Chef spills the beans on cooking at the White House
When John Moeller first heard about the pretzel incident, he thought he was toast.
It was 13 January 2002, the memories of the 9/11 attacks still fresh, and President George W Bush was doing what millions of other Americans were doing: trying to feel normal for a little while. He was watching football on TV.
Alone in his White House quarters, Bush was popping pretzels while watching an NFL playoff game. One didn’t go down right, and the president crashed to the floor after briefly losing consciousness. The fall caused only minor facial injuries — and perhaps a bruised ego.
Despite the passing, freakish nature of the incident, reporters wouldn’t let it go. They were on the story like, well, mustard on pretzels. They wanted to know the source of the salty treat. The White House remained mum. “You’re not going to get us to cough it up,” press secretary Ari Fleischer deadpanned to the New York Times.
As a sous-chef in the White House kitchen, Moeller was one of the few people in the United States to know the bakery that produced the pretzel. Moeller, in fact, was the one who had introduced the snack to the White House, back during the Clinton administration. The handmade beauties came from Hammond Pretzel Bakery in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, near where Moeller grew up in Pennsylvania Dutch country. “Chelsea went wild on it for a little while,” Moeller says about his hometown pretzel. Hillary Clinton wrote the bakery a letter, thanking it for the healthful and tasty treat. Then came president Bush’s snack-related scare, which practically caused Moeller to start choking himself. His first thought upon hearing the news: “Am I going to be working here to- morrow?”
Moeller kept his job, but he got another lesson in the tenuous status of the White House kitchen staff, which “serves at the pleasure of the president”, as the oftrepeated phrase goes. What does that mean in real terms for the men and women who work at the White House, feeding the First Family
Bush was popping pretzels while watching an NFL playoff game. One didn’t go down right, and the president crashed to the floor after briefly losing consciousness.
and their many guests and dignitaries from around the world? It means that politics, personal tastes or even a pretzel can potentially send a chef packing from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
Particularly the executive chef, the person who leads the small, full-time White House culinary team. The position has become increasingly political over the years, and Moeller, who worked in the White House kitchen from 1992 to 2005, remembers when the head chef gig shifted from a mere job to a post invested with palpable symbolism.
It was in late 1992, just weeks after Moeller started his job in the George HW Bush White House. Alice Waters, founder of Chez Panisse restaurant and earth mother of the US locavore movement, sent a letter to the president-elect Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton, urging them to install an American chef. The letter was signed by dozens of top chefs, including Wolfgang Puck, who was born in Austria.
At the time, Pierre Chambrin, a Frenchman, was leading the kitchen; feeling the outside pressure, “Pierre grew despondent and finally said, ‘I’ve decided to leave,’” Moeller writes in his new book, Dining at the White House: From the President’s Table to Yours, a pull-backthe-curtain look at cooking for the world’s most powerful family.
It took more than a year, but Waters finally got her American chef. Chambrin eventually was replaced by Walter Scheib, a native of Oakland, California, who introduced his own spin on American cuisine.
Waters’s letter “maybe did politicise the position more than it had been in the past. It became more volatile than it had been,” says Moeller, 52, as we sit in Paul bakery, a very French shop not far from the White House. Henry Haller, for example, served as executive chef for the White House for 21 years before retiring in 1987.
“I see a lot more interviews with White House chefs and stuff like that, where before we were just working,” Moeller adds. “We served at the pleasure of the president . . . and very rarely would we get any fanfare.” THE INDEPENDENT