At home in Connecticut in 1975, with the manuscript of the first edition of Roadfood.

Inside your white cardboard box, inscribed with a Sally Bell silhouette, you will find a single sandwich on thinly sliced bread; a cup of tomato aspic or potato salad; a half a deviled egg, wrapped in wax paper; a crisp cheese ­wafer (no bigger than a quarter) with a pecan exactly in its center; and a cupcake or fruit tart . . . We love the potato salad with its cucumber and onion crunch, and the sweet deviled egg that ineluctably conjures images of picnics long ago, but the cheese wafer makes us cry. So delicate, sadly out of fashion, with no place in the world outside this outré bakery, two little bites and it is gone; and you get only one in a box—a souvenir token of your visit to another era. 

—“Sally Bell,” Roadfood (1980 edition)

JANE STERN—neé Grossman—and Michael Stern were born, respectively, in New York City and Winnetka, Illinois. They met and married while doing graduate work at Yale, having had their first date at Frank Pepe Pizzeria Napoletana; soon after, they published the first edition of their landmark American travel guide, Roadfood. The book was among the first to treat ­regional American cuisine as worthy of serious study and serious writing. And yet the Sterns were never remote or overly pedagogical; writing in her introduction to their 1984 cookbook, Square Meals, M. F. K. Fisher described their attitude as one of “love and respect” for homegrown food and tradition. 

Although they have received several James Beard Foundation Awards and publish a new edition of Roadfood every three years (there is also a popular Web site), their thirty-plus joint titles cover all facets of what they like to call cultural anthropology: truckers, Elvis worship, “sixties people,” Roy Rogers and Dale Evans, and Hummel figurines. TheirEncyclopedia of Bad Taste (1990) manages to combine several of the above, along with fuzzy dice, Russ Meyer, and leopard print. For The New Yorker, the couple has written about bull riding, novelty toys, and Iowa radio homemakers. Michael has also written on Douglas Sirk, and Jane has published accounts of her life as an EMT and tarot reader. In 2007, they released the memoir Two for the Road: Our Love Affair with American Food. There’s also the 1979 novel, Friendly Relations; both groan when it is mentioned.

Although the Sterns divorced in 2008, they continue to work ­together and publish under their joint byline. Until two months ago, they lived in neighboring towns in Connecticut. (Michael has since moved to South Carolina.) For this interview, I met with them individually, at each one’s home, then together, at Jane’s house in Ridgefield. We enjoyed white-clam pizza, ice cream, and a cruller they had recently discovered at a nearby doughnut shop. Both are animal lovers—they have written on bird ­owners, dog shows, and horses—and on each occasion we were joined by several pets, including Jane’s French bulldogs and Michael’s parrot.

—Sadie Stein

INTERVIEWER

How did you two first meet? 

JANE STERN

We were both at Yale, and Michael was getting his Ph.D. in art history.

MICHAEL STERN

Hoping to get—I never got it.

JANE STERN

You were in the process of getting it. See, we’re already editing each other. He was in art history, and I had arrived at Yale to study art, been ­accepted, shown up, and when I got there and went to register the first day, they said, Oh, we don’t have any space for you. It was the height of the Vietnam War, and they said, We accepted all these men students, and we assumed that many of them would have been drafted, and none of them were. And I said, Have you ever met an art student? They’d sooner, like, shoot off their penis than go to Vietnam. So I found a temporary job at the slides and photo­graphs collection—

MICHAEL STERN

On High Street.

JANE STERN

They assumed that, being a painter, I knew art history. Whereas I was like, An Etruscan slide, all right, that goes with Jackson Pollock. I’d just throw them in anywhere. Anyway, I was sitting at my desk eating an orange snail—remember that good pastry shop—

MICHAEL STERN

The Danish pastry shop.

JANE STERN

—across the street, and looking pissed off, which I was, a lot. All the art history students looked like pear-shaped nerds, and Michael walked in.

MICHAEL STERN

I had my leather jacket. I was looking real badass in those days—

JANE STERN

And your Wayfarer sunglasses, and you were tall. And I looked up from my orange snail, and I said—you know what I said, my first words?

MICHAEL STERN

Yes.

JANE STERN

I said, Are you a Scorpio? And he is.

MICHAEL STERN

And I am.

JANE STERN

But this is 1968 and that was the coolest pickup line in the world. 

MICHAEL STERN

Then I said—I was very involved with the film society at Yale, so I said, There’s a documentary about—

JANE STERN

Hawks.

MICHAEL STERN

—Hawks, do you want to go see it? And Jane thought it was about birds, because she knew nothing about film.

JANE STERN

Howard Hawks.

MICHAEL STERN

And then we just started dating, pretty quickly.

JANE STERN

Yeah. Or fucking or eating or doing something in the realm of dating.

MICHAEL STERN

I don’t remember—what did we do then?

JANE STERN

Well, you were living on Edwards Street.

MICHAEL STERN

Oh my God, yes. In that horrible apartment.

JANE STERN

All I remember you doing, basically, is smoking dope and watching movies.

MICHAEL STERN

And remember, I painted the windows black, so I could watch movies all day?

JANE STERN

Yeah. And I remember you had a cardboard toilet-paper roll that you wrapped in foil.

MICHAEL STERN

To make a pipe. Well, I didn’t have a regular pipe. I did a lot of dope in those days. Lots of dope.

JANE STERN

Oh yes. I remember one of our first dates we drove to Lincoln Center. It was some movie—

MICHAEL STERN

It was the New York Film Festival.

JANE STERN

Right. And I’m sure you were high on something but you were just talking nonstop, and I thought, My God, this guy is like Brendan Behan—nonstop poetry. And it turned out you were quoting verbatim the script from Valley of the Dolls.

MICHAEL STERN

Yes, because I once had a very interesting acid trip where I dropped some acid that was way stronger than I thought it was going to be in the subway in Chicago, and by the time I got out of the subway I realized, I’m not capable of doing anything, so I just walked into a movie theater where Valley of the Dolls was playing. And I saw it like six times in a row. And to this day, lines from that movie—

JANE STERN

Do you remember any of the lines?

MICHAEL STERN

“French subtitles over a bare bottom don’t make it art.”