Craig Claiborne

Claiborne learned French cooking in Casablanca as a Navy man, went to hotel school near Lausanne on the GI Bill, and joined the New York Times in 1957. He is credited with the four-star restaurant rating, and his New York Times Cookbook (1961) sold more than three million copies. His best-known stunt was a charity auction win: he and Pierre Franey ran up a four-thousand-dollar tab at Chez Denis in Paris, thirty-one courses and nine wines, and the letters of rebuke that followed included one from the Vatican. His 1987 Southern Cooking honored home.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• B.B. King Museum and Delta Interpretive Center — 0.5 mi
  A museum built around the brick cotton gin in Indianola where B.B. King worked in the 1940s, with his grave in a memorial garden on the grounds.
• Dockery Farms — 19 mi
  The plantation on the Sunflower River where Charley Patton lived and played from about 1900, now a working farm, a National Register district and a Mississippi Blues Trail stop.
• Fannie Lou Hamer Memorial Garden — 20 mi
  The small park on Byron Street in Ruleville where Fannie Lou Hamer is buried beside her husband, with a Freedom Trail marker and a 2012 bronze statue.
• Winterville Mounds — 24 mi
  A Mississippian ceremonial center north of Greenville, built by hand from about AD 1000, with a 55-foot Temple Mound and twelve of its original twenty-three mounds still standing.

More markers nearby

• Albert King — steps away
• Wayne and Minnie Cox Park — 0.2 mi
• Irene Magruder — 0.5 mi
• Club Ebony — 0.5 mi