One night in February 1941, Franklin D. Roosevelt hosted a crowded reception for military brass in the Blue Room, then slipped upstairs to his oval study on the second floor for a private dinner with Wendell Willkie. Roosevelt had defeated Willkie in the election of November 1940, making him the only president to serve more than two terms. But Willkie was a former Democrat turned popular Republican, and the president admired him. Maybe, FDR thought, he could persuade Willkie to take up a delicate assignment. Roosevelt believed it was time for America to join the Allies in confronting Nazi Germany, but a strong isolationist bloc in Congress refused to back him. The president quietly forged ahead and was in search of a trusted envoy who could liaise with America’s allies. Willkie—a lawyer and utility executive from Indiana who had pushed for racial integration at home and intervention in Europe—was his leading candidate. FDR often used meals to take people’s measure. But the envoy job was especially challenging and persuading his formal rival to take it on would require a silken hand.
Much like Thomas Jefferson plotting his Dinner Table Bargain with Hamilton and Madison, Roosevelt affected a carefree air while meticulously choreographing his tête-à-tête with Willkie. A gourmet with an instinct for people’s hidden motivations, FDR researched what his guests liked to eat, drink, and smoke, then constructed a menu that was more than a simple list of things to eat. It was a meal layered with signs and symbols.
FDR built the Willkie dinner around an exotic dish: terrapin soup—or stew, as the president insisted on calling it—was a delicacy made with the flesh and juices of a diamondback terrapin turtle simmered with butter, cream, tomatoes, vegetables, a mix of spices (thyme, allspice, cloves, cayenne), and a jot of sherry or Worcestershire sauce. It was rich and deeply flavored, and not to everyone’s taste. But Roosevelt was betting it would appeal to Willkie on several levels. First, it was a satisfying meal and one of his favorite dishes. More deeply, Willkie, the son of German immigrants who was raised in the Midwest, was a self-made man who aspired to be a player in global politics. By serving him terrapin soup in his private study, decorated with maritime prints and ships’ models, FDR was welcoming Willkie into an exclusive club. On yet another level, terrapin soup was a quintessentially American dish, one that dated to Native American tribes and the early colonies: by sipping terrapin soup, Willkie would join the national continuum. In other words, Roosevelt was serving a soup full of flattery.
The diamondback terrapin is native to the Chesapeake Bay, and in the seventeenth century the Abenaki and Delaware introduced it to colonists as turpen, or “good tasting turtle.” Initially, terrapin was considered so common that it was fed to servants and slaves—so much so that Maryland banned serving it more than three times a week. But the recipe evolved to produce an elegant dark brown medley that counted George Washington, John Adams, and many other presidents as fans. (Dwight Eisenhower was probably the last president to serve the dish at the White House.)
During the nineteenth century, the “white and sweet” terrapin flesh—said to have the texture of lobster or frogs’ legs—was served at Delmonico’s in Manhattan, considered the finest restaurant of its day. But as the dish gained popularity, the terrapin population dwindled, prices soared, and the soup became the victim of its own success. In response, cheaper green turtles or snapping turtles were substituted. (Snapping turtle flesh is said to taste of six distinct kinds of meat: chicken, beef, shrimp, veal, fish, and goat—or, as one wag put it, “muddy, dirty, mushy and chewy.”) By the twentieth century, Heinz sold a canned Real Turtle Soup. And a sweet-sour Mock Turtle Soup—made from boiled head of veal or a mélange of tripe, sweetbreads, and beef tendons—appeared on menus. Campbell’s canned version of the mock soup, with a “tempting, distinctive taste so prized by the epicure,” was popular in the 1950s. Andy Warhol called it his favorite Campbell’s flavor and searched for stray cans after it was discontinued. Efforts to farm terrapin failed, cooks tired of the laborious preparations for the soup, and by the 1980s the public had lost interest in consuming turtles. Though terrapin soup is still served in parts of the South, the dish, like squirrel stew, canvasback duck, or possum—once considered the epitome of sophisticated taste—has largely disappeared from American menus.
For the Willkie dinner to succeed, Roosevelt needed a specialized cook, but that was hard to come by. First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt rarely stepped behind the stove. None of the White House cooks had the requisite skills, nor did their boss, the culinarily challenged housekeeper Henrietta Nesbitt. She feared terrapins as “huge brutes…crawl[ing] around in the cellar,” and once botched the soup so badly that FDR refused to let her try again. For Willkie, the president borrowed a chef from the private Metropolitan Club, who produced an exquisite broth.
Over bowls of the elixir FDR and Willkie built a personal and political rapport. After dinner, they talked, smoked, and drank whiskey deep into the night. “Great bursts of laughter” could be heard from behind the door, FDR’s son Jimmy reported. Soon after that dinner, Willkie departed on a diplomatic mission to England, North Africa, the Soviet Union, and China on Roosevelt’s behalf.
Terrapin soup was FDR’s lucky soup, and he regularly served it to foreign dignitaries and to luminaries like Will Rogers. Yet it was just the kind of food his wife, Eleanor, did not approve of. She viewed it as an elitist dish and disliked its earthy looks and taste. FDR liked to serve the broth, meat, bones, and flippers in the turtle’s shell, and Eleanor never forgot the zoologist who inspected his bowl and hissed, “These are the bones of rats!”
The Roosevelts’ opposing views of terrapin were emblematic of their many diverging tastes. During their unmatched, twelve-year residence in the President’s House, food played an outsized role and was laden with political, economic, psychological, and emotional weight. For FDR, food was a reminder of home, a bridge to other cultures, a tool of persuasion, a means of exploration, self-expression, and disinhibition. Though he is not often credited as a gourmet on par with Jefferson, I’d say Roosevelt possessed the second most discerning palate of any president. Yet his fine-tuned tastes proved a curse as much as a blessing, and set him apart from his nuclear family.
Madame, I only gave you the recipe. I did not teach you how to cook.
—Auguste Escoffier
Unlike most chief executives, Franklin Roosevelt spent a considerable amount of time thinking—obsessing, really—about food and drink. As the large, well-equipped kitchen at Springwood, his family’s mansion in Hyde Park, New York, suggests, his heart skipped a beat when he was served something interesting: kippered herring or creamed chipped beef for breakfast; green gumbo, abalone steaks, or chicken in aspic for lunch (which he called dinner); appetizers of caviar and champagne, followed by dinners (suppers) that would challenge most Americans’ palates: buffalo tongues, frogs’ legs, oyster crabs, and tripe pepper pot. He delighted in the “curious food gifts” that were sent to him from all over the world: ptarmigan from Greenland, teal duck from Egypt, a jar of crayfish and three pounds of smelt in summer; six Scottish pheasants in the winter; whitefish “fresh from Duluth”; a fifty-pound cherry pie.
FDR liked to grind his own coffee (using Filipino green beans, sourced for him by the navy) and brew his own French roast. In 1933 he had repealed Prohibition with the Twenty-First Amendment, and he took great satisfaction in mixing cocktails, serving fine wines, and sipping bourbon. When deprived of thick, juicy steaks during World War II, the president was given to flights of epicurean fancy that could veer into the delirious. He once waxed rhapsodic about a whole, fresh fish baked in mud—“the most delicious thing in the world,” he declared—though his children did not believe he’d ever eaten such a creature. It was the idea that he might, someday, that excited him.
The Roosevelt children—Anna, James (Jimmy), Franklin, Elliott, Franklin Delano Jr., and John—were hearty eaters, but their palates were more influenced by their mother’s tastes than their father’s. Eleanor regarded meals as a source of calories rather than as an aesthetic experience, and favored dry whole wheat toast for breakfast, a bowl of almond soup for lunch, and kedgeree—an Anglo-Indian plate of fish, rice, and mashed hard-boiled eggs—for dinner. “Very few things which I eat or drink matter to me a great deal, and it is more or less habit how I happen to take them,” she said.
Mrs. Roosevelt was far more interested in food as Food: a philosophical question to be pondered, a dietary conundrum to be dissected, a way to brand herself and her husband’s administration for public consumption, and a political statement about female empowerment and scientific rigor. “Mother is a wonderful woman…but, as she herself will tell you, she has no appreciation of fine food,” Jimmy recalled. “Victuals to her are something to inject into the body as fuel to keep it going, much as a motorist pours gasoline into an auto tank.”
Though her cookery was limited to baking popovers and scrambling eggs on a chafing dish, and she was raised with wealth and a household staff, Mrs. Roosevelt empathized with the millions of Americans suffering in the Depression. She recognized that as First Lady she had what her cousin Teddy Roosevelt called a “bully pulpit”—a prominent stage from which to promote a personal/political agenda—and educated herself about cookery and calories in order to set an example for the nation. First she consulted Sheila Hibben, America’s foremost gastronome and a proponent of fresh foods and historic recipes. Hibben tipped the Roosevelts off to Martha Washington’s crab soup (made with fresh crab, cream, Worcestershire sauce, and sherry) and advised that regional dishes—such as New England johnnycakes, corned beef, potatoes, and Indian pudding—would raise morale and help the nation persevere. “Crisis or no crisis, the tension of the country is better for preoccupation with the art of cooking,” Hibben declared.
But Mrs. Roosevelt didn’t see food as art, and she turned to Cornell University’s home-economics department, which had developed a radical new vision for the housewife of the future: by training in chemistry, nutrition, and sanitation, homemakers could supplant the decadent, homey meals of yore with healthy, economical, modern foodstuffs. “The woman who boils potatoes year after year, with no thought of the how or why, is a drudge,” said the president of the American Home Economics Association. “But the cook who can compute the calories of heat which a potato of given weight will yield, is no drudge.”
Inspired, Eleanor used the White House kitchen as a laboratory and lectern. She extolled simple, thrifty meals as lessons in self-reliance. In her newspaper column, “My Day,” she promoted dinners made with rationed goods—such as prune whip, spaghetti topped with boiled carrots, and Milkorno (a dried skim milk and cornmeal food supplement developed at Cornell)—to help stretch limited budgets. This rationalist approach paid little heed to the flavors, colors, textures, or associations—the emotional pleasures of eating—that ignited her husband’s senses.
The Roosevelts’ divergent tastes practically assured marital tension. To make FDR’s discomfort even more acute, the pairing of Mrs. Nesbitt, the bumbling housekeeper who oversaw the Executive Kitchen, with the urbane Franklin D. Roosevelt seems like a dark cosmic joke. It was one authored by the First Lady.
“A loaf of bread sent me” to the Roosevelts, Henrietta Nesbitt recalled. Raised in Duluth, Minnesota, she was taught how to bake strudel and cakes by her Austrian mother. She married Henry Nesbitt, a gentle soul whose attempts to sell whale meat, wooden barrels, and insurance failed in the Depression. In search of work they moved to Hyde Park, New York, about ninety miles from Manhattan, in 1927. There, Mrs. Nesbitt attended the Episcopal church and joined the League of Women Voters, where she met Eleanor Roosevelt, a woman with the “kindest face I’ve ever seen.” Though they hailed from vastly different backgrounds, the two bonded over children and Mrs. Nesbitt’s whole wheat bread. She had given a loaf to a neighbor, who passed it on to a friend, who shared a bit with Mrs. Roosevelt, who loved it. “Would you mind making up some extra for us?” Eleanor asked, fatefully.
“Would I!” Mrs. Nesbitt exclaimed.
FDR was in the midst of a New York gubernatorial campaign, and the Hyde Park kitchen could not keep up with the demand for campaign food. Mrs. Nesbitt—as the Roosevelts called her—jumped in, churning out breads, stolen, rolls, coffee cakes, strudels, streusels, fruit pies (pumpkin, cherry, and apple), plum pudding, dark fruit cake, white Scottish fruit cake, and roasted peanuts. Henry Nesbitt did the shopping and helped with slicing, mixing, and packaging. When FDR won in 1928, Eleanor persuaded the Nesbitts, small-town Republicans who believed that “only saloonkeepers are Democrats,” to undergo a political awakening. “I was branching out for myself in the thinking line,” Mrs. Nesbitt wrote. A devotee of astrology, she believed the astral bodies foretold “the start of the woman’s era.” While she admired FDR, she was cowed by his intellect. “He seemed on another plane, pure thought it was and over our heads….Still, knowing the way he liked peanuts, I wasn’t as awed as I might have been.”
In 1932, Roosevelt defeated Herbert Hoover to become America’s thirty-second president and inherited a nation in economic chaos. At his inauguration on March 4, 1933, Roosevelt rallied the nation with words that continue to stir: “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself!” In his first hundred days in office, he pushed groundbreaking laws and signed executive orders that led to the New Deal, which helped turn America’s fortunes around.
Eleanor took up the mantle of First Ladyship reluctantly. Though the role was considered a great honor, she disliked the pressure and scrutiny that came with it, and only agreed to support Franklin’s campaign on the condition that she would control their domestic sphere. An ambitious man with a pragmatic streak, he agreed.
When they moved into the White House in 1933, Mrs. Roosevelt hired Henrietta Nesbitt as the housekeeper and Henry as a custodian. Eleanor did not care that they had no experience catering meals for hundreds of people on a brightly lit stage. She wanted “someone I know” in the kitchen; self-conscious about her wealth, Eleanor believed that hiring the Nesbitts was a useful and charitable thing to do. It was also a quiet act of rebellion.
Mrs. Nesbitt’s duties included many aspects of normal housework, amplified—ensuring the presidential mansion’s sixty rooms were immaculate, its hundred-plus windows spotless, its floors waxed, and its silverware shined to a fare-thee-well. One of her most important jobs was to oversee the Executive Kitchen. Touring the space on her first visit, Mrs. Nesbitt spied grime, outdated fixtures, and something skittering in the shadows. “I can’t work up any charm for cockroaches,” she wrote. “This was the ‘first kitchen in America,’ and it wasn’t even sanitary….The refrigerator was wood inside and bad smelling. Even the electric wiring was old and dangerous. I was afraid to switch things on.”
There was “only one solution,” Eleanor declared: “We must have a new kitchen.”
Public Works Project No. 634 began in the summer of 1935—a complete kitchen renovation overseen by specialists from Westinghouse and General Electric. Once completed, the kitchen gleamed with a sixteen-foot stove, six roasting ovens, a soup kettle, a meat grinder, a massive deep fryer, waffle irons, mixers, a thirty-gallon ice cream freezer, five dishwashers, updated wiring, and dumbwaiters to lift food upstairs to the dining rooms.
FDR was eager to host, and on March 7, 1933, Mrs. Nesbitt (who didn’t actually cook) and the kitchen crew served their first White House menu, a simple lunch of stuffed eggs, cold cuts, and salad for the president and a few advisers. It went well. Not long after that she supervised the Roosevelts’ first diplomatic dinner—lamb chops, baked potatoes, green peas—for the Polish ambassador. That, too, was a success. And then, like a roller coaster climbing the first incline, then tipping over and barreling down the back side, the White House head cook, Ida Allen, and a rotating cast of eight to twenty assistants, were off on a wild, swooping, gut-wrenching ride.
Mrs. Nesbitt believed that meats should come from the cheaper cuts, such as sweetbreads, beef tongues, brains, and offal, while vegetables should come from cans, potatoes should be mashed, and salads should be molded from gelatin and dotted with marshmallows, nuts, or crushed peppermint candy. Some of her “economy meals” (“the best meals for the least money”) descended into tragicomedy—a torrent of noodles with chicken scraps, pig hocks, mysterious casseroles, curried tidbits, croquettes of leftovers, stuffed with this and that, gumbo z’herbes (the “cheapest soup,” made with leftover meats and greens), jellied prunes with cheese, and an Echo Emerald “salad” made of lime gelatin, celery, pineapple, pimiento, and vinegar.
“Yes, the commander in chief ate leftovers,” Mrs. Nesbitt proudly declared. “Relished them, too.”
The kitchen was on constant call, and served “so many meals it all blurred into one long one. I lost track,” the housekeeper wrote. A tea for twelve hundred guests was scheduled, then canceled, then reinstated as a tea for forty-two hundred. On another day, the First Couple shook the hands of 1,175 visitors, who consumed seventy-seven pounds of cookies and drank untold gallons of punch in half an hour flat—“a new record!” Eleanor exulted. Mrs. Nesbitt began to see roast turkeys, baked hams, sweet potatoes, fudge, and raspberry puree whirling in her dreams. “I was sick of food,” she declared. “So was the president.”
FDR complained bitterly about her insistence on “plain foods, plainly prepared,” which he said, “would do justice to the Automat.” After one bowl of oatmeal too many, he yelled, “My God! Doesn’t Mrs. Nesbitt know there are breakfast foods besides oatmeal? It’s been served to me morning in and morning out for months and months now and I’m sick and tired of it!” He ripped ads for cornflakes from newspapers as “a gentle reminder.” She paid no attention. When FDR said he disliked broccoli, Mrs. Nesbitt, called “Fluffy” behind her back, instructed the cooks to “fix it anyhow. He should like it.” She believed that he, like “all men,” “needed his vegetables.” And when Roosevelt requested hot coffee for his guests, she served iced tea instead. “It was better for them,” she insisted.
The president’s anguish was hardly a secret. After a long stint of liver-with-string-bean dinners, a New York Times headline noted, “Same Menu Four Days Palls on Roosevelt.” When subjected to another bout of repetitive meals, FDR wrote to Eleanor,
Do you remember that about a month ago I got sick of chicken because I got it…at least six times a week? The chicken situation has definitely improved, but “they” have substituted sweetbreads, and for the past month I have been getting sweetbreads about six times a week. I am getting to the point where my stomach positively rebels and this does not help my relations with foreign powers. I bit two of them today.
But the First Lady was deaf to his pleas. When the housekeeper and ten cooks produced thirty-two hundred sandwiches for a veterans’ party, costing just thirty and a half cents a head, Eleanor nudged Franklin, saying, “You ought to get a manager like Mrs. Nesbitt to run the country. You’d save money.”
It was an understatement to say the Roosevelt White House cuisine “did not enjoy a very high reputation,” a staff member grumbled. Mrs. Nesbitt’s salad “resembled the productions one finds in the flossier type of tea shoppe.” Ernest Hemingway described a 1937 dinner there 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.” The journalist Martha Gellhorn (his third wife) “ate three sandwiches in the Newark airport before we flew to Washington. We thought she was crazy at the time but she said the food was always uneatable and everybody ate before they went there to dinner. She has stayed there a lot. Me, I won’t be staying there any more.”
Curiously, Roosevelt seemed powerless to direct his own diet. Eleanor placated her husband one minute and soothed the housekeeper the next, advising her not to take his “tizzy-wizzies” personally. “When he said ‘The vegetables are watery,’ and ‘I’m sick of liver and beans,’ these were figures of speech,” Mrs. Nesbitt rationalized. “But the newspapers didn’t understand that.” After Jimmy wrote damningly about the housekeeper, Eleanor defended her: “The responsibility for what she spent and for what she ordered was [mine] and [mine] alone….Father never told me he wanted to get rid of Mrs. Nesbitt.”
It is hard to believe, but apparently true. FDR was no shrinking violet when it came to Congress, industrialists, or Nazis, but he shied from confrontations with his staff—even the valet who fell asleep and stranded the president in his wheelchair. (Roosevelt contracted polio in 1921 and was paralyzed from the waist down.) A charismatic and gregarious public figure, the president was a loner at heart. He was a single child raised by an older, distant father and an overbearing mother, and, Eleanor observed, “it became part of his nature not to talk of intimate matters.” And Jimmy recalled, “Pa couldn’t even bring himself to insist that Mother fire Mrs. Henrietta Nesbitt…who was responsible for serving him the uninspired meals which he disliked so passionately.”
After his formidable mother, Sara, died in 1941, FDR transferred her cook Mary Campbell from Hyde Park to the White House, where she made his old favorites in the private kitchen. Outflanked, Mrs. Nesbitt complained that Campbell’s dishes were too rich, but conceded that FDR “liked her cooking….Mary was awed neither by ration points nor Presidents.”
Roosevelt said, “ostensibly in jest but actually (or so all of us suspect) with a lot of real feeling,” Jimmy wrote, that the main reason he ran for a fourth term in 1944 was “ ‘so I can fire Mrs. Nesbitt!’ ” Tellingly, Jimmy noted, “Everybody was against Mrs. Nesbitt—everybody except Mother.” Which raises the question: Why was Mrs. Roosevelt so loyal to the ham-handed housekeeper? Eleanor never answered that question directly. But it seems likely that she used Nesbitt’s horrible diet, at least in part, as a shield, or weapon, against her inconstant husband.
The Roosevelts shared a deeply complex marriage. Eleanor admired Franklin’s intellect and charisma, but disapproved of his bold pronouncements and quirky humor, was self-conscious about her looks, and did not understand the primal tug of sex (an ordeal to be borne, she told her daughter, Anna). FDR admired her intelligence and calm willfulness, but missed the frisson of romantic excitement.
In September 1918, when he was the assistant secretary of the navy, Eleanor discovered Franklin was carrying on a passionate affair with Lucy Mercer, her former social secretary. It was a bitter betrayal that summoned painful memories of Eleanor’s father, Elliott Roosevelt (Theodore’s younger brother), who was addicted to drugs, drink, and women and died in a carriage wreck when she was nine. Mercer was an attractive, unmarried woman from a once-wealthy family, a food lover and art appreciator who had a knack for prompting Franklin’s fun-loving side. Like Woodrow Wilson, Roosevelt had a deep need for female attention. Mercer’s presence was an open secret in the family, and though Anna was prepared to hate her, they became good friends. Alice Roosevelt Longworth opined that her cousin FDR “deserved a good time…he was married to Eleanor.”
The Roosevelts contemplated divorce, but his advisers warned it would end his political career. The navy was famously puritanical, they noted, and the public would be outraged by such libertine behavior. And then there was his mother. When FDR raised the question with Mrs. Sara, she threatened to disinherit him. In the end, they stayed together for the sake of family, politics, money, and the ghost of their youthful love. But from then on, Jimmy recalled, the marriage became “an armed truce that endured until the day he died.” Later, Eleanor wrote, “I have the memory of an elephant. I can forgive, but I never forget.”
The Roosevelts increasingly ate apart, slept apart, vacationed apart, and worked apart. It is likely that FDR had other romances, and it has been rumored that Eleanor also found extramarital succor. While her papers reveal that she had numerous infatuations—for her bodyguard, a biographer, the journalist Lorena Hickok, the pilot Amelia Earhart—there is scant evidence those relationships tipped into the erotic.
Against this background, Eleanor staunchly promoted Mrs. Nesbitt’s dispiriting grub. The choice was so dissonant with FDR’s epicureanism that it remains a fascination. The historian Barbara Haber believes Mrs. Roosevelt did not intentionally serve bad food, but lacked a discerning palate and wanted to please everyone; Eleanor approved of the housekeeper’s menus to exemplify “simple foods that…reflected the hard times,” and to protect FDR, who suffered from high blood pressure, indigestion, bronchitis, and bouts of depression. But the biographer Blanche Wiesen Cook wrote that Nesbitt “was an expression of [Eleanor’s] passive-aggressive behavior…a tool of ER’s revenge.”
As he was perusing the newspaper one morning in 1938, a news item caught Roosevelt’s attention. King George VI and his wife, Queen Elizabeth, were planning a goodwill tour of Canada. Left unstated was their real agenda: to drum up resistance to the rise of Nazi Germany. The president recognized the royal visit to North America as an opportunity. If he could convince his public that Britain deserved support, there was a chance he could build an alliance against the Fascists. But the United States was still emerging from the Depression, and much of the public was in a xenophobic funk. Many resented the British, who they believed had dragooned America into World War I and never repaid their debts. Worried about Hitler, and determined to rebuild the alliance with Britain, FDR hatched a plan.
“I think it would be an excellent thing for Anglo-American relations if you could visit the United States,” he wrote to the king. “It occurs to me…that you both might like three or four days of very simple country life at Hyde Park—with no formal entertainments and an opportunity to get a bit of rest and relaxation.”
George replied, “I can assure you that the pleasure…would be greatly enhanced by the thought that it was contributing in any way to the cordiality of relations between our two countries.”
Thus began a risky dance between the two nations. If Roosevelt’s gambit backfired, the U.S.-U.K. alliance would sour further, entrench American isolationists, and give Hitler a pass to invade western Europe. But if he succeeded, he might shift the balance of geopolitical power. It wouldn’t be easy. No reigning British monarch had ever set foot on U.S. soil. And Roosevelt knew that to win over the American public, he had to present the king and queen as something other than pretentious royals who feasted on roast beef and goblets of claret. Instead, he would have to present them as a likable couple that everyday Americans could relate to. His plan called for a bit of culinary stagecraft.
Hoping to display the Windsors’ “essential democracy,” the president plotted moments of pomp and relaxation, including, FDR insisted, a “simple picnic” at Hyde Park, as everyone called Springwood, the Roosevelt mansion overlooking the Hudson River in upstate New York.
The king and queen arrived in Washington, D.C., in June 1939 and were greeted by a large, curious crowd. The Roosevelts hosted them at a formal dinner at the White House. After a visit to Mount Vernon, where the great-great-great-grandson of King George III paid his respects at the tomb of George Washington, the Roosevelts and Windsors drank tea on the South Lawn. Then the two couples attended the 1939 World’s Fair in New York and proceeded to Hyde Park. And it was there, on June 11, that FDR staged his coup de théâtre.
To the public’s delight, the president’s picnic was an all-American hot-dog-and-beer cookout. The only objector to the menu was Mrs. Sara, who declared that hot dogs were not suitable for royalty. Uncharacteristically, her son ignored her.
The press was barred as 150 guests—including earls, bishops, equerries, and ladies-in-waiting along with Roosevelt’s friends, staff, and neighbors—made their way to Top Cottage, his fieldstone retreat near Springwood. The king and queen sat on folding chairs on the small porch. The hot dogs were served on silver trays, but everyone, including the Windsors, ate them from paper plates. The king eyed the hot dog and said, “What should I do?,” recalled James Roosevelt. “Put it in your mouth and keep chewing until you finish it,” FDR quipped.
More refined lunchables were also provided—Virginia ham, roasted turkey, cranberry jelly, a green salad, strawberry shortcake, orange and lime soda, hot or iced coffee, and iced tea—but only Mrs. Sara stuck to the refined fare.
The king enjoyed his hot dog so much that he had a second and washed it down with a cold beer, like a regular human. The New York Times was so gobsmacked that it ran a front-page story with the headline “King Tries Hot Dog and Asks for More: And He Drinks Beer with Them.”
The Windsors thoroughly enjoyed their visit, and though FDR played it down as nothing more than a weekend jaunt, he and King George had managed to discuss weighty matters of state in private. The king reported to London that Roosevelt promised to defend British convoys and sink German U-boats, and “wait for the consequences,” and pledged to remind American and Brazilian farmers that the U.K. was one of their best customers.
Roosevelt’s Hot Dog Summit helped shift Americans’ resentment of Britain to a warm embrace, and just in time. Three months later, German troops blitzkrieged Poland. The United States began to ship supplies to Europe in 1940, and a year later FDR sent troops into combat. The lunch at Hyde Park would be hailed as “the picnic that won the war.”
On Sunday, December 7, 1941, Mrs. Nesbitt noted in her diary, “One p.m. small lunch, about thirty-four, in State Dining Room.” Thirty-four guests were no challenge for her crew of eight cooks and helpers. They routinely made breakfast for thirty hungry politicians, lunch for eighteen hundred ladies with discerning tastes, a garden party for five hundred veterans, and a dinner for a thousand finicky diplomats. Mrs. Nesbitt was delighted to pour tea for the queen of England and shop for Madame Chiang Kai-shek. “Do I sound cocky?” she wrote. “I was.”
But as she left for work, her son Buck, a naval officer, shouted, “Did you hear?” Mrs. Nesbitt stopped and turned, and the globe seemed to wobble on its axis. The U.S. fleet at Pearl Harbor had been attacked by Japanese bombers. Ships were sinking. Americans were dying. Within days, the Axis—Japan, Germany, and Italy—had declared war on the United States.
The mood was electric at the White House. The mansion’s windows were painted black, and air raid shelters were dug into the lawn. The surrounding streets were blocked off and bristled with armed Secret Service men. The First Lady helped organize a defense of the Pacific coast. Men were overheard plotting to nab FDR “by the elevator.” A butcher who had supplied the White House was sacked because he was born in Germany. The kitchen staff locked their milk and food supplies, did background checks on vendors, and used an unmarked truck to pick up groceries. “Too much was going on. Too fast,” Mrs. Nesbitt wrote. “ ‘Hush-hush,’ ‘Confidential,’ ‘V.I.P.’ ”
On December 22, just days after the surprise attack in Hawaii, FDR told Eleanor, “We will be having some guests tonight.” It was just before Christmas and he had declared war; it was hardly an opportune moment for visitors. The guests would require a room big enough to hang maps in, the president continued, and “see to it that we have good champagne and brandy in the house and plenty of whiskey.” When she asked who the guest was, he said the man’s identity was so sensitive he could not tell even her.
A black limousine roared up the White House driveway, and out stepped Winston Churchill, the prime minister of Great Britain. Eleanor was stunned. She had never met the great man, and traveling transatlantic was an extremely risky gambit. England had fended off the Germans in the Battle of Britain, and Churchill had maintained morale with galvanizing oratory—“We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender!” But his pleas for aid had fallen on deaf ears in the United States.
The Pearl Harbor attack killed 2,403 Americans, sank four battleships and eight other vessels, and flipped public opinion in favor of war. But Churchill feared the United States would send troops to the Pacific, leaving Britain to fend for itself. Determined to persuade Roosevelt to pursue a “Europe First” strategy, the prime minister knew his best chance was to risk an in-person visit.
It didn’t hurt that FDR enjoyed good food, fine drink, and talk as much as he did. Both men were armed with charm, erudition, and wiliness. They had met once, in a secret rendezvous off Newfoundland, in August 1941 (Roosevelt had said he was “going fishing”). They bonded over cocktails, witty banter, and an elaborate feast of caviar from Joseph Stalin, smoked salmon, roasted grouse from Scotland, and, in a nod to British naval tradition and Roosevelt’s taste, turtle soup. Their talks eventually bore fruit in the Atlantic Charter, a framework for world peace that paved the way for the United Nations.
To cross the Atlantic, Churchill hazarded U-boats and a tumultuous gale, but he arrived safely at the White House in a double-breasted peacoat, with a walking stick topped by a flashlight for use in London blackouts. He “looked poor-colored and hungry,” Mrs. Nesbitt observed. “They had pared to the bone over there.”
Roosevelt invited seventeen guests for dinner—including the British ambassador, generals, advisers, Eleanor, and a few friends. Churchill was fond of champagne, but FDR insisted on mixing sturdy cocktails and was especially proud of his “reverse martini” (see the Recipe section, page 389).
Working with the caterer (and future White House chef) François Rysavy, Mrs. Nesbitt and the kitchen crew managed to pull together a broiled chicken dinner. The war-deprived British gratefully consumed every morsel and washed it down with bottles of wine. At the end of the meal, Roosevelt raised a flute of champagne and toasted “to the Common Cause!”
He invited the prime minister to bunk at the White House. The strategically minded Churchill secured a bedroom across the hall from Harry Hopkins, Roosevelt’s adviser, and commandeered an office next to the president’s. The prime minister lived on “tummy time” and would sleep most of the morning, then rise to eat and drink prodigiously in the afternoon and work through the night. He suffered “indy”—indigestion—and when visited by the “black dog” of depression, he’d self-medicate with “a hot bath, cold champagne, new peas, and old brandy.” Hearing this, Adolf Hitler called him a “superannuated drunkard supported by Jewish gold.”
On his first day in Washington, Churchill posed with FDR for photographs: Roosevelt jauntily tilted his Camel cigarette wedged into a cigarette holder up at an angle, and Churchill puffed the enormous cigar that seemed permanently affixed to a corner of his mouth. Both understood the power of such images and made sure they were spread far and wide to project strength and unity, troll Hitler, and fortify British and American resolve.
That night they shared a simple dinner of noodle soup; roast beef; stuffed potatoes and broccoli; orange and watercress salad; Bavarian cream pie; and coffee. Afterward, the two leaders stayed up until two o’clock in the morning. Fueled by brandy and tobacco, they fleshed out a plan to send American troops to Europe and delved into what Eleanor described as their passions for “new people, new places, new things”—politics, literature, religion, and other “new experiences in life.”
Such wide-ranging banter was Churchill’s métier. He liked to position wineglasses and decanters like chess pieces to demonstrate how the Battle of Bull Run was fought. “It was a thrilling experience,” an observer recalled. “He got worked up…making barking noises in imitation of gunfire and blowing cigar smoke across the battle scene in imitation of gun smoke.”
Delighted, Roosevelt said with a chuckle, “It is fun to be in the same century with you.”
But Eleanor, like Churchill’s wife, Clementine, did not approve of these late, alcohol-fired nights. “Mother would fume and go in and out of the room making hints about bed,” Elliott Roosevelt reported. “Still Churchill would sit there.” They looked like “two little boys playing soldier,” Eleanor recalled. “They seemed to be having a wonderful time—too wonderful, in fact. It made me a little sad somehow.”
On December 26, 1941, Churchill addressed a joint session of Congress with a rousing call—“Now we are the masters of our fate!”—and raised two fingers in the V-for-victory sign. The applause was thunderous. That evening, he suffered a heart attack. After a short recuperation, and several more dinners with Roosevelt, Churchill risked the return to London aboard a lumbering flying boat, an easy target for German fighters. As the Boeing lofted above the clouds, the prime minister dozed off and Lord Beaverbrook confided to the pilot, “If we lose Churchill, we lose the war.”
All concerned, with the possible exception of the First Lady, deemed the prime minister’s visit a coup. He and FDR deepened their alliance and set the stage for summit meetings between the Big Three—Roosevelt, Churchill, and Joseph Stalin—on the fate of Europe. The wild card was Stalin. Churchill considered the Soviet a “hardboiled egg of a man.” But the Nazis were a common enemy and immediate threat.
When they first met, in 1942, Stalin had plied Churchill with caviar, sturgeon, and vodka in Moscow at a time when his people were starving. Impervious to the Briton’s charm, the Soviet demanded that the United States and Britain attack German troops in France to relieve pressure on the eastern front. When Churchill said the Allies were planning an attack in North Africa, the conversation ground to a halt. The prime minister stood to leave, but Stalin invited him to stay for “a drink.” Churchill accepted. Glasses of Crimean champagne led to a snack of radishes and then to a feast of chicken, beef, mutton, fish, “enough to feed thirty people.” Over food, the conversation turned productive, and Stalin seemed open to sending his troops to the Pacific theater. Four hours later, he offered a delicacy: the head of a roast suckling pig. Churchill, who had once raised pigs and was fond of them, declined. Stalin, he wrote, “tackled it with relish. With a knife he cleaned out the head, putting [the brains] into his mouth with his knife. He then cut pieces of flesh from the cheeks of the pig and ate them with his fingers.” After six hours of eating, drinking, and talking, Churchill stumbled back to his villa at 3:15 in the morning, feeling “definitely encouraged,” he told Roosevelt.
Nineteen forty-two swept by, as the battles at Corregidor, Dunkirk, and North Africa unfolded in a kaleidoscopic rush. Nothing tasted right to the president. His staff scoured Washington for delectable oddments—musk ox, ptarmigan, quail, pheasant, fresh brook trout—in a vain attempt to distract him from the turmoil. But nothing seemed to placate the presidential stomach.
In 1943, Mrs. Nesbitt wrestled with strict rationing, like “every other housekeeper in the land.” Government bureaucrats categorized the White House akin to a tugboat, allotting the Roosevelts just two months of food stamps. But the bean counters’ calculations for meat, sugar, coffee, and canned goods were based on the First Couple’s lightest months of entertaining, which greatly underestimated their needs. The Roosevelts sacrificed favorites, such as roast beef and butter, and stretched their provisions to feed their guests—four presidents, one prime minister, various celebrities, and their entourages. Mrs. Nesbitt seemed to exult in the wartime thrift as a necessary corrective for the nation’s gluttony. “I thought smaller meals a fine idea, sending people away from the table satisfied but not stuffed,” she wrote, “and I don’t think we’ll ever go back to those teeming dinner tables of our mother’s day.” The Roosevelts, she claimed, preferred simple meals, and rationing was “no problem at all.”
On June 6, 1944, Allied troops streamed across the English Channel in the D-day invasion of Normandy. It was an event the entire world had been anticipating, but that evening Roosevelt cursed, “Damn it, I don’t want beef!”
“Then what do you want?” Eleanor asked, soothingly.
“I want steak!” he thundered.
Mrs. Nesbitt noted in her diary that the president “looked thin and worn, but his mind was acute—too fast-working….[H]e was worn out waiting for the rest of us to catch up. His meals were all he had to vent his irritation and worry on.” Even the implacable Eleanor “looked harassed…[and] people tired her who never had before. There was a limit even for Mrs. Roosevelt.”
The Big Three summits were held in Tehran, Yalta, and Potsdam, and each was structured around a series of meals that revealed the leaders’ temperaments, their nations’ aspirations, and the shifting global order. The first was held in Tehran, Iran, in November 1943. Roosevelt opened with a steak and baked potato dinner. On the second night, Stalin hosted, and he and FDR poked Churchill with ill-tempered barbs. The prime minister sensed that the power dynamic was changing, and the Big Three was morphing into the Big Two.
On November 30, Churchill hosted a party for his sixty-ninth birthday. Promising “a never-to-be forgotten” event, he got his wish. Things began badly, when Stalin refused to shake the prime minister’s hand and declined Roosevelt’s cocktail. At dinner, the marshal had to ask which piece of cutlery to use. The menu included Persian soup, boiled salmon from the Caspian Sea, turkey, and a cheese soufflé. Copious amounts of French and Iranian wine were poured, and Churchill was presented with a cake decorated with sixty-nine candles in a V shape.
As the evening wound down, a fabulous “Persian Lantern Ice” dessert arrived. It was an ice cream confection set on top of an ice block on which a candle burned inside a perforated metal tube. When it arrived, the lamp melted the ice and caused the metal tube to list. The waiter wobbled, and watched in horror as the pile of ice cream inexorably slopped over the head of the Russian interpreter, Pavlov, who was in the midst of translating Stalin’s speech. It was a shockingly funny yet terrifying moment, and the room went dead silent. “Ice cream was oozing out of his hair, his ears, his shirt and even his shoes,” a British diplomat said. Fearful for his life, Pavlov carried on translating Stalin’s words, until towels were brought to wipe him down. With the ice literally broken, the mood lightened and the Big Three agreed to cooperate on troop movements and the postwar order in Europe.
Tehran was considered a diplomatic triumph for Winston Churchill, but when it came to gastro-politics the prime minister left a haunting legacy. He understood the power of food and was not afraid to use it—playing the charming epicure who brokered agreements over fine wine one minute and the coldly calculating strategist who used starvation as a weapon the next. In Afghanistan, he burned crops to quell restive Pashtun tribes. In Kenya, he forced Indigenous people off the fertile highlands to make way for British farmers. And in India, he and Lord Cherwell—Frederick Alexander Lindemann, a scientist with a Malthusian bent—destroyed rice stocks to deny sustenance to advancing Japanese troops. As a result, about three million people starved to death in the Bengal famine of 1943. FDR must have known about the prime minister’s unsparing policy, but turned a blind eye. Some consider Churchill a hero. Others have deemed him “a war criminal.” The best one can say is that he was both.
Food has been used as a weapon of war since the Greek siege of Troy three thousand years ago. Roman legions salted the earth to render it infertile. During the American Civil War, Confederate soldiers poisoned wells with dead animals and the Union General William Tecumseh Sherman conducted a scorched-earth campaign across the South. The drive to acquire and deny calories was a defining factor of World War II, as it was in World War I. In both cases, one of America’s decisive advantages was the ability to produce butter as well as guns. Hitler said Germany had lost World War I in large part because of the Allied food blockade, and one reason he invaded the Soviet Union was to plunder grain fields, which, according to his “Hunger Plan,” would feed his countrymen while starving his enemies. Some four million Soviets starved to death in German camps. A million German POWs were starved in Soviet camps. When the Japanese seized Vietnamese rice, one to two million people died of hunger. The brutal lesson, Churchill said, was “the stomach governs the world.”
On January 20, 1945, Franklin D. Roosevelt was inaugurated to an unprecedented fourth term. Two weeks later, the second Big Three meeting was convened in Yalta, on the Black Sea. As Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin debated how to apportion postwar Germany, FDR’s face was drawn and dark semicircles drooped beneath his eyes. He looked “tired to the point of an inhuman loneliness….[T]he whole world seemed [to be] pulling him down,” Mrs. Nesbitt wrote.
In March, American planes bombed Tokyo and Berlin into cauldrons of flaming dust, and the end of the war was in sight. After a long weekend with Eleanor in Hyde Park, FDR departed for a vacation at his “southern White House,” in Warm Springs, Georgia. There, he soaked his polio-racked body in eighty-eight degree thermal baths, which improved his spirits and allowed him to move his right leg a bit. Then, on April 12, the president suffered a cerebral hemorrhage and died at sixty-three.
Despite the shock, “all went smoothly as clockwork” at the White House, Mrs. Nesbitt noted. What she failed to mention was that two of FDR’s female admirers, Lucy Mercer and Daisy Suckley, were with him in Georgia. In a black veil, Eleanor accompanied her husband’s body to Washington on a funeral train as thousands of citizens paid tribute along the tracks. FDR’s body lay in state in the East Room of the White House and was buried at Hyde Park. (Roosevelt’s death just eighty-two days into his fourth term spurred the Twenty-Second Amendment in 1951, limiting presidents to two terms.)
En route from Hyde Park to Warm Springs, Roosevelt had stopped in Washington for his last dinner at the White House. He ordered his lucky meal, terrapin soup. “A man came in from one of the hotels and cooked it in cream and in the shell, just as he liked it,” Mrs. Nesbitt wrote. “I was pleased that we had terrapin, and that it turned out just right.”