which is a combination of cookbook and discussion of some road stop venues they've made across the US. Pubbed 1988, so many of the eateries they discuss are probably no longer in existence.
I may pick one of their recipes, or I may pick something from Walter Staib's "
City Tavern" - a restaurant in colonial Philadelphia that after a reincarnation or two appears to exist until today.