You can learn a lot about people and the times they lived in by looking at what they ate. That includes presidents.
Here & Now‘s Scott Tong talks to chef and writer Bennett Rea of “Cookin’ with Congress,” about his collection of presidents’ recipes and what it’s like to eat like certain presidents for a day.
Cottage cheese figures prominently in the diets of some past presidents. Former President Richard Nixon liked his with ketchup. And while former President William Howard Taft didn’t eat cottage cheese, he did eat a lot of other food, including possum with sweet potatoes.
8 questions with Bennett Rea
Where did you find these presidential recipes?
“One of the most delightful parts of this project is that so many of them come from analog source material. So old cookbooks, old cook booklets, you know, the spiral-bound type. Great biographies out there. And even some archival New York Times, Washington Post articles can dig into the later presidents, [former President] Jimmy Carter and [former President] John F. Kennedy.”
A lot of them strike me as rather weird. Did you pick the weird ones, or is this just what you found?
“Yeah, you got me there. I definitely am drawn to the ones that are neat or different, or I kind of follow the fun in terms of recipes. And I find if it’s, you know, a favorite recipe of theirs or one that they have themselves submitted to the world. The ones that have the most fascinating ingredients or a strange name or something we’ve never heard of, like ‘mugwump in a hole.’ That was a [former President] Chester Arthur favorite.”
You ate like Taft for a day. A typical Taft dinner included possum with sweet potatoes. Is there something serious you learned about particular presidents based on what they eat?
“Yeah. I started this whole series out of curiosity. I wanted the experiential side of presidents.
“I saw some of the recipes. I tested them out. I’ve eaten, I think, 41 out of the 45 presidents so far.
“But you kind of learn a lot in different periods of time, I think.
“There’s like a 40-year span where everyone’s eating steak for breakfast, which is fascinating. And then there’s a 40-year span where cottage cheese gets really trendy. And so that’s [a] consistent lunch, whether you’re having it with a martini like [former President] Gerald Ford or with ketchup like Nixon. So, I think you learn a lot about specific eras of time, but also about the presidents themselves — who treats food as something they enjoy and something to be treasured and something that brings people together, and who treats food like fuel.”
I made one recipe from your collection: crustless coconut pie. It sounds really good: milk and eggs, nutmeg, coconut flakes and tiny bit of flour. Give us the reveal. What president does this come from, and what do we learn from this?
“Yeah. Crustless coconut pie. This is a [former President] Barack Obama recipe, actually. So, a more recent president. It’s delicious. It’s custardy. It’s also just kind of goes along with a lot of these other foods that he ate on a daily basis. But unique, efficient, a little on the healthier side. Kind of fits with Obama’s general image.”
Former President Franklin Delano Roosevelt ate chicken of aspic. What is that?
“Aspics are so interesting to me because they started off as this very high cuisine, right? A French cuisine, very popular, and really only for the elites or only for wealthy folks for many years. And then eventually Jell-O came along and kind of brought gelatin to the masses.
“Aspics are a gelatin dish, right? So, you’ll see something like asparagus and duck suspended in what looks like what we would call Jell-O. They’re usually savory. They usually have meat, fish, sometimes you see eggs involved as well.
“But it’s very time-intensive. It takes days to boil the calf’s feet; in the 1700s, 1800s, that’s what they were using. It’s a very expensive process. It’s laborious. And so it was not very popular for most people to be eating gelatin in the states, at least until the [1940s] and [1950s] and beyond.”
What was in Roosevelt’s recipe?
“There’s not much to it, but when you see it, it’s mostly just shredded chicken suspended in a broth-based gelatin. So, it’s salty. It’s brothy. It almost might be better on a sandwich, like between two pieces of bread with a little bit of mayonnaise, rather than just kind of dug into straight as a luncheon item.
“The funny part about [Roosevelt]’s entire culinary history and his daily diet is he didn’t like the food that he was eating in the White House very much. So, we don’t know whether he even enjoyed this dish. He had a very worldly palate. But due to the Great Depression and Eleanor Roosevelt’s very keen insights on maybe not eating fancy in the White House, he was not eating food that he adored.”
Nixon ate ham mousse. You’ve tried all these things. Are you somebody who is OK eating a lot of different kinds of things, or did you become OK at it?
“I think I always had a curiosity, and I don’t kind of cross off a lot of foods into, ‘Oh, I won’t try that.’
“I’m constantly training myself to try new foods by doing this series, and there’s really relatively few that I wouldn’t try in the world. I’ll try that, you know, 100-year-old duck egg or whatever. I’ll give it a shot.”
Is there anything you would suggest we try because you think it’s good?
“I really like a lot of the kind of Gilded Age food that came about. So, you know, Taft, this is post-Gilded Age, but Taft’s rich lobster stew, some of the odder recipes from [former President William] McKinley and [former President Herbert] Hoover, even. There’s caramel tomatoes. There’s a four-color cream fruit pie.
“I’m at work on a cookbook with all of this. So soon, there will be more recipes for folks to go to. I would also recommend Harry Truman’s day-of-eating is particularly interesting, filled with vegetables and it’s got a great pineapple fairy fluff at the end, that’s light and flavorful, and it’s kind of a perfect way to end a full day of eating.”
This interview was edited for clarity.
Recipes
Former President Barack Obama’s crustless coconut pie
- Former President Richard Nixon’s ham mousse
- Former President George Washington’s Yorkshire pie
- Former President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s chicken in aspic
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Julia Corcoran produced and edited this interview for broadcast with Micaela Rodríguez. Michael Scotto adapted it for the web.
This article was originally published on WBUR.org.
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