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Patty's Story

 

NORTHERN HARVEST: TWENTY MICHIGAN WOMEN IN FOOD AND FARMING

https://www.wsupress.wayne.edu/books/detail/northern-harvest

 

Patty’s Story

After describing herself as a “terrible” student in high school, and before that a “horrible” student in junior high school, Patty LaNoue Stearns attributed her successful career as a journalist to the teaching of one very charismatic journalism teacher in that high school, and also to the good fortune that her mother was already a journalist and could give Patty, still in her teens, entrée to a local chain of papers in Lincoln Park, as a copy girl/society reporter. Years later that same high school honored her as a distinguished former student in the Allen Park Hall of Fame for her career in journalism.

With regard to food, she described her mom as “a stone soup cook who would pull a rabbit out of a hat every night, and we’d eat it.” And this was in the “Wonder Bread, Space-Age kind of eating existence.”

But moving on from Wonder bread, in later years Patty became a respected restaurant critic first in Detroit and then in northern Michigan. She authored several cookbooks, including one, Cherry Home Companion, comprised entirely of cherry recipes, a tribute to Traverse City, the cherry capital of the nation.

For a number of years she and husband Joe, a superb artist with wood-working, lived on one of the Twin Lakes a few miles out from Traverse City, a veritable tree house.  Later they moved back to the Detroit area but keep in close touch with friends in the north and news in the north.

No longer writing much about food, Patty told me she is working on a memoir that “will include many recipes, many food memories, and many things about food that I love. . . . It’s a happy story.” I look forward to reading Patty’s memoir.


For you to read more of Patty’s story including her adventures with cooking in France, you can now order Northern Harvest from Amazon or your favorite independent bookstore.

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