PREFACE

Dear President Obama,

I have a few questions for you. Nothing that will affect the world situation, but I was wondering … I love shrimp and pineapple pizza. What are your favorite foods? I am not allergic to anything, not any kind of food or any animals. Are you allergic to anything? There are a lot more questions I’d like to ask you, but I don’t want to bug you. You probably have more important earth-shattering questions to deal with.¹

When eleven-year-old Malaysia wrote the letter above to President Barack Obama circa 2009, she expressed a desire widely shared by many Americans. We want a personal connection to our presidents and First Families, and we believe that food—what presidents like to eat (or refuse to eat), what they serve to their guests, and what they cook—can be a leading indicator of presidential character. This predicament leads to what I call the “presidential pickle.” We want our presidents to be extraordinary people, but we also want them to be a lot like us. In our system of government, where power ultimately derives from its citizens, a president’s popularity is the bread and butter of maintaining political power.

Savvy presidents carefully use food to ordain and establish in the public consciousness that they are regular people, just like you and me. It’s an enterprise that is fraught with peril, and the stakes are high. Any missteps could make a president seem aristocratic (dining on too much fancy food), out of touch (not knowing the price of common groceries), weird (cottage cheese and ketchup, a combination that President Nixon loved), or just plain boring (having a strong affinity for iceberg lettuce or saltine crackers). Presidents’ food personas often publicly take shape on the campaign trail as they spend their days visiting working-class restaurants, county fairs, and other community events to talk to voters. Though these moments are managed as much as possible by a candidate’s staffers, there remains enough spontaneity to get a feel for those seeking the Oval Office. We scrutinize how they answer questions, how they emote with concerned citizens, and, probably more important, what they eat, their table manners, and how they chew their food. Remarkably, the latter is often not pretty. The stakes can be high because failure at good manners gives a president’s political enemies an opportunity to sear an aristocratic image of said president in the public’s consciousness. Several chief executives have suffered a political “kiss of death” because of a poor food image. Depending on how successful presidents are at crafting their image, they may leave the American public hungering for more information about them—or not.

That’s how the presidential food story often plays out in the public, but what happens in private is a much different matter. In this sphere of their lives, the First Families simply want food that will make them happy and keep them healthy. Depending upon the president, the public persona and the private reality may go together like beans and rice, or they may seem like alternate universes. Whether acknowledged or not, presidents and the public are in constant dialogue, and food helps the American public avoid the chemical aftertaste left by staged events and scripted speeches. Through food, we get an authentic taste of our president’s personality.

African Americans, as private and professional cooks, have been called upon time and time again to multitask in the following ways: cooking superb, comforting food for the First Family; dazzling presidential guests with the same; aiding and abetting a positive presidential food image; all while maintaining their professionalism and asserting their humanity, often under difficult conditions. In turn, presidents and First Ladies have often leaned on their African American cooks to burnish their reputation for private entertaining, for friendship, and for a unique perspective on African American life. This book will feast upon the legacy of African Americans who have been involved in various aspects of presidential food service. Though it will focus primarily on chefs and cooks, we will learn of many other people who are important to the president’s culinary team. This book is truly a group biography.

One would think that I got interested in this subject while I worked in the White House in the late 1990s. I had a high-security clearance, and I could have gone into the executive kitchen during down times in activity and chatted up the chefs. But I didn’t. Not for several years would I become fascinated in the presidential food history of our nation.

For fourteen months at the very end of his second term, I worked in the White House for President William Jefferson Clinton on something called “The President’s Initiative for One America.” This was an outgrowth of “The President’s Initiative on Race” that President Clinton also launched. Clinton’s bold idea was that if we just talked to one another and got to know one another, we might find out that we have a lot more in common than what supposedly divides us. I got the job thanks to Kathleen Ahn, a Georgetown University Law Center classmate, who was already working on the initiative. I was practicing law in Denver, Colorado, when she called and asked me if I had any friends back in Washington, D.C., who might want to work with the initiative. I asked about the job and quickly figured out that this was a “once-in-a-lifetime” opportunity. I took the approach that Dick Cheney did when presidential candidate George W. Bush asked him to recommend a vice presidential candidate: as the head of the search committee, I submitted only my own name.

I thoroughly enjoyed my time in the White House but at first had only limited access to presidential cooking. By the end of my tenure, however, I was elevated to a position that gave me White House Mess privileges (I highly recommend the cheeseburger), and I regularly ate in a small cafeteria on the first floor of what is now called the Dwight D. Eisenhower Executive Office Building—back then we called it the “Old Exec.” I never dined at a state dinner nor noshed in any of the presidential dining rooms. Though I passed it several times walking through the West Wing to the White House’s East Wing, I never took a peek into the White House kitchen.

At the change of an administration, the outgoing president’s political appointees write a resignation letter and submit it to the incoming president’s staff, a task I undertook at the end of Clinton’s term. Shockingly, President-elect Bush accepted mine. I was now back in the private sector seeking a job in either Washington, D.C., or my beloved hometown of Denver. The employment market was slow at the time, and I was watching way too much daytime television. I thought to myself, “I guess I should read something.” I went to a D.C. area bookstore and purchased the late John Egerton’s Southern Food: At Home, on the Road, in History. That book launched the journey to writing my first book, Soul Food: The Surprising Story of an American Cuisine, One Plate at a Time. During the decade that I researched Soul Food, African American presidential chefs kept jumping out at me from the pages of dusty books and from the soft glow of digitized newspapers and periodicals on my computer screen. I was immediately intrigued, but I didn’t have enough information to tell more than a handful of stories.

Fast-forward to late 2008 when Ari Weinzweig of Zingerman’s Roadhouse and Deli in Ann Arbor, Michigan, asked me to speak at the upcoming African American annual dinner at the restaurant. I was originally charged with talking about soul food, but I had a change of heart once I found out the date of the event: 20 January 2009, the inauguration day for Barack Obama, our nation’s first African American president. I looked over my files, convinced myself there was enough material to do a presentation, and then persuaded Ari that we should change course. Fortunately, he agreed. That night, Chef Alex Young, the Roadhouse’s winner of the James Beard Award, prepared a themed dinner utilizing historical recipes, and I introduced each course by telling stories about the particular African American presidential chef who inspired the dish. It was a wondrous night, and it inspired me to continue my quest to bring to light the personalities and capabilities of African American presidential chefs.

It’s been an amazing journey but not without some stumbling blocks along the way. Though presidential cooks have worked for some of the most powerful people on earth, history writers have provided significant details on the lives of only a tiny handful of them. This book offers plentiful detail for more of the 150 African American presidential culinary professionals I’ve identified in my research, but for many, the historical record gives only glimpses of their lives by way of incomplete name references, quick anecdotes, praises from satisfied diners, and pictures without captions. First-person accounts by African American presidential chefs are scarce because they spoke infrequently about what they did in the presidential kitchen (either by choice or by claims for confidentiality). Some valuable information comes from presidential biographies, cookbooks, and the recollections of the presidents themselves, their families, and their trusted aides. For most of what you’ll find in this book, we must thank numerous presidential observers who wrote about these culinary professionals in books, magazines, and newspapers. Regrettably, there are fewer contemporary African American voices in the historical sources. It’s a real challenge to interview presidential chefs currently on the job and recent alums involved in presidential food service due to an understandable culture of discretion and nondisclosure agreements. Still, I encourage these chefs to share their stories. I can personally attest to the fact that there is intense public interest in them as people, in their path to the White House, and in what they do at work and during their leisure time. These culinary professionals, these people, deserve more than to be historical silhouettes. Let’s give more life to their legacy.

White House executive chef Walter Scheib was tremendously helpful while I was researching this book. I came across his website and e-mailed him some initial questions. To my surprise, he called me within a few hours, and we had a great conversation. After this, we stayed in occasional contact. I eventually persuaded him to team up with me for a “Black Chefs in the White House” event for the Stanford Black Alumni Association of Washington, D.C. The event was held on a lovely spring night in May 2011 at Johnny’s Half Shell Restaurant. Chef Ann Cashion did a great job replicating and reinterpreting presidential recipes, and John Fulchino was a fantastic host. I gave the history of African American presidential chefs, and Chef Scheib provided a highly entertaining perspective on his experiences in the contemporary White House kitchen. After Scheib saw me in action, he came up afterward and said, “I don’t lend my name to many things, but I love what you’re doing. You have a fascinating project, and I can tell that you have integrity. If you give me enough notice, and my calendar is open, I’ll do as many of these events as I can with you. I think we’d be a good team.” In short, he immediately got what I was trying to accomplish.

We collaborated on a few events and projects, including pitching a television documentary on this subject. Scheib was quick to take my phone calls and texts and was generous with his time, giving me a great insider’s view of how the White House kitchen worked. We were scheduled to do another event in July 2015. But in June, on my birthday, as it sadly happened, Scheib went for a solo hike in the mountains outside of his part-time home in Taos, New Mexico, and disaster struck. A fast-moving storm moved in, and Scheib drowned in a flash flood. I miss his counsel, fun personality, and graciousness and wish we had had the opportunity to become better friends. That’s why this work is dedicated, in part, to him.

I thank the following people for helping in various ways as I worked on this project: Maureen Farkash for letting me interview her daughter Kiana; Shai Halbe and Manjusha Kulkarni; Nelson Hsu and Kimberly Kho; Jeannette LaFors and Matt Kelemen; Kary and Nanette LaFors; Dan Manatt; Angie and Johnny Mosier; Caroline Park; Ellen Sweets; and Marques and Roopa Tracy.

I also greatly appreciate the research and editorial help from Kelly Bates, Carrie Hale, Shawn Hallinan, Deborah Nicholson, and Mary Russell. I give a special thank you to my editor, Elaine Maisner, copyeditor Julie Bush, and managing editor Mary Carley Caviness for using their keen eyes and sharp minds to improve the manuscript. I also thank the anonymous readers who critiqued an early draft of this book. They kept me from making some woeful historical errors and gave me helpful guidance on striking the right tone. I also thank Sue Zimmerman for testing some recipes on short notice, Kristi and Andres Espiñeira for hosting a drink-recipe-tasting party, and Cynthia Chen for giving me a laser printer at just the right time in my writing life.

Thanks again to my White House colleagues in the President’s Initiative for One America office: Kathleen Ahn; Karen Scott, for many laughs and an enduring friendship; and especially to Robert “Ben” Johnson, who took a chance on me and did things to advance my career that he really didn’t have to do. I also thank President Bill Clinton for the glorious opportunity to work in the White House.

I thank my law school buddy Don Graves for giving me the serious White House hookup. Former Colorado governor Bill Ritter Jr. created an opportunity for me to speak with Chef Sam Kass while he worked in the White House and gave President and Mrs. Obama a copy of my first book while describing this one. Ramin Ganeshram and Tavis Smiley presented me with the opportunity to write my first essay about African American presidential chefs in the America I AM Pass It Down Cookbook. I thank Joe Yonan, food and dining editor at the Washington Post, for giving me the space to write and further flesh out some themes found in this book; former White House assistant chefs John Moeller and Frank Ruta for taking the time to share experiences and answer my questions; Kris Browning-Blas, the former food editor at the Denver Post; Patricia Calhoun of Westword for showing me and this project so much love in my hometown media; and freelance writer Ruth Tobias for getting the word out on my work nationally. Deep thanks go to Walter Scheib IV, one of Chef Scheib’s sons, for being so willing to give me access to his father’s culinary files. It was great to see a White House chef’s mind at work.

Writing this book was greatly aided by those who, on my behalf, helped organize numerous Black Chefs in the White House presentations around the country, where I got to test out theories, storytelling approaches, and puns and corny jokes: Claud Cloete, Lee and Charles Everding, Jesi Jones and the good folks in the Denver Eclectics, Dr. Joy Simmons, and Ari Weinzweig. Also, my thanks go to all who helped organize the events that I did for various Stanford University Alumni Clubs around the country (in Atlanta, Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, Northern California, Philadelphia, the Rocky Mountains, San Diego, and Washington, D.C.): Magnus Christon, Jane and Cam Collins, John Drive, Eric Fortner, Lauren Graham, Saidah Grayson, Amanda Johnson, James Jordan, Lisa Park, Mary Beth Walpole, Lyzette Wallace, Yale University Dining Services, and the Virginia Club of New York.

I also thank the staffs at the following presidential centers and libraries for helping me with research requests in person and from afar: the George Bush Presidential Library and Museum; the George W. Bush Presidential Center; the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library and Museum; the William J. Clinton Presidential Center; the Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library, Museum and Boyhood Home; the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library and Museum; the Benjamin Harrison Presidential Site; the Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Center; the Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library and Museum; the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum; the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum; the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum; the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum; and the Harry S. Truman Presidential Library and Museum. I also thank the University of Denver for maintaining an excellent and thorough culinary collection and for making all of its resources readily available on-site for independent researchers like me.

As I continue to discover and unearth more information on African American presidential culinary professionals, I’ll post it on my website: www.blackchefswhitehouse.com. If there is a presidential cook somewhere in your family history or social circles, I encourage you to reach out.

Finally, I thank God for the blessing to pursue one of my passions, to commune with these intriguing personalities, and to share their stories with you.