In 1992, Bill Clinton ran his presidential campaign on the slogan “For People, for a Change.” At his first dinner as president—a banquet for governors held in January 1993—he and his wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton, made two big changes to the status quo: they asked guests to smoke outside (to advocate for healthy living and to preserve the mansion’s antique furnishings), and they invited outside chefs to advise on the White House menu. Both initiatives are common now, but were considered unusual, even radical, at the time.
Before the dinner, the social secretary, Ann Stock, consulted with the incumbent executive chef, Pierre Chambrin, as usual, but she also solicited ideas from three well-known restaurant cooks: Anne Rosenzweig of Arcadia and Larry Forgione of An American Place, in New York, and John Snedden of Rocklands Barbeque and Grilling Company in Washington. “We’re trying to get a kitchen cabinet…who will advise us about new menus,” Mrs. Clinton explained. “It will keep us up to date about what a lot of American chefs are doing….Asking people for their advice, whether it’s about policy or food, is a way to give even more people a feeling of inclusion. And you get good ideas.”
She seemed to be indicating that larger change was on the way. The resulting menu was a sophisticated mix of all-American ingredients: smoked shrimp with mango horseradish chutney; roasted beef tenderloin with baby vegetables in a zucchini basket; Yukon gold potatoes with Vidalia onions; a salad of winter greens with hazelnut dressing and goat cheese. The wines hailed from Virginia, California, and Oregon. Mesnier’s dessert was an apple sherbet terrine with applejack mousse and hot cider sauce.
The dinner was hailed by guests, but the kitchen crew felt slighted. “I can’t say I’m very pleased,” growled Chambrin, the epitome of an old-school chef. “It’s always difficult with something new.”
Relations with him deteriorated from there. He was annoyed when the Clintons began to invite colleagues—up to fifty at a time—for dinner on short notice (a habit of many First Couples). Adding to the strain, the president was a talker who habitually arrived late, which made serving hot, tasty food a challenge. In response, Chambrin staged a slowdown, declaring the Clintons “will have to learn to wait” for their food. The pastry chef Roland Mesnier reminded his countryman that the First Family was “not hard to please,” but “you do have to please. If you can’t do that, you don’t belong” at the President’s House.
Then Mrs. Clinton, who worried about her husband’s genetically weak heart and years of unwise eating, invited outside diet consultants to coach him. The biggest name was Dr. Dean Ornish, a celebrity cardiologist and director of the Preventive Medicine Research Institute, in California. Ornish advised Clinton to eat more fruits and vegetables, keep dietary fat at 10 percent of calories, and replace burgers and fries with stir-fried vegetables with tofu or salmon. “The president did like unhealthy foods,” Ornish said, but the soy burgers he put on the menu “were delicious and nutritious.”
When Chambrin scorned the outsiders and their edicts, his obstinacy did not go unnoticed. “Pierre is incapable of doing low fat. He truly doesn’t understand and isn’t willing to be taught,” an anonymous Clintonite said. “His desk is covered with cookbooks, but they are all in French and they are all by dead people.”
In March 1994, the White House announced that Chambrin and three assistant cooks had resigned. The chef was paid an unprecedented $37,026 settlement. He landed a job at the St. Louis Club and years later would gripe, “Hillary Clinton don’t know nothing about food….She was une personne political. She did it because it was popular at the time.”
With Chambrin gone, the Clintons cut back their entertaining to give themselves time to figure out what kind of food they wanted to serve, what messages it should send, and which chef could bring their vision to life. They aspired to showcase innovative cookery that fused local ingredients with global flavors, classical technique, and the latest in dietary science. “The big issue about health is so paramount,” the First Lady said.
“The Clintons, a minority choice, were elected to offer ‘change.’ So the cuisine, too, must change,” opined the London Independent. “Maybe the Clintons will at last define what US cuisine is. Or which American cooking is most American. That would be no mean achievement.”
Wittingly or not, the Clintons had scratched an old itch. For years, people have debated just what “American cuisine” is, or if it actually exists. In the 1820s, a British visitor lamented Americans’ habit of scarfing down dinner in twenty minutes flat, without apparent joy or conversation. Fifty years later, Russia’s grand duke Alexis opined that America had no discernible cuisine. In the 1930s, the wine importer André Simon wrote “An American Tragedy,” an essay that lamented American diners’ obsession with speed, sugar, and shows (singing waiters and the like). But it wasn’t only the Europeans. During the Clinton administration, the American anthropologist Sidney Mintz defined cuisine as a cultural phenomenon that citizens discuss and have opinions about: because the United States did not have that tradition, he maintained, it did not have a proper cuisine. Noting that the nation’s favorite entrées in 1994 began with pizza and ham sandwiches, moved through hot dogs and hamburgers, and ended with spaghetti, Mintz sniffed, “I don’t think anyone wants to call that array a cuisine.”
These views raised howls of protest from those who pointed to regional specialties—Louisiana gumbo, Florida key lime pie, apple pie (“as American as…”)—and eclectic mixes of immigrant foods—hamburger chow mein, say, or pizza topped with pineapple and ham—as evidence that we have an identifiable cuisine that does not fall into traditional categories. The protests continue today. In 2019’s American Cuisine: And How It Got This Way, the Yale historian Paul Freedman wrote that food in the United States is characterized by regionalism, standardization, and variety. It “is recognizably different from that of the rest of the world. It has a distinctive set of tastes that can be called American cuisine.”
The Clintons didn’t set out to define American cooking per se, but they did lead the nation in a new gustatory direction suited to the fast-approaching millennium. Viewed one way, they were leading by example from the top; seen from a different angle, they were merely following the herd of baby boomers toward lighter, healthier menus. The changes the Clintons wrought at the White House were evolutionary rather than revolutionary, but in the culture at large food became an important part of the national conversation and a bigger business than ever during their tenure.
Americans’ interest in modern cooking as pleasurable, or at least something more than fuel, was seeded in the 1960s by the adventurous, Eurocentric recipes of Julia Child, James Beard, and Graham Kerr (the “Galloping Gourmet”), and the food writing of Craig Claiborne and M.F.K. Fisher, among others. It blossomed in the 1970s, with the arrival of lighter, healthier nouvelle cuisine, along with bottled water and quiche, from France; looser immigration laws that brought new kinds of Asian and Central American foods; and, as more women joined the workforce, changing dining habits. The healthy eating trend flowered in the 1980s, with the arrival of kiwi fruit, sushi, and the California cookery popularized by inventive chefs like Wolfgang Puck, Deborah Madison, Judy Rodgers, Jeremiah Tower, and Jonathan Waxman.
In the 1990s, a broad swath of the American public had the time, money, and interest to contemplate food and how it relates to human and environmental health. On television, cooking became a form of entertainment and chefs became stars. Recipes multiplied in newspapers, magazines, and books. Cookware stores bloomed out of muddy fields. Restaurants embraced new types of fusion cuisines. Farmers, academics, and activists promoted locally grown and organic food and raised pointed questions about Big Agriculture’s sustainability. The Clintons rode that wave of gastronomic interest and pushed it further.
One spur to this phenomenon was Food Network, which debuted in 1993, the same year the Clintons took office. With a relatively small, $10 million budget, Food Network showcased cooks with a flair for performing—Emeril Lagasse, Sara Moulton, Jacques Pépin, Marcus Samuelsson, Ming Tsai, Mario Batali, David Rosengarten—and grew into a slick, 24-7-365 infotainment juggernaut that changed media, restaurants, and food production. With an assist from the publishing business, Food Network created the “celebrity chef” phenomenon. They were a small group of mostly white, mostly male cooks who—unlike the pale, overworked, and underpaid kitchen trolls of yore—were CEOs, lifestyle gurus, entrepreneurs, real estate tycoons, and media moguls.
As the internet began connecting people in an entirely new way in the mid-1990s, food blogs, zines, podcasts, radio shows, apps, and even food video games proliferated. This new media “flattened” gastronomy and turned highbrow cuisine into middlebrow pop culture. Suddenly everybody thought they could cook, or at least post and editorialize about what they were eating.
If you were to point to the moment when the new politics of food was publicly asserted, you could trace it to December 9, 1992, when Alice Waters, the leader of the “delicious revolution” in Berkeley, wrote a letter to President-elect Clinton and Vice President–elect Al Gore Jr., urging them to model a diet of “seasonal, pure foods [and] health.”
The three were baby boomers: Waters was forty-eight, Clinton was forty-six, and Gore was forty-four. She spoke their language and appealed to their youthful populism, but she also called them to action. Waters (who would reimagine the café at Monticello in 2018, as I mention in the introduction) demanded the White House abandon the rich, elaborate foods in vogue since the Kennedy administration and replace them with healthful plates heaped with fresh lettuces, fruit, multigrains, and light sauces, prepared in a global fusion style—the kind of food she served at Chez Panisse.
Americans, she warned, “are set in their addictions to salt and sugar and fat. I have to believe you can change people’s minds. An example has to be set at the top.”
Waters’s letter—cosigned by four hundred well-known cooks, who called themselves Chefs Helping to Enhance Food Safety (CHEFS)—was a combination of flattery and provocation: unless the Clintons updated the White House cuisine, she implied, they risked being seriously out of step with modern America. And she sounded another important theme: the inherently political nature of the presidential diet, a subject long overlooked, or pointedly ignored, at the mansion.
Politics always simmers just below the surface of any talk about food, but the attitude of most First Families was, “Good food is nice, but it’s not as important as government,” which ignores the fact that dining is a powerful, primal tool for consensus building, persuasion, and message-signaling. For their part, White House chefs had always taken a stoic line: “We are cooks, not politicians, and any talk about food policy is above our pay grade.” Waters was having none of it. She stressed that not all meals are equal, that food production and environmental quality are essential to human health, and that White House chefs should play a more public role. To some, this was a call to action; to others, near heresy.
Diminutive and soft-spoken, with an oval face and dirty blond hair cropped stylishly short, Waters was hard to ignore. She had just been anointed the first female “Best Chef in America” with a James Beard Award and had a stellar lefty résumé. In 1967, she joined the Free Speech Movement at UC Berkeley and cooked for Vietnam War protesters. Then she ate her way through Paris and Provence. When she opened Chez Panisse in 1971, Waters and her troupe of lettuce worshippers (she washed each leaf individually, it was said, and served only “perfect” peaches) opposed pesticides and preached the value of organic gardens.
Waters’s gospel spread, and her hippie ethos—she dressed in vintage clothing and ran her restaurant as a freewheeling collective—made her a media darling. Praised as a crusader, she declared, “We chefs…believe that good food, pure and wholesome, should be not just a privilege for the few, but a right for everyone. Good food nourishes not just the body, but the entire community….[A] discriminating quest for fish and meat of quality would herald the need to care for our waters, pastures and areas surrounding them.”
While the Clintons were impressed by Waters’s passion, others thought she was overstepping. A Bush insider snickered, “Tree huggers in the White House kitchen? Quelle horreur!” Accused of elitism, Waters doubled down, declaring, “Just seeing what Clinton eats is pretty distressing. McDonald’s and Cokes. It’s a terrible image.” This inflamed Defenders of the Common Man, who wondered why “the food police” would not allow Clinton to “tear into a burger without having Alice Waters tear into him?…It’s time for the culinary busybodies to get out of his kitchen.”
Finally, Waters seemed to suggest it was high time to appoint an American chef to lead the Executive Kitchen. This set off more hand-wringing. The nouvelle cuisine master Paul Bocuse declared that nationalism was important to French gastronomy and that it was ridiculous not to have an American cook in the White House. But the Swiss-born Henry Haller disagreed, saying, “I would be a hypocrite” to say a chef’s nationality was more important than his ability.
Contrite, Waters said her letter “wouldn’t have received such attention…if it had been correctly interpreted.” Yet she had touched a nerve. “A decision about the White House chef is not something [we] have been able to focus on,” the new administration said. But Hillary Clinton stirred the pot by calling Waters “a breakthrough figure….I think what she says makes a lot of sense.”
The good news, lost in the hot air and flashing cleavers, was that many ordinary Americans suddenly cared about who was cooking what in the Executive Mansion and why. That was new.
The Clintons spent six months interviewing chefs across the country, but ultimately found their man across the street. Patrick Clark was a thirty-nine-year-old Black chef who weighed three hundred pounds, sported a dramatic mustache, and ran the kitchen at the Hay-Adams Hotel, which overlooked the White House. The only Black chef of his stature at the time, Clark trained in France with the innovative Michel Guérard, made his name at Odeon—the Manhattan two-star bistro made famous by Jay McInerney’s 1984 roman à cocaine, Bright Lights, Big City—and was named one of the James Beard Foundation’s “Best Chefs.”
The Clintons were so pleased by Clark’s Moroccan barbecued salmon and his smoked-and-seared venison loin that they offered him the job of executive chef. He declined, explaining, “I have five kids and five college tuitions.” The starting salary for a White House chef was between $50,000 and $70,000. The Hay-Adams paid Clark a princely $170,000 a year, and he would later find security in a $500,000 annual salary at the 850-seat tourist palace Tavern on the Green in New York. (He cooked almost until the moment he died of congestive heart failure in 1998, at forty-two.)
The Clintons started their search again. Their quest captured the public imagination, and within days the White House had received four thousand applications. Asked repeatedly when they would resume hosting, Hillary replied, “We’re not going to entertain until we have the chef I want.” Her inadvertent use of the pronoun “I” was telling, for she and Bill had very different ideas about food.
William Jefferson Clinton was raised in Hope, Arkansas, on a steady diet of grilled steak, chicken enchiladas, French fries, pies, cakes, and other foods loaded with salt, sugar, and fat. As a teen, he was an overweight saxophonist—“a fat band boy,” as he put it. As the governor of Arkansas, he patronized nearly every restaurant in Little Rock—grazing on barbecued pork at Sims Bar-B-Que, jalapeño cheeseburgers at Doe’s Eat Place, enchiladas loaded with smooth melt cheese at Juanita’s, and the like.
In 1991, when the six-foot-two, forty-five-year-old Democrat campaigned for the White House, his cravings for fast food became the stuff of legend. In New Hampshire, he inhaled almost a dozen doughnuts before an aide whisked the box away. He frequently pressed the flesh and scarfed burgers at McDonald’s, a habit memorialized by a Saturday Night Live sketch showing Clinton (Phil Hartman) “going jogging,” which meant ambling into the Golden Arches to distract patrons while helping himself to their fries. Fueled by cheap calories, Clinton’s weight ballooned to 230 pounds. This turned some voters off, but his struggle with “the battle of the bulge” made him relatable to many others.
The candidate’s populist tastes represented “the kind of diet most people his age and older grew up eating: heavy on the meat, dessert at every meal and tiny amounts of vegetables, the tinier the better,” The New York Times reported.
An armchair psychologist might say that Clinton gorged on unhealthy comfort foods as compensation for the turmoil of his childhood. Bill Clinton was born William Jefferson Blythe III. His father was a traveling salesman who died in a car crash before Bill’s birth. Clinton’s mother, Virginia, married four times (she married one man twice), and at fifteen Bill took the surname of his stepfather, Roger Clinton Sr., a car dealer and abusive alcoholic gambler. Shortly after Bill was born, Virginia left for nursing school and lodged him with her parents. In the racially tense South, they were a tolerant white couple who ran a grocery and were willing to do business with anyone. In this way, Bill Clinton was schooled in the vagaries of love, betrayal, and compassion from the start.
He coped by becoming a gifted talker, copious eater, and alleged serial philanderer. As rumors about an affair with Gennifer Flowers and charges of sexual harassment dogged him, Clinton’s inability to restrain his lust for fried chicken and cinnamon rolls was all too easily equated with his weakness for women who were not his wife. In both cases, Hillary came to his defense.
Speaking about his diet, she said, “An occasional trip to a fast-food restaurant is not the worst of all possible sins. The good news is my husband loves to eat and enjoys it. The bad news is he loves to eat, even when things are not always right for him.”
Food was a constant theme on the campaign trail, where Hillary was often an effective surrogate for Bill. Taunting President Bush, she’d say, “Let’s put broccoli in the White House again!” But when asked about her career as a corporate lawyer, she snapped, “I suppose I could have stayed home and baked cookies and had teas, but what I decided to do was to fulfill my profession.” It was a political misstep. Intending to explain her life choices, she had insulted stay-at-home women and was labeled a “radical feminist.”
The First Lady apologized profusely and spent years trying to reshape her image from a sharp-elbowed lawyer to a traditional spouse and mother. Her hairdos and wardrobe seemed to change weekly, and when Family Circle asked Mrs. Clinton and Barbara Bush to participate in a chocolate chip cookie bake-off in 1992, she obliged (and won). When Hillary ran for the Oval Office in 2016, however, she resurrected the line about “baking cookies” as a badge of honor.
Political optics aside, Mrs. Clinton was genuinely interested in tasty, salubrious food and underwent a culinary awakening in Georgia. While her husband was gorging on gooey burritos, she insisted, “We are trying to move toward healthy, fresh American food” at home, meaning grilled skinless chicken breast rather than deep-fried chicken wings. “We do a lot of vegetables and a lot of fiber and a lot of fruit,” she said.
Raised in the Chicago suburbs, Hillary Rodham (she kept her maiden name until 1982, when she added “Clinton” to assuage Arkansas voters) was a gifted academic who said, “I’m a lousy cook, but I make pretty good soft scrambled eggs.” She could also whip up a decent tossed salad and was fond of spicy curry, but—admitting to being “periodically undisciplined about what I eat”—was not above the occasional olive burger, made from six ounces of ground sirloin topped with chopped pimento-stuffed green olives (now called the Hillary burger).
She collected bottles of hot sauce and shared a weakness for ice cream and chocolate with her daughter, Chelsea, sweet treats that Bill was tragically allergic to. His dessert abstinence became “one of the serious issues of our marriage,” Hillary said, laughing. “Chelsea and I love chocolate. One of our favorite things is rich, rich, rich chocolate cake with thick chocolate icing.” That was a sentiment that many voters could get behind.
Mrs. Clinton’s tastes were a sign that she had “a stylish palate,” observed the food writer Mimi Sheraton. “How can anyone not admire a woman who, like so many of us, is torn between renunciation and appetite, with a weakness for the hot and spicy and the cool and sweet, and who surely represents the people’s palate?”
In the 1992 election, Bill Clinton defeated George H. W. Bush and the billionaire independent Ross Perot, becoming the nation’s third-youngest (forty-six) chief executive after Theodore Roosevelt (forty-two) and John F. Kennedy (forty-three). And with a dawning insight that you are, in fact, what you eat, Clinton strove to adopt a cleaner, healthier diet with help from a new chef.
On March 5, 1994, The New York Times ran a story headlined “High Calories (and Chef!) Out at White House” about Pierre Chambrin’s unceremonious departure. On a flight, Jean Scheib read the article and nudged her husband, Walter: “You should apply for that job.”
He shrugged. They were returning from his mother’s funeral, and he was depressed. His mother had been a devotee of Julia Child’s and had raised him in Bethesda, Maryland, on dishes like beef tongue, bouillabaisse, and paella. While other kids were out playing baseball, Walter would dice onions, cook, and watch Graham Kerr on The Galloping Gourmet. He trained at the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, New York, did stages in France, and worked in kitchens across the United States. By 1993, Scheib—a tall, dark-haired, pink-cheeked, bespectacled thirty-nine-year-old—was the executive chef at the Greenbrier, a luxury hotel set on eleven thousand acres in the Allegheny Mountains. (Hidden beneath its grounds was a Cold War bunker to shelter Congress in the event of a nuclear attack.) In the hotel’s state-of-the-art kitchen, Scheib’s staff of two hundred honed a sophisticated “contemporary American” style that integrated local, seasonal ingredients with Asian and Mediterranean flavors and European technique.
Still immersed in grief, Scheib was distracted, so Jean sent his résumé in without telling him. He was invited to audition for Mrs. Clinton, and arrived in the White House kitchen, which he was shocked to discover was a cramped space filled with obsolete tools and painted an odd shade of blue. The gas ranges, broiler, griddle, and counters dated to the 1970s and were woefully underpowered. It was “a backward-looking spectacle that recalled the American attitude toward food as fuel,” he recalled. He whipped up a lunch sourced from local green markets: poached lobster tails lacquered with a ginger sauce; roast rack of lamb; a spicy curried sweet potato mousse; and a spring lettuce salad. The First Lady and her advisers—known collectively as Hillaryland—were smitten.
“The money might not be as good as you’re used to,” said the chief usher Gary Walters, “but if you get the job, you’ll be part of living history.”
Scheib was hired on April 1, 1994, making him the nation’s sixth executive chef—only the second American after Jon Hill—since Jackie Kennedy created the position in 1961. His appointment “marks another milestone in the evolution of America’s rapidly changing dining habits,” observed Nation’s Restaurant News. “When the White House sends such an unmistakably clear message about diet, there is ample reason to believe that the politics of food and health are more and more in the country’s collective thoughts. And we can only speculate that this will lead to even more changes in the future.”
Scheib arrived at the White House just as political typhoons were beginning to churn. Clinton had lowered taxes on the poor and raised them on the rich, signed the Brady bill gun law, and backed the North American Free Trade Agreement. Conflicts had broken out in Somalia, Bosnia, and Ireland. Diplomats worried about the nuclear ambitions of North Korea, Pakistan, and Iraq. Mrs. Clinton was chairing a task force to build a national health-care system. Meanwhile, accusations were made about Clinton’s alleged affairs, the death of Deputy White House Counsel Vince Foster, and the Whitewater real estate scandal.
Scheib led a full-time staff of five he called “the Casa Blanca Gang”—two assistant cooks, a steward, and two staff cooks—and a part-time crew of twenty assistants who pitched in for big events. He quickly learned that the president liked a grab-and-go breakfast from the Navy Mess, while Hillary started her day with fresh grapefruit juice, blueberries, and Quaker oatmeal. Fourteen-year-old Chelsea grazed on whatever was at hand. At lunch, the president was an omnivore, but was happiest with a pizza and salad. The First Lady didn’t like frisée lettuce, but enjoyed his Chilean sea bass or tartine of grilled eggplant. The Clintons’ favorite dish was crab cakes, which they served at lunch, dinner, or watch parties for University of Arkansas football games, and they served fifteen to twenty thousand mini crab cakes every Christmas.
The chef grew frustrated by the White House’s dysfunctional supply chain. “If you wanted a ripe tomato, you should have written ‘ripe’ on the requisition form,” a bureaucrat said, after Scheib rejected a box of hard, tasteless pink orbs. It took him two years to find good suppliers, replace the kitchen’s antique appliances with high-speed ovens and new storage cabinets. But his biggest challenge was to improve the president’s diet.
Scheib typed up weekly menus that were low in red meat, fat, and carbohydrates, and high in fruits, vegetables, and whole grains. Hillary—who had a commanding presence but seemed far more relaxed and sympathetic in person than the character she played on TV, Scheib noted—penciled queries in the margins: “Walter, could you please calculate calories?” or “What is jicama salad?”
With input from nutritionists, they crafted heart-healthy meal plans, but lest the “Clinton diet” become a gossipy distraction, they were kept private. For the record, a typical menu included half a grapefruit, shredded wheat with skim milk, and oatmeal toast for breakfast; Boston lettuce and watercress salad with a side of bagel chips and hummus for lunch; and navy bean soup, broiled arctic char with an orange tarragon sauce, and multigrain rice for dinner. Together, the First Lady and the executive chef promoted contemporary American cuisine in a new way. They didn’t lead a revolution, exactly, but their efforts led to a significant evolution in White House cookery and influenced the way citizens thought about what they ate.
Settling in, the Clintons began to host weekly themed receptions—an Eastern Shore cookout, say, or a New Orleans jazz celebration, or a congressional luau—for two hundred to four hundred guests at a time. The South Lawn became a favorite party venue, though hot grills, wind, rain, and unexpected drop-ins proved a challenge. When the Olympic torch arrived during a congressional picnic in June 1996, the skies suddenly opened, forcing Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich to hide beneath a picnic table. And just before Clinton honored twenty-eight hundred AmeriCorps volunteers at a picnic, a light plane crashed on the South Lawn; the area was cordoned off as a “crime scene,” and the crowd was herded inside for an impromptu Big Mac feast.
The Clinton administration grew increasingly fractious, and as political tensions mounted outside the White House, personal relations grew strained in its back corridors. Sixteen hundred Pennsylvania Avenue is staffed by ambitious people whose egos occasionally clashed. This was true in the kitchen, where hostilities flared between Scheib and Roland Mesnier. It began with a squabble over ingredients: when Scheib used orange sections in a salad, he forgot to mention it; Mesnier used oranges in his dessert that day and denounced the chef for repeating one of “his” ingredients, which is considered a faux pas. To avoid further duplication, the two, who shared a small office but rarely spoke, left notes for each other.
“Mrs. Clinton presided over a minor revolution….[Scheib] made a great many changes, far too soon, with the result that many…staff members were furious,” Mesnier wrote in his memoir. Scheib countered that the pastry chef was simply jealous. “I was stealing his spotlight,” he wrote in his memoir. Less credibly, he added, “I did nothing to promote myself. If anything, I shied away from such attention.”
Yet the pressure was relentless, and the two had no choice but to work in sync, if not together. In the stretch between Thanksgiving and Christmas the Clintons hosted functions almost every day. Scheib began cooking at 6:30 a.m. and worked until early the next morning. As the Clintons added guests, he streamlined procedures to feed up to fifteen hundred people at a time. Perversely, once the kitchen raised its game, Hillary added another thousand mouths to feed. “We were there…to bring Mrs. Clinton’s almost magical notion of what White House entertaining should be to life,” Scheib wrote like a good soldier.
For the 1993 Christmas parties, Mesnier baked twenty chocolate logs and two thousand petits fours in a day. Feeling burned out, he bought a house in rural Virginia and contemplated retirement. But then he was dragooned back to the White House to whip together lemon tartlets, a carrot cake, and a gingerbread house. Before she let him go home, Hillary had one more special request: to prepare a treasured family recipe. As she thrust a scrap of paper into his hand, he blinked uncomprehendingly at the ingredients, then bent to his mixing bowls like Dr. Frankenstein in his lab, making the Coca-Cola-flavored jelly with black glacéed cherries she had requested. It was “an atrocious concoction,” he wrote, “but I bowed to family tradition.”
In 1994, Scheib oversaw the construction of a small vegetable garden on the White House roof. The grounds crew planted four varieties of tomatoes and two kinds of peppers, squashes, and cucumbers in ten-gallon planters, along with rows of herbs, including basil, thyme, mint, and chives. Up there, the vegetables were too high for insects, and no pesticides were required. (The roof already had a flower garden in a greenhouse. And the First Lady’s Garden was an ornamental herb garden growing on the mansion’s east side.) Scheib used the vegetables for the Clintons’ meals, and he sourced other produce from local farmers and food co-ops. Their identities were not publicized, for security reasons, and if a grower’s name leaked, they were dropped from the list.
Finding his footing, Scheib cooked most of the Clintons’ twenty-nine state dinners. Each menu included three standard elements, he said: the best American ingredients; a culinary nod to the honored guest’s home cuisine; and interesting flavors that would appeal to different palates. Usually served, eaten, and cleared in about ninety minutes, state dinners “are not Escoffier,” Scheib said (referring to the legendary French chef Auguste Escoffier). “You can spin it any way you want,” but a state dinner is “still a banquet. How you serve 240 people and have them not think it’s another rubber-chicken-circuit dinner, that’s the job.”
His first state dinner was held in June 1994, in honor of the emperor Akihito and the empress Michiko of Japan. The meal served as a capstone to diplomatic talks with America’s most trusted Asian ally and as a display of the Clintons’ new approach to food, wine, and service. It began with an appetizer of quail with corn custard and a tomato-cumin sauce. The entrée—arctic char with lobster sausage, mushroom risotto, braised fennel, and a vegetable ragout—was a nod to Japan’s love of seafood. Char is a cousin to salmon, with beautiful orange flesh and a subtle taste; popular today, it was little known at the time. The meal featured two other unusual twists. The char was served with Pinot Noir, a light- to medium-bodied red wine, in contrast to the usual pairing of fish with white wine. And the dinner was served “American style,” meaning the food was plated in the kitchen, which the cooks preferred, rather than the conventional “French style,” in which waiters held platters from which guests helped themselves, which can be slow and awkward.
With the Japanese emperor successfully fed, Scheib was ecstatic. “I get to do every day what most chefs get to do once or twice in their life if they’re lucky,” he enthused. “People will have to pry me out of here with a crowbar.”
In September 1994, Boris Yeltsin, the president of the Russian Federation, joined Clinton for talks about eastern Europe. The two were burly, sociable men, and their meeting was dubbed “the Bill and Boris show.” The state dinner paid homage to Russia with a vodka-marinated salmon with cucumber salad and kasha pilaf. But then things went sideways. Yeltsin downed glass after glass of wine and grew increasingly boisterous. Worried, the butlers substituted water. But when the Yale Russian Chorus began to sing, Yeltsin rushed the stage to conduct with sweeping arm movements. After safely depositing him at Blair House, the official guesthouse, his hosts breathed a sigh of relief.
Early the next morning, U.S. Secret Service agents discovered the Russian president weaving unsteadily down Pennsylvania Avenue dressed in nothing but underwear. He “wanted a taxi to go out for pizza,” Clinton recalled. Eventually, Yeltsin “got his pizza” and was coaxed back to bed. But the next night he eluded his security detail again, and crept down to the Blair House basement. A guard mistook Yeltsin for an inebriated burglar, and the situation grew tense when U.S. and Russian agents converged. After a standoff, Yeltsin was repatriated to his room.
This made for an amusing anecdote, but it had at least two serious consequences. On a personal level, Yeltsin was an alcoholic whose addiction impaired his ability to lead and worsened his health. (He died of a heart attack in 2007.) On a global level, Yeltsin’s antics seemed a metaphor for Russia’s loss of direction and prestige. One critic was the former KGB agent Vladimir Putin, who began his rise to power with a vow to restore Russian pride.
A week after the Yeltsin tragicomedy the Clintons hosted Nelson Mandela, the winner of the 1993 Nobel Peace Prize. He was that rare figure: an individual who seemed to embody a race, a nation, and the aspirations of billions of people around the world. Mandela had caused a sensation in 1990, when he was a guest of the Bushes’. Now the Clintons welcomed him back as the first Black president of South Africa. He was greeted by one of the largest crowds ever seen at the White House. Cannons boomed a twenty-one-gun salute, and Mandela spoke movingly of his struggle to end apartheid. “That victory is your victory,” he told the crowd.
The Mandela state dinner on October 4, 1994, was one of the most significant White House events of the twentieth century. The challenge was to make it inclusive and respectful of protocol and to spice it with a dash of the old Kennedy magic. The Clintons aimed to conjure a nimbus of personalities, decor, symbolism, energies, food, wine, and music into a spectacular experience that fizzed in the mind long after the last plates were cleared. The scrum for tickets was intense, but the Clintons made sure to invite famous Black Americans, such as Maya Angelou, Jesse Jackson, Harry Belafonte, David Dinkins, and the ethereal singer Whitney Houston, who performed that night.
The meal was served in the East Room, where President Johnson had signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, with overflow tables in the Green Room. Mrs. Clinton used the Roosevelt china in the East Room and the Johnson and Reagan patterns in the Green Room. (The Clinton china, which depicts the White House’s north facade in gold, would not be commissioned until 2000, when it was used to celebrate the mansion’s two hundredth anniversary.)
Scheib’s kitchen catered 220 dinners that night, 20 percent more than usual. Most of the Casa Blanca crew were Black, and the mood in the kitchen was a mix of nerves, pride, and euphoria. The Clintons had invited Patrick Clark—the Black chef who declined their job offer—and his wife as guests. The chef accepted, and his white sous-chef Donnie Masterton cooked one of their signature dishes: sautéed halibut with a wasabi-sesame crust in a carrot juice broth. Scheib and his team cooked everything else, including layered late-summer vegetables with lemongrass and red curry, which combined South African ingredients, Southeast Asian seasoning, and European technique, in a hat tip to Cape Malay cuisine. “No visiting head of state inspired as much excitement,” Scheib recalled of Mandela. “It was an honor.”
Impressed by such meals, Chelsea Clinton asked for cooking lessons. Born in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1980, she came of age in the governor’s mansion and used food to define herself from early on. One day in 1991, the sixth grader was given two articles to read in school: one about the harmful effects of red meat on the human body, and the other about the way cattle are mistreated at slaughterhouses. At dinner that night, she announced she was giving up red meat. Her parents agreed, and two years later were surprised again when Chelsea announced she would become a full-blown vegetarian. They moved into the White House in 1993, when Chelsea was twelve. She spent more time in the Executive Kitchen than her parents did and was keen to learn how to transform raw ingredients into artfully composed meals. Furthermore, it was one of the few places the First Daughter could hang out like a regular person.
By the summer of 1997, Chelsea was seventeen and had been accepted to Stanford University. As a parting gift, Scheib taught her and a friend how to shop for vegetables, care for knives and pans, and make soups, salads, vegetable stocks, and vinaigrettes. The girls learned to substitute tofu (soybean curd) and tempeh (bricks of fermented soybeans) for meat, and to make vegetable risotto, buckwheat linguine with lentils, baba ghanoush, black bean enchiladas, and the like. At the end of the course, Chelsea donned a chef’s toque and accepted a certificate from “The White House Culinary Program.”
Bill Clinton’s second term from 1997 to 2001 brought the nation into the twenty-first century and was more fraught than his first. Nineteen ninety-eight was a particularly uncomfortable year. On August 7, attacks on the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania killed 224 people, including 12 Americans. Then the independent counsel Kenneth Starr launched an investigation into the Clintons’ alleged improprieties in Arkansas—including the Paula Jones sexual harassment case, which revealed the president’s affair with the twenty-two-year-old White House intern Monica Lewinsky, which began when she delivered pizza to him. That culminated in his impeachment and eventual acquittal.
A dank gloom enveloped the President’s House, and the Clintons reduced their torrential socializing to a trickle. Chelsea turned eighteen in 1998 and suffered “psychic damage” from the controversies, said Carl Sferrazza Anthony, a historian and friend of hers. “When you’re a bright young person…and you’re hearing what people are saying about your dad, it’s going to affect you.”
Again, Chelsea turned to the kitchen for solace, this time to learn how to bake. Roland Mesnier taught Chelsea and a friend how to grease a pie mold, make fresh ice cream, and shape marzipan paste into rose leaves. Though her flowers “bore a striking resemblance to cabbages,” she was determined to surprise her parents with their favorite desserts. After dinner, the waiters presented Chelsea’s handiwork: a mocha gâteau with marzipan roses for Hillary, and a cherry pie for Bill. Insulated from political vitriol for a night, the three dug in, alone together.
After the Clintons left the White House in 2001, Clinton continued to be dogged by high cholesterol, a “bent and ugly” coronary artery, and rumors of sexual impropriety. “Because of your genetics, moderate changes in diet and lifestyle aren’t enough,” admonished Dr. Ornish. But “more intensive changes…[can] reverse” heart disease. Clinton underwent a quadruple bypass in 2004, and six years later he transformed himself into America’s first president to become a vegan. (Once she had children, meanwhile, Chelsea reverted to eating meat.)
Replacing meat, eggs, dairy, and oil with snow peas, garlic hummus, spiced quinoa, and shredded beets, Clinton spoke out on the dangers of obesity, promoted exercise, and pushed for better nutrition policies. Sounding a lot like his onetime gadfly Alice Waters, he blamed “the way we consume food and what we consume” for soaring costs and a dysfunctional health-care system. Clinton lost twenty pounds and looked healthier. But, as was often the case with the former president, the story didn’t end there neatly.
Confusion set in when he mentioned that he ate an omelet or a piece of salmon once a week, which to purists meant he wasn’t a true vegan. And his message was further muddled when he consulted Dr. Mark Hyman, whose belief that “fat does not make you fat or sick” was the opposite of Dean Ornish’s “low-fat” mantra. Recent studies about whether eating fat leads to heart disease have been inconclusive. But the two experts agree that restricting sugar and refined carbohydrates while eating a whole food, vegetable-forward diet reduces weight and aids cardiac health.
As a politician, Bill Clinton had an uncanny ability to channel the public’s appetites, instincts, and contradictions. As an eater, now in his seventies, he continues to embody the nation’s vacillation between renunciation and appetite, our uncertainty about who or what to believe. A centrist, not an absolutist, he has chosen a middle path in the hope of having it all.