Journalist and Julia Child’s grandnephew Alex Prud’homme (My Life in France; The French Chef in America) has crafted a finely balanced, scrupulously researched account of gastronomy and tradition, historical past and politics in Dinner With the President: Food, Politics, and a History of Breaking Bread at the White House.
Even for these of us who paid the barest of consideration in historical past class, Prud’homme’s distinctive writing and good nostril for a energetic anecdote make the e book’s portraits of 26 American presidents vibrant, entertaining and related. Food in the White House is each “sustenance and metaphor,” he writes. In a literal sense, these meals replicate the preferences of presidential palates. For instance, George H.W. Bush despised broccoli; Barack Obama had a “global palate”; Richard Nixon didn’t care what he ate; Abraham Lincoln cherished his cornbread; and Lyndon B. Johnson doted on Texas barbecue. In a broader sense, no matter meals is served in the White House influences the nation’s financial, social, cultural and political local weather. Food even has the energy to convey collectively disparate events for productive political debate, reminiscent of Thomas Jefferson’s “Dinner Table Bargain” and Jimmy Carter’s Camp David peace brokering efforts between Israel’s Menachem Begin and Egypt’s Anwar Sadat. As the late chef and author Anthony Bourdain put it, “Nothing is more political than food. Nothing.”
Prud’homme additionally provides credit score to the much less seen figures who’ve wielded meals’s energy, reminiscent of the many Black cooks and numerous cooks who’ve staffed the White House kitchen all through historical past. He additionally reveals the highly effective affect first girls have had over the presidential weight loss plan and their canny oversight of White House entertaining, from State dinners to receptions and extra.
The e book’s coda is a brief curation of presidential households’ favourite recipes, together with Martha Washington’s preserved cherries, Jefferson’s salad with tarragon French dressing, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “reverse martini,” Dwight D. Eisenhower’s steak and Lady Bird Johnson’s Pedernales River chili. A charming epicurean historical past with a political twist, Dinner With the President is an enchanting have a look at life in the “People’s House.”
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