A new book by Alex Prud’homme, Dinner With the President: Food, Politics, and a History of Breaking Bread at the White House examines what each president and first lady ate, and how this influenced their leadership styles.
Franklin D. Roosevelt regularly ate leftovers to portray himself as an everyman during the Great Depression. Teddy Roosevelt maintained his “tough guy” reputation by regularly enjoying hearty meats like grilled steak, wild game, and fried chicken as he established the National Forest Service and established five new national parks. He also drank his coffee black.
Jackie Kennedy took her breakfast in bed: a tray of toast with honey, orange juice, and coffee with skim milk. For lunch, the first lady had a cup of broth and a slim sandwich (which, on occasion, was grilled cheese.) Her dinner of choice? Cold poached salmon, followed by lamb with potatoes, string beans, and ice cream.
President Kennedy also ate toast with marmalade, accompanied by boiled or poached eggs. It’s a breakfast habit he continued quite literally until the day he died: It was his final meal on the morning of November 22, 1963, hours before his assassination in Dallas, Texas.
The Kennedys, not surprisingly, were some of the greatest gourmands the White House had ever seen. “A Francophile, Mrs. Kennedy modeled her soirees on the court of Louis XIV, where the Sun King used a heady blend of politics, food, and culture to assert himself as Europe’s leading 17th-century monarch,” he writes. “Fine dining was central to her vision, and the Kennedys proved to be the greatest presidential epicures since Thomas Jefferson.”
Jackie brought on board French chef René Verdon. At a 1962 dinner for Nobel Prize winners, the Kennedys served a menu that included a seafood mousse appetizer decorated with morel mushrooms and lobster, beef Wellington, and bombe Caribienne (Tahitian vanilla ice cream with pineapple, rum, coconut milk, and cinnamon). For JFK’s 1963 birthday dinner, Jackie planned a meal that included crabmeat ravigote, noodle casserole, asparagus hollandaise, and roast beef fillet, all accompanied by 1955 Dom Pérignon.
During diplomatic dinners, American cuisine was highlighted. California wine from Napa or Sonoma was served. The president occasionally indulged in crabmeat from Miami’s Joe’s Stone Crab (usually picked and flown up by his father, Joe). His favorite meal was a bowl of classic New England clam chowder.
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