San Diego Union-Tribune (Sunday)
Presidential food morsels
Alex Prud’homme talks about his favorite books, White House foodtales and fond memories of his great-aunt, Julia Child
Journalist Alex Prud’homme is best known for his books about famed chef Julia Child, who was both his great aunt and his co-author on Child’s bestselling 2006 memoir “My Life in France.” His latest book, “Dinner With the President: Food, Politics, and a History of Breaking Bread at the White House,” was published Feb. 7. In a wide-ranging interview, he talked about Child, presidents, cookbooks and what he’s reading now.
Q: What books are on your nightstand?
A: I have a colorful pile of books that is slowly accreting by my bed and occasionally sets off a landslide. At the moment, the stratum includes: George Saunders’ “A Swim in a Pond in the Rain,” Geoff Dyer’s “The Last Days of Roger Federer,” Toni Tipton-martin’s “Jubilee” cookbook, Patti Smith’s “M Train,” Mark Strand’s “Hopper,” Mark Rozzo’s “Everybody Thought We Were Crazy,” Ian Fleming’s “Thrilling Cities” (a 1963 travelogue picked up for 10 cents), Sally Mann’s “Hold Still” and a substrate of magazines and catalogs. I dip in and out of these books before sleep, or when I’m procrastinating and will eventually finish them all. Or not.
Q: What’s the last great book you read?
A: The last book I read straight through — one way to define a “great book” — was Susan Orlean’s “The Library Book,” a deceptively simple tale of the Los Angeles Central Library, the people in its orbit, books, family and arson. In 1986 the library was engulfed by flame, over a million books were damaged and 50 firefighters were injured, but few outside Los Angeles noticed because the blaze occurred while Chernobyl was melting down. After declaring that she was done with book writing, Orlean got hooked on the tale of Harry Peak, a classic Orleanian oddball and possible firebug, and the Macguffin she uses to pull the reader through a meditation on time and knowledge and the evanescence of things. A book about libraries doesn’t sound like a page-turner, but I found myself sprinting through it, then doubling back to reread sections for their sheer wit.
Q:
Are there any classic novels that you only recently read for the first time?
A:
I am an on-again-offagain reader of spy fiction, and one of my favorites is “The Riddle of the Sands,” a classic novel of spycraft and seafaring, first published in 1903. Written by Erskine Childers, it begins when Carruthers, a junior British foreign officer and fop, is invited to sail around the Frisian Islands, off the German coast, by his friend Davies, an expert mariner. After some picaresque high jinks in the fog and sandy shoals and snooping around a “wreck,” the yachtsmen discover the Germans are secretly massing a flotilla to invade England. Based on Childers’ own sailing in the Baltic Sea, the book is nautically accurate and predicted Kaiser Wilhelm’s imperial ambitions by a decade. Despite some archaic language, the book remains a dramatic, comic, salty adventure that is said to have influenced many 20thcentury espionage writers.
Q:
Describe your ideal reading experience.
A:
Many people assume that a hammock amid palms is the best place to be, and a romance or light thriller glowing on an electronic device is the best thing to read. I prefer to hunker by the fire on a stormy day in Maine, with a book printed on paper; as howling gusts rattle the windows, rain drums the roof and waves crash on the rocks outside, I become absorbed in imaginative, involved stories that are entirely different from my own. Since childhood, I have happily traversed a shelf ’sworth of books under these ideal conditions — from “Stuart Little” through Narnia and the Hobbits to “Jonathan Livingston Seagull,” “Dune,” “Moby-dick” (of course), “The Shipping News” (ditto), “Corelli’s Mandolin” and “One Hundred Years of Solitude.”
Q:
What’s your favorite book no one else has heard of?
A:
At the risk of being accused of nepotism, one of my favorite overlooked reads is “From Julia Child’s Kitchen,” a cookbook-memoir that is now out of print and never spawned a TV show. This book was the hardest one for Julia to write, but its publication in 1975 marked a watershed moment, when she eschewed the “French Chef ” persona and began to perform as Julia Child, write alone, include personal stories for the first time (such as the day she ate Caesar salad in Tijuana, made table-side by Chef Caesar Cardini himself ), use recipes from around the world, include fictional reveries (she imagined a “raddled little helper ... her poor little arm beating, beating, beating” sugar, butter and eggs with a wooden spoon in pre-electric mixer days), and illustrate the book with her husband Paul’s poetic photographs and drawings. Julia’s editor Judith Jones pushed her to write more personally, which Julia — a modest person who disliked “tooting one’s own horn” — balked at.
But eventually she got the hang of it, and found it liberating. In the meantime, she had a mastectomy, engineered a professional breakup with her collaborator Simone Beck (they remained friends) and nursed Paul back to health after a botched heart-bypass left him with “the mental scrambles.” Working on the book saved her from going “cuckoo in those dark months,” she recalled.
Q:
What three cookbooks should every reader own?
A:
Other than Julia Child’s oeuvre, for the home cook I recommend Irma Rombauer’s “The Joy of Cooking,” Jacques Pépin’s “Essential Pépin” and — this is a cheat — a tie between Marcella Hazan’s “Essentials of Classical Italian Cooking,” Mark Bittman’s “How to Cook Everything” and, for a vegetable-forward diet, Yotam Ottolenghi’s “Simple.”
When it comes to presidential cookery, I recommend Poppy Cannon and Patricia Brooks’ “The President’s Cookbook,” Letitia Baldrige and René Verdon’s “In the Kennedy Style,” Henry Haller with Virginia Aronson’s “The White House Family Cookbook,” Walter Scheib and Andrew Friedman’s “White House Chef,” and Roland Mesnier and Christian Malard’s “All the President’s Pastries.” (Executive Chef Scheib and Executive Pastry Chef Mesnier worked together under Presidents Clinton and George W. Bush, and detested each other, which provides some sharp asides.)
Q:
What book, if any, most influenced your love of food?
A:
Growing up with all of Julia Child’s books in our shelves, “The French Chef ” in our little black-andwhite kitchen TV, and the actual Julia cooking in our kitchen, everything my towering great-aunt wrote, said or demonstrated influenced me in ways that are profound and unmeasurable. Julia and Paul (the twin brother of my maternal grandfather) did not have children, but they treated my sisters, cousins and me like surrogate grandchildren. While she never gave us “cooking lessons,” Julia swept us up in her enthusiasm for all things gastronomic — setting the table, helping Paul bring wine from his cave, slicing and stirring and frying and baking, experimenting with newfangled gadgets (she was an early adopter of salad spinners, food processors and microwaves), laughing at our mistakes, taking part in dinner table conversation, washing dishes — which taught us to eat and entertain by osmosis. I am extremely lucky and grateful to have had that experience, which helped shape my life.
Q:
Who are your favorite food writers? Your favorite memoir by a chef?
A:
I am drawn to the bracing M.F.K. Fisher and the acerbic Richard Olney, the naughty Nora Ephron and inquisitive Michael Pollan. As for memoirs, you can’t go wrong with Gabrielle Hamilton’s “Blood, Bones & Butter,” Bill Buford’s “Heat” and “Dirt,” Eric Ripert’s bittersweet “32 Yolks,” Jacques Pépin’s touching “The Apprentice,” Stanley Tucci’s “Taste” and, yes, despite his faults, Anthony Bourdain’s “Kitchen Confidential.”
Q:
What’s the most memorable dish or menu you’ve ever encountered in a book?
A:
As you might expect, American presidents are often served remarkable dishes, for better and for worse. At the first state dinner held for a foreign leader, for instance, Ulysses S. Grant hosted King Kalakaua of the Sandwich Islands (now Hawaii) in 1874. To celebrate, the chef Valentino Melah prepared a banquet of some 30 courses for the “Merry Monarch,” who loved to eat but brought stone-faced food tasters to ensure he wasn’t poisoned.
The menu from that night has not survived, but Melah was famous for prodigious spreads that began with, say, consommé, moved on to trout, gained momentum with squab, hit their stride with beef tenderloin (charred to a crisp to suit Grant’s taste) and a parade of sides and salads, and ended with a cavalcade of desserts with names like sorbet fantasie. One admirer hailed a Melahnian elixir thus: “No soup, foreign or domestic, has ever been known to equal it. It is said to be a little smoother than peacock’s brains, but not quite so exquisitely flavored as a dish of nightingale’s tongues.”
Other presidential meals have been decidedly less refined, such as the barbecue served to William Howard Taft, who was stumping in Fargo, N.D., in 1908. By some reports, thousands of people gathered around a bonfire to feast on 10 steer and 20 mules, which symbolized the roasting of the Democratic Party. Two black bears fattened on walnuts were also on the menu but were spared when the organizers realized that bears were linked to Taft’s mentor Teddy Roosevelt in the public imagination.“it would never do to have the candidate eat up the ‘real Teddy bear,’ ” The Times noted.
Occasionally, White House fare has been almost inedible. While Franklin D. Roosevelt was a certified gourmet who thrilled at “curious foods,” like buffalo tongue, ptarmigan from Greenland and whitefish “fresh from Duluth,” the food of his White House was legendarily abysmal. This was thanks in part to wartime rationing, but mostly to the housekeeper, Mrs. Henrietta Nesbitt, who, under the protection of the first lady, Eleanor Roosevelt, produced a farrago of liver and beans, mystery casseroles, gelatin salads with marshmallows and other “economy menus.” After a 1937 dinner chez Roosevelt, Ernest Hemingway described the meal as “the worst I’ve ever eaten ... rainwater soup followed by rubber squab, a nice wilted salad and a cake some admirer had sent in. An enthusiastic but unskilled admirer.” Hem’s soon-to-be third wife, the journalist Martha Gellhorn, ate three sandwiches at the airport before they flew to Washington: “She said the food was always uneatable,” he wrote.
Q: What’s the most interesting thing you learned from a book recently?
A: I was astonished by the story of Thomas Jefferson’s slave cook, James Hemings, which I pieced together from several books. Jefferson brought James to Paris as an 18- or 19-year-old, where he trained in some of the city’s finest kitchens and learned to speak French better than his master. Upon returning to America with a pocketful of recipes and money (slavery was not customary in France, and he was comparatively wellpaid there), Hemings followed Jefferson from New York to Philadelphia and the Monticello plantation in Virginia. There, he prepared some of the most significant meals of the day and, in the process, helped to define American cuisine as we know it — a fusion of native ingredients cooked with French tools and techniques, English recipes, African herbs and spices, and a soupçon of his own creativity.
James was also one of Sally Hemings’ brothers. Sally was a servant for Jefferson’s white daughters in Paris and, DNA testing has proven, the mother of at least six children by Jefferson. (Those children were three-quarters white but treated as slaves; four survived to adulthood and were not freed until the end of Jefferson’s life.) It’s a lineage that boggles the modern mind, though it was not unheard of at the time.
After James Hemings bought his freedom, he struggled to find his identity: As a former slave who could read and write, had traveled widely and was a culinary artist of the highest caliber, he was neither fully Black or white; he never married or had children, and his sexuality may have been fluid. He simply did not fit into the world as it was. Upon his election, Jefferson offered Hemings the job of White House chef, but the two men could not agree on terms. Instead, James settled in Baltimore, cooked at a tavern and drank himself to death at age 36.