“Though the food was good and wholesome,” Fields wrote, “Let us say its presentation was poorly done, with no desire to please or excite the appetite.”, There are few records of what the honored heads of state thought of these meals, but a letter Ernest Hemingway wrote to his mother-in-law in 1937 about his dinner at the White House is rather illustrative. Leave room for dessert! Mayor LaToya Cantrell was unable to join a meeting at the White House this morning because she tested positive for COVID-19 during a health and safety screening, her office reports. Trump, who became president over two years ago, has so far hosted only one. The president, perhaps preoccupied by Congress’s ongoing investigation into grounds for his impeachment, perhaps shunning events covered by the evil liberal media, instead spent that evening at the Veterans of Foreign Wars 25th Annual Congressional Banquet, where he was presented with a case of five commemorative medallions. It’s not an entirely personal matter. Starting with the famous Chez Panisse restaurant in Berkeley in the 1970s, Alice Waters, Wolfgang Puck, and other noted California chefs created a food revolution that “highlighted American ingredients and a kind of simplicity in cooking, that great cooking begins with great ingredients,” Pollan said. This time, the queen was served medallions of Maine lobster and cucumber mousse with aurora sauce, crown roast of lamb, galettes fines herbes, potato croquettes, bouquets of vegetables, watercress and Belgian endive salad, St. Andre and chevre cheeses, and pistachio marquise with fresh raspberries for dessert. “I think the public is more, let’s just say, anti-aristocratic about these things,” Miller said. The concept of a salad morphed from a cream-cheese-smothered-watercress monstrosity to a garden in a bowl. “Hans Raffert was a very nice person, but cooking-wise he was very old-fashioned,” said Pierre Chambrin, who began serving as executive chef in August 1992 after Raffert decided to retire. The structure is the same for every state dinner: A sherry with every first course, a Sauterne for the next course, a Burgundy for the following, and a Champagne at the end. We also see the first appearance of many dishes that are mainstays on the state dinner menus all the way to George H.W. Chambrin told FP that 99 percent of what he bought was local, organic American food. Eisenhower’s biggest dinner distinction is the transition between the austerity of the 1930s and 1940s to the postwar boom. His official dinner for South Korean President Kim Young-sam in November 1993 offered ginger-almond ice cream made with 2 percent milk to keep the fat content down. Johnson even hosted two state dinners within three days of each other on the week of June 8, 1964. No word on whether the future president was grounded without dinner. President Biden gives remarks ahead of his meeting with CEOs at the White House about how the country and businesses can recover from the coronavirus pandemic. A state dinner with Chancellor Ludwig Erhard of West Germany scheduled for Nov. 25, 1963, was to feature Boston fillet of sole Verdi, roast sirloin Concorde, spinach à la crème, mousse of Roquefort, and bombe glacée nelusko with petits fours for dessert. But he apparently didn’t like to share if he didn’t have to. Herbert Hoover: Gumbo, lobster, roast lamb, Virginia ham rubbed with currant jelly and sprinkled with breadcrumbs, egg timbales, corn soup, homemade candy, griddle cakes, fried cornmeal mush, Oregon black cherries. Grover Cleveland: Corned beef and cabbage, oatmeal, steak and eggs, brown bread, pickled herring, and snickerdoodles. While compiling this list I attempted as often as possible to learn not what the presidents ate at state functions and inaugural dinners but during their solitary breakfasts and family suppers — in other words, their comfort foods. Harry Truman: Hot cereal, buttermilk, fried chicken, cornmeal dumplings with turnip greens, cornbread with sorghum molasses bought on trips home to Missouri, and candied carrots and sweet potatoes. The Gipper was three state dinners shy of beating LBJ’s record, but 52 is still four times as many as those held by George W. Bush or Barack Obama. Benjamin Harrison: Oysters, consommé, bouillon, terrapin, lettuce salad, corn, fig pudding, sausage rolls, chicken salad, and maraconi. The menus could not be found by the Gerald R.  Ford Presidential Library and Museum. Guests would wash these down with a tall glass of water, because Prohibition. The White House attitude toward rice wine had come a long way from 1933, when sake was among the many gifts delivered from around the globe after Prohibition was repealed, according to Fields, the former White House butler. Befitting one of the most ambitious presidents of the 20th century, Johnson also holds the record for most state dinners: a staggering 54. Forget the “Me Decade.” For the White House, the 1980s might as well have been the Mousse Decade. Could President Trump's refusal to concede impact the 2021 turnover? Trump is en route to his Mar-a-Lago Florida Resort. If Roosevelt kept his state dinners humble to show the United States he was willing to sacrifice, too, Eisenhower helped show America that, “Hey, it’s okay to be fancy again.”. The sausages the queen normally brought with her on visits abroad stayed home, the Washington Post reported. (Across the pond, that didn’t stop British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, whose accumulated debt to his wine merchant reached the equivalent of $75,000 today.) Eisenhower would have thrown his soup bowl in disgust (or at least asked whether it could be garnished with mint gelatin). The president and their spouse make their visitors, usually heads of state themselves, feel welcome and ready to reaffirm their relationship with the commander in chief. The most significant departure from other state dinners of the era was the appearance every so often of a Georgia dish. The ever-moderate and incremental Eisenhower was, in fact, the first president to serve California wines at White House social functions—but only at luncheons and dinners lower on the social totem pole than the state dinner. J.P. … Bush: wild rice, bibb lettuce salads, artichokes, mousse. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post via Getty Images). Foreign Policy has collected menus for White House state dinners dating back nearly 86 years. Although the courses themselves don’t differ much from Nixon’s, the return to English menus also signals a larger, Johnsonian effort by the Fords to present meals “representing everything American at the White House,” according to Betty Ford’s social secretary Maria Downs. Calf’s head soup. After creating these visualizations, some general trends quickly became clear. In fact, he said precisely that at one dinner. Julia Child’s epochal book Mastering the Art of French Cooking was published in 1961, the year Kennedy took office. On Nov. 1, social secretary Nancy Tuckerman wrote a memo to appointments secretary Kenneth O’Donnell complaining that the suggested guest list, which included Robert F. Kennedy, Milton Berle, Marlene Dietrich, Aaron Copland, and Martha Graham, was much too large. We arranged that data into graphs known as treemaps, in which data are represented by a series of boxes that vary in size and color depending on quantity. An account from the Washington Post in May 1991 reveals he was given strict instructions by George H.W. The Biden administration has made several changes to the White House website with an … If historians judged presidents purely on their culinary performance, Jimmy Carter would be ranked one of the all-time greats. His detailed recipe for vegetable soup was printed in an Iowa newspaper in 1954. What do you think will happen when a woman becomes president of the United States? President Biden and first lady Jill Biden arrive at the White House on Wednesday. George W. Bush: Biscuits, chicken pot pie, grilled cheese sandwiches made with Kraft singles and white bread, huevos rancheros, and deviled eggs. A country that knew of Chinese food mainly as chop suey and egg rolls was exposed to a variety of new dishes during the media blitz—mu shu pork and Peking duck, for instance. He was feted by Brezhnev with caviar with butter, coulibiac (a type of pie), a “seafood assortment” (including dried meat from the back of a sturgeon), woodland game birds, fresh cucumbers and tomatoes, borscht, starry sturgeon with champignon mushrooms, Russian-style meat and potato stew, and strawberry mousse. Oftentimes the provided wine made reference to the guest of honor’s country. James Madison: Chicken and okra soup, pickled eggs, corn oysters, popovers, seed cakes, gingerbread, ice cream, and Yard of Flannel. Claim: U.S. President Warren G. Harding wagered and lost White House china in a poker game. Broccoli. By December 1987, tensions had thawed, and the White House even threw a state dinner for Mikhail Gorbachev. Copyright Foreign Policy, 2019  |   “[Chambrin] is an expert in French cuisine. Pork (other than ham and one pork belly canapé in 2016) appears never to have been served at a state dinner. Although the United States today puts the successful businessman on a bigger and more beautiful pedestal than during the New Deal era, one thing that’s remained the same is the country’s disdain for the elite. But all too often the President merely picked at his food.” — Francois Rysavy, A Treasury of White House Cooking. Before boarding Marine One, the president … Bush had been part of Washington culture for a long time and loved to entertain. Main courses transformed from roast turkey to “Tournedos Heloise” (steak with black truffle sauce). Chicken and waffles and venison tartare with truffle vinaigrette somehow occupied the same menu space. President Biden departed the White House for Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland. For President Ernesto Zedillo’s state dinner six Octobers later, guests dined on spiced partridge breast, toasted pear and poppyseed bread, acorn squash with smoked chili sauce, a salad of fall field greens, and a sweet corn and tequila ice cream mold with lime sauce for dessert. Martin Van Buren: Boar’s head, oysters, doughnuts, figs, raisins, and apples. Indeed, one reason Scheib got the job was because his predecessor, Pierre Chambrin, was reluctant to cook the low-fat cuisine desired by Hillary. The Roosevelts might have been American aristocracy, but when it came to the dinner table, the radical spirit of the New Deal was very much in play. * This includes the planned menu for his canceled Nov. 25, 1963 state dinner honoring Ludwig Erhard, the chancellor of West Germany. Yet Trump followed up on his fast-food pledges with his infamous spread for the Clemson University football team during the government shutdown, when Trump dipped shallowly into his own pockets to provide 300 hamburgers. They’re not the worst—nothing will beat Roosevelt’s and Truman’s cream cheese salads—but the salads are dull and standardized in contrast to his elaborate choices elsewhere. Carter’s bridge-building efforts were another reason for the whirl at the table. Nearly every state dinner under Johnson included beef or steak, whereas Clinton, whose presidency coincided with the low-fat-crazed 1990s, served beef only twice. Is it better to serve the foods of the guest of honor’s country or to demonstrate a universal culinary language? And that wasn’t even technically Ford’s first state dinner—or his first state dinner with King Hussein. The king later dined on cold Columbia River salmon en bellevue (yup, more aspic) with paillettes dorées. Oct 9, 2012 - Jackie stepped up the quality of the cuisine, toned down the number of courses and add a French twist to her White House menus. Privacy Policy. The menu was not what we’ve come to expect from a president deemed by the New York Times to be “the nation’s fast food president.” It’s more sophisticated fare than the food Trump served China’s Xi Jinping at an April 6, 2017, dinner at his Mar-a-Lago resort, for example. “George W. Bush didn’t like the food.”. Wines came predominantly from France, but at his state dinner for Peruvian President Manuel Prado Ugarteche on Sept. 19, 1961, Kennedy became the first president to serve state dinner guests a wine from the United States: Almaden pinot noir. Like Eisenhower’s state dinners, the elder Bush’s 32 such gatherings were a transitional phase between eras of state dinner cuisine. Ted Strickland at … The wineries are notably all from France or Spain. Ask Bill Clinton—or Harry S. Truman, who literally served fried chicken and turkey at state dinners. That goat cheese gateau shows the world what the United States thinks tastes good, in 2018, as interpreted by the Trump administration. John F. Kennedy: Broiled bacon, New England chowder, lamb chops, steak, fish on Fridays, mashed potatoes, baked beans, corn muffins, grilled cheese sandwiches, quiches, soufflés, and beer. Had the years 1964 to 1968 really happened, or were they simply a frenzied, sirloin-and-spuds fever dream? Nixon’s opening volley to Brezhnev would be returned five days later, when the premier hosted a “reciprocal dinner” at the Soviet Embassy. He mixed it along with the other gift wines into spiked punches for receptions instead. (Abbie Rowe/National Park Service/Harry S. Truman Presidential Library and Museum/National Archives). “Because most of it sucked!” Pollan said. Nancy Reagan is served an orange surprise dessert during the dinner for Japanese Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone on April 30, 1987. “Generally beef has long been seen as the meat of aspiration, of striving,” said the food writer Adrian Miller, whose 2017 book The President’s Kitchen Cabinet describes the history of African-Americans in the White House kitchen. Kennedy was assassinated on Nov. 22, and the dinner was canceled. Two people, one of whom said they were there to meet with the president, approached U.S. Secret Service officers outside the White House Saturday and were arrested after admitting to … Pat Nixon and Jackie Kennedy were good friends, according to Seale, despite the bitterness of the 1960 election. George W. Bush never possessed the makings of a prolific state dinner host. When Chef Verdon quit in December 1965, they hired Henry Haller as his replacement. Andrew Johnson: Fresh milk and butter (which a White House dairy was established to provide), popcorn, roasted apples and chestnuts, hoppin’ john, canvasback duck, wild turkey, pine bark stew, sweet potato pone, sweet potato pie, and sweet potato pudding. It was a decidedly more modest affair. But the state dinner’s future is uncertain. The celebrity chefs Marcus Samuelsson, Rick Bayless, Anita Lo, and Mario Batali each had a turn in the White House kitchen. His son would later say the President’s coffee cup was “more in the nature of a bathtub.” — Poppy Cannon and Patricia Brooks, The Presidents’ Cookbook. She urged him and the president to do “a great deal of cutting.”. That was over eight times the number hosted by Truman. “It seems to me that style and entertaining take a back seat to everything else that is going on today,” Ruta said. Eleanor Roosevelt cut two courses off of dinner, according to Fields: “If there was an entree, soup would usually be cut out. That’s not what we serve here at the White House,” said White House press secretary Dee Dee Myers upon Chambrin’s departure in March 1994. “They were not tolerant of mistakes. “Don’t answer that!” Barbara Bush interjected, appearing out of the blue. “I was told there would be no waste, as in the Hoover Administration, and that Mrs. Roosevelt did not believe in elaborate dinners,” former White House head butler Alonzo Fields recounted in his book, My 21 Years in the White House. * A total of 23 menus were used for this dataset. https://www.businessinsider.com/white-house-food-trump-events-2019-6 The generation gap between George H.W. Alice Waters had been arguing for it since Clinton’s inauguration, but it took until 2009 for Michelle Obama to finally plant a 1,100-square-foot organic vegetable garden on the South Lawn, in a tribute to the localism that had come to become such a dominant part of the American food scene. Presidents  |   Or which American cooking is most American. The menu for Eisenhower’s June 4, 1958, state dinner for President Theodor Heuss of West Germany could not be found by the Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library. The family's pair of German shepherds, Champ and Major, will restore the time-honored tradition of keeping pets in the White House after former President Donald Trump opted against one. More than three-quarters of his state dinners included beef, lamb, or veal. Those are for liberal elitists like Obama and Hillary Clinton. President Donald Trump and First Lady Melania Trump depart the White House for the last time. * It technically wasn’t a state dinner, but it was close enough. But whether Bush was willing or not, thanks to first lady Laura Bush his presidency still made state dinner history. These were all on the menu when U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt hosted Britain’s King George VI at a 1939 White House state dinner. 3. Matthews. Development by C.K. Yes, somehow aspic survived the Cold War. — -- President Trump will enjoy a traditional Thanksgiving dinner this evening with "friends and family at the winter White House," the first lady's spokesperson said. Bush engaged with her anyway. Will the “first gentleman” be in charge of food, menu, and dinner planning at the White House? In a ceremony at the White House, President Obama awarded Biden the Presidential Medal of Freedom with Distinction — the nation’s highest civilian honor. For the grand duchess of Luxembourg’s state dinner in April 1963, for example, she was served Bombe Glacée Grand Duchesse. Photo of Clinton courtesy of Penn State Archives, via. His dinners were so French, the menu for United Kingdom Prime Minister Harold Wilson’s state dinner in January 1970 referred to a Brussels sprouts dish as “Choux de Bruxelles.”. (Over the last decade, age has cut down on her travel plans, though she hosted both Obama and Trump in the U.K.) At her May 7, 2007, state dinner, the queen was served dover sole almondine; saddle of spring lamb with chanterelle sauce; chive pizzelle with American caviar; roasted artichokes, pequillo peppers, and olives; spring pea soup with fernleaf lavender; an arugula, Savannah mustard, and mint romaine salad with Champagne dressing; and “Rose Blossoms” for dessert, which were pulled-sugar roses surrounded by tiny white cakes. And plenty of beer.”. Although not a chef, Graber was “more of a foodie than what is now considered a foodie,” Ruta recalled. The late 1970s saw so much growth in the American wine market that by 1980, sales surpassed that of hard liquor. If Ronald Reagan were president today, it’s likely his 52 extravagant, star-studded state dinners would paint him as an out-of-touch elitist, too. The Orson Welles ad campaign of the late 1970s clearly had an effect. The garden appeared in more than one state dinner salad, including the White House Garden chopped salad with White House honey gastrique served to German Chancellor Angela Merkel on June 7, 2011. Hickey. That’s as many as Richard Nixon threw his first year in office. Theodore Roosevelt: Hard boiled eggs, hominy, rolls, milk crackers, cantaloupe, tea (especially Caravan and Hu-Kwa), chicken (especially fried chicken with gravy), dandelion greens, fiddlehead fern salad, pigs in blankets, liver and bacon, kidney stew, Indian pudding, white wine, shad and shad roe, game meats, oysters, green turtle soup, and coffee, into which Roosevelt sometimes stirred as many as seven lumps of sugar. On the one hand, the dinner is devoted to the guest of honor. In his second term, the state dinners get noticeably fancier, matching the boom times of the 1950s. President Donald Trump speaks during a state dinner for French President Emmanuel Macron on April 24, 2018. The menus for Presidents John F. Kennedy through George H.W. Calderón was served herb green ceviche of Hawaiian opah, Oregon wagyu beef in Oaxacan black mole, black bean tamalon, grilled green beans, a sesame-cilantro cracker, and a jicama salad with oranges, grapefruit, and pineapple and citrus vinaigrette. Dwight D. Eisenhower: Roast stuffed breast of veal, beef stew, oxtail soup, chicken noodle soup, rare steak, quail hash, trout, corn pudding, string beans, succotash, fluffy turnips, and prune whip. State dinner cuisine from the 1930s through the 1950s was relatively modest—almost like a traditional Thanksgiving dinner. Ford was saying, “Don’t worry. When Bush hosted President Carlos Salinas de Gortari in October 1989, the menu featured supreme of sole in Champagne, roast saddle of veal farci, marquise potatoes, spinach timbale, and a watercress and Belgian endive salad. Choire Dishes like the grilled cannon of Colorado lamb with garlic fried milk for Chinese President Xi Jinping in 2015 didn’t exactly jive with Michelle Obama’s crusade against childhood obesity, but the White House’s continued emphasis on fresh, local ingredients ensured Obama state dinners were more heart-friendly than an evening with, say, Harry S. Truman. Priyatnogo appetita! * This number excludes state dinners held before World War II under the original definition, which referred to three dinners held every winter for the cabinet, U.S. diplomats, and the Supreme Court, respectively. Kennedy was a global president, starting the Peace Corps and making travel a far more frequent role of the presidency, with eight state visits in his less than three years in office—three times the rate of Eisenhower. He maintains that these changes were a political move, not a result of Clinton’s own foodie tastes. JFK is only one of two presidents known to have served waffle fries as a side dish (the other is Lyndon B. Johnson, but there’s still time for President Trump). James Buchanan: Beef, mutton, venison, ham, terrapin, calf’s head dressed as terrapin, Pennsylvania Dutch specialties such as scrapple and succotash, moss rose cake, peach charlotte, Confederate pudding and Jeff Davis pie, grape pie, and ice cream. Gerald Ford: Waffles with strawberries and sour cream, german apple pancakes, white bread, prime rib, new potatoes, green beans, ice cream, spaghetti and meatballs, liver and onions, lean pork chops, and lemon pudding. President Donald Trump’s April 24, 2018, state dinner with French President Emmanuel Macron lacked celebrity chefs or tree bark, but—perhaps surprisingly—the menu showed good taste and followed the “American ingredients with at least one flavor from the guest of honor’s country” formula set in the 1990s. This is not a joke: Truman served both Dutch Prime Minister Willem Drees and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill Fritos.
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