Here's Where It Gets Interesting - Dinner with the President with Alex Prud'homme

Episode Date: April 12, 2023

Today on Here’s Where It Gets Interesting, Sharon sits down with author Alex Prud'homme about his book, Dinner with the President, all about White House food. He is the coauthor of his aunt Julia Child's memoir, My Life in France, and merges Presidential history with dishes that were the height of sophistication at one point. An on ramp to this book and conversation can be summarized in this passage: “Presidential meals often had personal meaning, and sometimes con­tained coded political messages. James Garfield and Dwight Eisenhower liked bowls of squirrel soup. William Howard Taft had a taste for possum. Zachary Taylor died after eating cherries and drinking cold milk. Wood­row Wilson had chronic indigestion and consumed dubious elixirs, yet he and Herbert Hoover saved millions of lives with innovative food poli­cies. The gourmand Theodore Roosevelt and his gourmet cousin Frank­lin D. Roosevelt led the nation over bison steaks and terrapin soups. (A gourmand is someone who eats and drinks to wretched excess. A gour­met is a connoisseur of fine dining.) JFK liked clam chowder, LBJ favored chili, Richard Nixon ate cottage cheese almost every day, and George W. Bush liked ballpark hot dogs. The presidents’ food choices reflected the state of the nation.” Hosted by: Sharon McMahon Guest: Alex Prud'homme Executive Producer: Heather Jackson Audio Producer: Jenny Snyder Researcher: Valerie Hoback Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey friends, welcome. So happy that you're here because I have a treat for you today. I'm speaking with author Alex Prudhomme about his new book, Dinner with the President. And let me tell you, I loved every single page of this book, which is about White House food. First of all, people love to talk about food. People love presidential history. They love White House history. And the subtitle of this book is Food, Politics, and a History of Breaking Bread at the White House. And I think this conversation is going to be fascinating. So let's dive in. I'm Sharon McMahon, and here's where it gets interesting. I am very excited to be chatting with Alex Prudhomme today. I told you this before we started recording, but I loved this book. Tell us why you wrote it.

Well, there were sort of three things that led me to write the book. My great aunt, Julia Child, who I knew very well and worked with and I helped her write her memoir. And we used to sit around the dinner table talking about history and politics. When I was working with Julia on her memoir, My Life in France, I discovered that she had spent quite a bit of time at the White House. I knew she had been there, but I didn't know quite how much. And in particular, she did two televised state dinners. She was the first person to bring TV

cameras into the White House kitchen. She and her husband, Paul, who was the twin brother of my grandfather, were diplomats before she got on television. And so they understood the political, social, and gastronomic value of state dinner in a way that few Americans did. And their notion was to show a side of the people's house that people hadn't seen before. And so in researching that, I got really interested in the phenomenon of the state dinner and also the fact that there's something food-wise going on at the White House virtually every day, which I'd never stopped to think about. And then in 2016, I gave a talk at the White House for mid-level staff about fresh water, which I think will be the defining resource of this century. I wrote a book about it called The Ripple Effect, and I was invited to talk to them.

The Obamas were out of town, so it was kind of quiet there. And I had a friend in the administration who invited me to lunch at the Navy Mess, which is probably the world's most unusual cafeteria. It's in the basement next to the Situation Room. It's decorated as if you're on a presidential yacht. It's staffed by Navy men, and it's a pretty fabulous place. And then he took me on a quick tour of the White House and it really hit me in an emotional way that I wasn't expecting at all. By looking at the portraits of these presidents and the busts in the hallways, and suddenly it all came alive to me. And this is the value in visiting presidential homes and the White House. It really brings history alive. And I was talking to a guard

and he said, oh, you're not alone in this. When people come into the White House, they suddenly get overwhelmed because it's such a big image in our minds. And he said, I've seen people break into tears. I've seen people pass out. I've seen people get sick. And I think looking back, that was the moment, even though I didn't realize it at the time, when all of these strands came together and the seed was planted and germinated over the next couple of years while I was doing other things. And in the fall of 2018, I began to work on this book in earnest. And I discovered very quickly that, first of all, there's a ton of information about

the presidents, as you know. And second of all, pretty much every single one of them had a good food story, and I had to decide what to use and what not to use. So your book is called Dinner with the President, Food, Politics, and a History of Breaking Bread at the White House. And I love the chapter subtitles. First of all, I'll give the listener just a couple of examples here. Chapter five is called Abraham Lincoln, Corn, Gingerbread, and Thanksgiving. Chapter six is Ulysses S. Grant, the Drunken Tanner, the Military Genius, and the First State Dinner.

And I chuckled at chapter 13, Lyndon B. Johnson, how barbecue led to diplomacy and chili led to civil rights. That's what it says it all, right? Basically, yes. I want to get into some of the individual presidents, but I also wanted to highlight this specific paragraph, which I felt like really gives the reader sort of an on-ramp to what this book is going to be about. I love this. It says, presidential meals often had personal meaning and sometimes contained coded political messages. It's so interesting. James Garfield and Dwight Eisenhower liked bowls of squirrel soup. William Howard Taft had a taste for possum. Zachary Taylor died after eating cherries

and drinking cold milk. Woodrow Wilson had chronic indigestion and consumed dubious elixirs, yet he and Herbert Hoover saved millions of lives with innovative food policies. The gourmand Theodore Roosevelt and his gourmet cousin, Franklin D. Roosevelt, led the nation over bison steaks and terrapin soups. JFK liked clam chowder. LBJ favored chili. Richard Nixon ate cottage cheese almost every day. And George W. Bush liked ballpark hot dogs. The president's food choices reflected the state of the nation.

And I love how you say that presidential menus are like tree rings. Their ingredients and recipes and techniques are mini histories of how the country has evolved over time. And I just loved that characterization of it. Because today, if you were like, can I interest you in a bowl of squirrel soup? Most people would be like, I'm going to pass. I'm going to pass. Okay. First of all, I know people are now going to have their curiosity piqued about the squirrel soup. Why? Why with the squirrel soup? Well, because a lot of these presidents, first of all, they were either farmers or they grew up on the frontier, people like Abe Lincoln. And that's what one ate.

I mean, that's what was around. It was what they grew up with. And we all have favorite foods from our childhood. And to some people, squirrel stew was a comfort food. Dwight Eisenhower was probably the last president who actively ate squirrel stew. And he was brought up in Abilene where he was taught to hunt and fish and cook by an illiterate woodsman. And he would go on these days-long camping trips with his buddies and they would eat what they shot and fished for. And he loved that stuff. And he was arguably, I think, the best presidential cook.

He loved to cook. And Mamie, his wife, did not like to cook, but he took care of the family. As a general, he took care of his troops and always made sure that they were well-fed. And in fact, that gave them an edge during the D-Day invasion. As president of Columbia University, he publicized his mother's two-day vegetable soup, which is this fabulous creation that I've made. And it fills the house with these amazing aromas. And then at the White House, he was up on the roof grilling steaks or out back doing corn on the cob. And when they were on road trips, he would grill trout or fry it up in bacon grease. And so squirrel stew is not something that we eat so much anymore, except in parts of the South.

The same goes for terrapin stew, roasted possum. These are dishes that were considered the height of sophistication at one point, and they're now out of vogue. But we're eating things like jelly beans and kale and McBurgers. What I love about these White House menus is they show you the evolution of American cookery. They reflect the president's sort of inner being to a degree. Someone like Richard Nixon would eat a little ball of cottage cheese every single day for

lunch, which is just odd. But it also reflected the state of the nation and what we were all eating then. And so it is sort of like these tree rings. You see eras where certain things are popular and then they fall out of favor. And it's kind of a micro history of the country. Yeah. And you can see how, you know, like cottage cheese became like a popular diet food in the 70s and like weight watchers. Yes, yes. He was from California. And in fact, Gerald Ford also ate cottage cheese because he was trying to lose weight.

I love how you say too in the book that as the colonists established themselves in the new world in the 17th century. Much of their cooking was based on local ingredients prepared with English recipes. But as Americans won their independence in the 18th century, distinct regional cuisines emerged among the New England Puritans and the Pennsylvania Quakers and the Virginia planters and the Western frontiersmen. And it goes on to talk about access to spices and what is there around here to hunt and eat? Sometimes squirrels were the most plentiful. You could get a couple of them just sitting on your back porch. You don't have to go on a large hunting expedition to try to get some migrating caribou. So you begin in the book with George Washington,

the first kitchen. What was food like in the Washington administration? Well, it was actually quite good once he was president, but during the revolution, it was pretty meager. And I actually opened the Washington chapter with Washington and his troops hunkered down at Valley Forge in the winter of 1777. Valley Forge is this beautiful kind of large plateau due west of Philadelphia. The British were hunkered down in Philadelphia, partying over the winter, kind of saving their energy for a spring offensive. Washington and his troops were freezing. It was snowy and cold. Many of his troops didn't have footwear. They were sort of in bare feet in the snow and very threadbare clothing. They were living in these tents. It was pretty brutal. And it was a perfect location except for one thing,

which is there wasn't much food. They foraged everything they could, but there was in the middle of winter, so there wasn't a lot around. But then Washington made a curious discovery, which was, in fact, there was plenty of food. It's just that the shopkeepers and farmers were middle of winter, so there wasn't a lot around. But then Washington made a curious discovery, which was, in fact, there was plenty of food. It's just that the shopkeepers and farmers were hiding it because the British paid better for it. And so Washington made an example of a few of them. He flogged them in public. And pretty soon the word got out. And suddenly there was plenty of food in his larder, and it really helped his troops. Then spring came along. There was a big shad run. They feasted on the shad, gained their strength and eventually won the war.

And it was a very important turning point. Once Washington was president, he had a slave chef named Hercules. He should have had his own TV show. He was a very precise cook, very demanding. He had everything had to be clean. It had to be cooked correctly. It had to be served on time. It had to look good. It had to taste good. He was cooking over an open fire, which is very difficult. You need to be skilled for that. He was so valued by the Washingtons because he really held their White House on his shoulders that he was allowed to sell

the leftovers and he used the money to buy fine clothing. And he used to walk through the streets of Philadelphia, which is where the temporary Capitol was, with a top hat and a cane with a gold handle. And he was kind of a dandy and he liked to present himself. But he didn't much like being a slave. Imagine that. He escaped the night of Washington's 65th birthday, right towards the end of his second term, and disappeared, and they never found him. So the food in Washington's day, once he became president, was really quite good. And food played an important role in defining our national character. We had this kind of fusion cooking where it was indigenous ingredients like corn and turkey and venison combined with these British recipes, French technique, and the herbs and spices that the slaves had brought from Africa,

plus their own inspiration. And so this produced this wonderful early American cookery. And it was considered Virginia cuisine originally, which really meant Thomas Jefferson's cuisine, but it informed what we now think of as American cuisine. And so, you know, even from the very earliest days before we were a nation, our cookery was in process. And the historian Catherine Al Gore has this quote where she says the entire revolutionary enterprise was basically planned over meals around people's tables. And I think that's true. This sort of seemingly simple situation that when you lift the lid and look at it carefully, it becomes more complicated and interesting. I love that. And you're absolutely right. You can even see that in the musical Hamilton, where the idea that the room where it happens, where they're trying to sort out where will the nation's capital

be? And Aaron Burr is, of course, secretly very resentful that he's not invited to be in the room where it happens. But one of the lines in the song is about like, I'll plan the menu. How did food then differ between, say, Thomas Jefferson and George Washington, who had these large plantations where they grew lots of vegetables and they enslaved people to do all of this cultivation and cooking. And they had, especially with Thomas Jefferson, had spent considerable time in Europe and had trained chefs, some of whom he enslaved, cooking for him. How did that differ with presidents like John Adams, a frugal New Englander? This is one of the things about food is it's quite revealing of people's interior lives in

their circumstances. So George Washington and Thomas Jefferson were both slaveholders, and they had these plantations, which were these bountiful gardens. Jefferson in particular, and if anybody goes to visit Monticello today, you'll see them. I mean, they're like a combination of a laboratory and a kind of a school where you can learn about all these remarkable vegetables that he brought from around the world and a few fruits too. He was a real foodie ahead of his time. Jefferson had what we now call a vegetable forward menu, meaning a lot of veggies and a little bit of protein. But that was very unusual for their day.

And usually at that point, people were carnivorous and they ate large amounts of meat and just a little bit of vegetables. The difference with Adams was he was this frugal Yankee New Englander who liked codfish cakes and very simple meals. He didn't have a lot of money. And so when he moved into the White House, he and Abigail Adams were the first couple to live at the White House, which was still under construction when they moved in and was kind of a wreck. And yet Washington, which was still kind of a dusty backwater town at that point, there was a social scene. Yet Washington, which was still kind of a dusty backwater town at that point, there was a social scene and they were under pressure to host the first White House dinner at the People's House, so-called. The problem was that they didn't like to socialize that much. They were kind of academic.

They were very thoughtful people, but they like to stay at home and, you know, sit in front of the fire and read or talk amongst themselves. This is something I've noticed in presidential history is that sometimes these presidents are destined for things that they are ill-suited for. And this is one case where the Adamses were not well-suited to be the first hosts and yet destiny thrust this job upon them. At first they resisted. Abigail said she was waiting for some more of her China to come down from Massachusetts. But eventually, they did give in, and on New Year's Day, they hosted their first and only reception at the White House for the public. And it wasn't even a full dinner. It was sort of sweets and things to drink. I loved the chapter on Abraham Lincoln because we think of him as this sort of austere character. Some of it is based on his appearance, right? Like he's this

tall, skinny man with sunken cheekbones. We know that he's kind of depressed and undergoes this series of tragedies while he's, you know, in his early life and also while he's president, and he has the weight of the Civil War on him. But the description of the second inaugural ball of the Lincolns, where 4,000 revelers arrive in the reception room, and the food, the list of food that was served. Today, if a president had a list this long, we'd be like, come on. You talk about how there was a 250-foot-long table heaped with exquisitely prepared food from oyster stew to courses of beef, veal, poultry, game, pâtés, smoked meats, salads, cakes, tarts, jellies, ice cream, fruit ices, desserts, and coffees, and chocolate. Just the list of pastries is an entire paragraph long.

I know. It's hilarious. I actually include that menu in the book. You can see it for yourselves. It's really quite stunning. Yeah. Yes. Yes. I was like, my mouth kind of hung open, like ornamental pyramids of nougat and orange and caramel with coconuts. I mean, the list is not at all what you would peg on Abraham Lincoln's second inauguration. You know, the Civil War is happening, all of this tragedy. You would not necessarily think, like, let's have the biggest feast with the fanciest dessert table of seemingly all time. Well, remember the context. This is the second inauguration and the Civil War is almost over. U.S. Grant has won his great victory at Appomattox. The South is in disarray. There is this great sort of frantic energy in the air because the war is clearly ending. And let's not also forget that the Lincolns had lost their

son to a scarlet fever. So they were trying to put on the best possible face. And Mary Todd Lincoln had social aspirations. And so there was a lot going on at that meal. She wanted to show that she could really entertain at the highest style and that everything was normal. Everything was under control. And Abe also wanted to celebrate the impending end of the war. And so the dinner starts off with people slowly arriving and there's a general conversation. The band is playing hail to the chief and they come in, but the dinner doesn't get served till late. People start drinking to pass the time and dancing and whirling around and more and more of the energy gets kind of frantic. Finally, the doors are open to the dining room and the crowd surges in and they attack this table full of beautiful food and

they go kind of crazy. There's food on the floor. They're ripping down the curtains. They're smushing stuff into each other's faces. The Lincolns are there and they're kind of observing. And one of the Secret Service agents is saying it was just sort of sad. It was like you could see Lincoln's face watching this mayhem and wondering what was going on. But they stuck it out for a bit. A lot of people stayed the whole night and left at dawn, trashing the White House as they left. And in retrospect, he was assassinated not too long after that. In retrospect, that Secret Service agent said it was almost as if the crowd had a premonition of his death,

that they sensed that there was a sea change afoot and they were going to get a piece of the White House while they could. It's just a remarkable moment. I mean, almost like a movie or something. Totally. And the idea that today we would let thousands of people in to eat at the White House and they rip down the curtains and like trash the White House. It's absurd by today's standards when we think of a state dinner, which is, you know, like a red carpet kind of moment and a million TV cameras and lots of protocol. And it is so interesting for me to think about the guests of the Lincolns trashing the White House and stealing things from the White House. I'm Jenna Fisher. And I'm Angela Kinsey. We are best friends. And together we have the podcast Office Ladies, where we rewatched every single episode of The Office with insane behind the scenes stories, hilarious guests and lots of laughs.

Guess who's sitting next to me? Steve! It's Steve Carell in the studio! No, in the studio. Every Wednesday, we'll be sharing even more exclusive stories from the office and our friendship with brand new guests. And we'll be digging into our mailbag to answer your questions and comments. So join us for brand new Office Ladies 6.0 episodes every Wednesday. Plus, on Mondays, we are taking a second drink. You can revisit all the Office Ladies rewatch episodes every Monday with new bonus tidbits before every episode. Well, we can't wait to see you there. Follow and listen to

Office Ladies on the free Odyssey app and wherever you get your podcasts. I love the chapter title in chapter eight, From Wilson to Coolidge and Hoover, heartburn, hard cheese, and a hail of rotten tomatoes. How did food in the White House change in the early part of the 20th century? Well, it's fascinating because that was the era when the railroads were starting to bring goods all across the country. There would be timber and salmon from Maine and gold from California and coal from the Midwest. This really started during the U.S. Grant administration and kind of picked up speed later. And it was a remarkable time. So with all of these goods, there was

suddenly the kinds of foods one could never have before, particularly at a place like the White House. So that chapter that you mentioned, it begins with Woodrow Wilson, who had a very delicate stomach and could barely keep food down, and he ate the really bland food. He was another one who was sort of destined for something he wasn't suited for. Actually, his food policies ended up saving millions of lives, especially in Europe. It's really kind of ironic, a guy who didn't like food, who used food so effectively as a policy tool. So he would survive on these horrible nostrums and he would have a glass of grape juice with two raw eggs in it for breakfast,

glass of grape juice with two raw eggs in it for breakfast, which of course I had to try. It was in my little recipe section. Is it delicious? You know what? I'll tell you something. I really had to steal myself for that, and it turned out to be pretty good. Really? It's not something I'm going to have every day, but I channeled Rocky. It was much better than I thought it would be, but it's not a habit of mine. Then you had Calvin Coolidge, who followed Warren G. Harding, who had some of the worst food in the White House. Warren G. Harding should not have been president, did not want to be president. He spent a lot of his time chasing women around the White House, impregnating one, getting blackmailed by another. And he held something called the poker cabinet, where he would confiscate liquor during prohibition and then drink it in the White House. confiscate liquor during prohibition and then drink it in the White House. But he's playing poker. Calvin Coolidge was his vice president and was his polar opposite. He was a taciturn Yankee from Vermont. He kept chickens in the backyard of the White House, but they put the

chicken coop on top of a mint patch planted by Teddy Roosevelt for his mint juleps. And so the Coolidge chickens tasted like mint. And he had very obscure tastes. He ground his own oatmeal. He would only eat certain things, regardless of what was being served his guests. He would complain about the cost of food all the time. And yet his wife, Grace, was this lovely woman who actually liked to cook and would bake apple pies at the White House and so on. And his section is called Hard Cheese because up at Plymouth Notch in Vermont, they still make the Coolidge cheese, which is called Plymouth cheese. And it

tastes like cheddar. It's quite good. And then the hail of rotten tomatoes was Herbert Hoover, who helped Wilson with his food program during the First World War and afterwards and helped to save many lives and was a real hero and was a bit of a gourmet himself. He had worked around the world as a mining executive and he liked to have good food. But then the depression came and kind of overwhelmed him. And this guy who was known as America's food czar, because he'd been so important, ended up being pelted by rotten cabbages and tomatoes. And there again, food becomes a symbol, a metaphor for other things, people's discontent in that case. Speaking of vegetables, George H.W. Bush was famous for refusing to eat broccoli, saying essentially like, listen, I am the president and if I don't want to eat it, I'm not gonna.

Yeah. I never liked broccoli. My mother forced me to eat it as a kid. And now I'm the president. And he had a real hissy fit. I'm not going to eat broccoli. Yes. Yes. The quote that you have in here is, I do not like broccoli. I haven't liked it since I was a little kid. My mother made me eat it. And I'm the president of the United States and I'm not going to eat any more broccoli. And some people were big mad about that. Oh, yeah. There's always a political aspect of these stories. So this became known as Broccoli Gate. The farmers were so upset with this that they brought 10 tons of broccoli to the White House

in protest. Now, of course, the president didn't like broccoli, but his wife, Barbara Bush, actually did like broccoli. So she made a point of saying, we're going to use it. And the stuff that we don't use, I mean, this is 10 tons of broccoli. It's a lot. So they gave it to soup kitchens and homeless shelters. And the funny thing was that there was a state dinner for the Polish president and the Polish don't eat broccoli. They've never heard of it. And they didn't understand what broccoli gate was. It's kind of one of those moments that has lived years beyond the president himself. I also found it really interesting when you describe how George H.W. Bush bought a gallon of milk at a grocery store in 1992 and then said he was amazed at the checkout scanner.

And it really just highlighted how this man has not been grocery shopping for himself in many years. Yeah. Many years. Little out of touch with the reality of most of his voters. And so that was actually a big moment. People think it was a kind of a trivial thing, but it seemed to encapsulate his cluelessness. And the other thing is, you know, Reagan had branded himself with jelly beans and George H.W., who was Reagan's vice president and then became president, tried to do the same by eating pork rinds, but it didn't come across as genuine. It came across as he was kind of faking

it. He was this thin, waspy guy from Connecticut who'd gone to Groton and Yale, but then reinvented himself as a Texas oil man. And it just seemed like he was faking it. And so it boomeranged on him, whereas Reagan's jelly beans really worked for him, really kind of helped him reach across the aisle and to entice voters. Yeah, you absolutely believed that he had a little dish of jelly beans and he took a couple and popped them in his mouth when he walked by. That was a very believable story. And you're absolutely right. It was harder to swallow this idea of like, come on, you're eating pork rinds. I don't know.

I don't know if I believe that. Hot sauce on them. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. And I wanted to get to to Bill Clinton because he was from Arkansas and he had a certain type of food that he preferred and his weight became something that people made fun of him for. And now here we are. I don't know if this is still true, but for a period of time, Bill Clinton was or still is vegan. Right. I mean, isn't that a

great narrative arc? Here's this guy who grew up on fast food and greasy, fatty things. And we can all relate to that. You know, it's good. Our brains are wired to like that stuff. But he had a weak heart and he had several heart operations. And it was really a problem. And Hillary was worried about this. And so she hired a new White House chef, a guy named Walter Scheib, who specialized in clean food, fusion cooking using Asian and Latin American ingredients,

very inventive cook. And Hillary's mission was to save her husband, essentially. And she brought in people like Dr. Dean Ornish as a cardiologist who helped a lot of celebrities. And he gave Clinton some very specific advice on how to change his menu. And he said, look, your genes are not your destiny. You can actually change your diet and change your physical health. And so they slowly but surely started doing this. By the time he had ended his second term, he was a vegetarian, his health had improved, and then he ultimately became a vegan. What I've heard is that he's slipped a little bit on that. He's not a strict vegan any longer, but he does eat a vegetable forward menu and the proteins are very lean.

You can see in photographs, he's lost a lot of weight. Yes. And he's the only president that I know of who was a vegetarian slash vegan. And I wouldn't be surprised though, if in the future, as the nation's diet becomes more vegetable oriented slowly, that we end up having a full-on vegetarian president. I also thought the Obamas had a unique take on White House food. I would love to hear more about the Obamas' view on White House cooking. And of course, Michelle Obama was very famous for encouraging people to exercise.

This was kind of represented a little bit of a change. What was happening in the Obama White House? Well, they followed George W. Bush, who was famous for loving burgers and nachos and ballpark hot dogs, where he would have Little League games on the White House lawn and was kind of a regular Joe. He was equated with Joe Sixpack, although George W. didn't drink. And the change that the Obamas brought was, as you said, a much healthier diet, more emphasis on exercise. Barack Obama was raised in Hawaii, but also in Indonesia, and he had a very global palette. And you saw this when he did this famous television special with Anthony Bourdain in Hanoi, where they ate spicy

bun cha noodles in a little shop on the street. And it was a great moment. It went viral around the world. It was one of the things that defined his presidency. And he was very comfortable using chopsticks and eating spicy noodles. I mean, I remember when he and Michelle would go on date nights and they would hit all the hot restaurants and he knew what to order. And I was totally jealous. And of course she had her garden, which was a really interesting moment because it was considered almost a radical act to dig up a plot in the beautifully manicured, to dig up a plot in the beautifully manicured, highly fertilized White House lawn and plant vegetables that were being eaten by people. It was sort of seemed crazy to some. And yet, in fact, it was a real throwback because many of the early presidents had vegetable gardens

in their backyard because that's how they got their veggies. But she also understood that it was a political tool. It was a way of getting people to pay attention to their weight and their health. We were facing, and still are, an obesity epidemic, which leads to diabetes and all sorts of horrible diseases. And this came from a place of concern in her as a mother, seeing her daughters gaining weight, not exercising much. And she had this kind of primal reaction to try to help her daughters. And one of the things they did is they hired a guy named Sam Cass as a personal chef, and he specialized in healthy food. He joined them at the White House and as their private cook up in the private quarters. And then he took on a policy

role and he actually helped to spearhead the garden effort along with Alice Waters and really educate the public about eating more vegetables and less junk food. If you could have the cuisine of one administration's White House, it would go back in time and like, I'm going to have a dinner with so-and-so and I want to eat what they were eating. Which one would you choose? Oh, that's such a tough question because there's so many really good ones. There's some bad ones too. You know, you had U.S. Grant had this wonderful chef named Valentino Mela, who was a Sicilian who was known as the professor because he was such a precise cook and he knew so much. And he cooked for the very first he was such a precise cook and he knew so much. And he

cooked for the very first state dinner for a foreign dignitary. Then you had, of course, Thomas Jefferson. It kind of all starts with Jefferson. And I'm tempted to say Jefferson, but actually, I would have loved to have eaten at the Kennedy White House. Jackie Kennedy was a Francophile. She very intentionally modeled her White House on the court of Louis XIV, the Sun King, who used food as a political and diplomatic tool as a way to keep his friends close and his enemies closer. And she understood that and emulated it. And so she hired René Verdun, who's a wonderful French chef who kind of revolutionized the

cuisine of the White House. And she also used entertaining as a way of sort of soft power diplomacy when you bring a bunch of Nobel laureates to the White House, or you bring André Malraux, who was the French cultural minister. And at that dinner, you arranged to have the Mona Lisa loaned to the United States. you arranged to have the Mona Lisa loaned to the United States. I mean, these things are culturally phenomenal moments that had never been done before. And it totally enhanced her husband's agenda politically. It redefined the role of first lady. And it was just kind of a magical scene. And I opened the Kennedy chapter with this wonderful description by Leonard Bernstein of being invited to a state dinner and then subsequently going to a private dinner with the Kennedys upstairs in the private quarters. And it's almost like he was transported to another dimension.

You know, it was just such a magical thing. And then, of course, it all came crashing down when Kennedy was assassinated. It was a very special time at a particular hinge moment in history from the 50s to the 60s, sort of the black and white 50s when Eisenhower was in the White House to the technicolor 60s when the Kennedys were this young, beautiful couple, kind of this golden, almost aristocracy. And it would have just been a very fascinating thing to experience. Yeah, Jackie didn't phone it in. just been a very fascinating thing to experience. Yeah. Jackie didn't phone it in. Jackie didn't phone anything in. Everything was done to the utmost, to the best of her ability. In addition, it had to look good. It had to have significance. I can not totally understand why you would choose her or choose that administration.

We could keep talking about literally the entire book because the whole thing is absolutely fascinating. I read very widely in history and I absolutely enjoyed every single page of this book. So thank you so much for your work. So nice. And thank you for being here today. I think people are absolutely going to love reading this. Well, I really hope so. And I would say to you what Julia always said. Bon appetit. We could have talked for so much longer.

There is so much more to talk about. You're going to have to read Dinner with the President, Food, Politics, and a History of breaking bread at the White House. You can also visit Alex Prudhomme's website. He is going on tour. You might have a chance to meet him or go to one of his live events. I can't tell you how much I really, really enjoyed this book. Thanks for being here today. This show is researched and hosted by me, Sharon McMahon. Our executive producer is Heather Jackson. Our audio producer is Jenny Snyder. And if you enjoyed this episode, would you consider leaving us a rating or review on

your favorite podcast platform? That helps us so much. And we always love to see your shares and tags on social media. We'll see you again soon.