4. Semisweet
Thou art the King of rail-splitters, O Abe!
Thou art the everlasting son of the late Mr. Lincoln.
When thou lookest upon thee to run for the Presidency and deliver the Union, thou didst humble thyself to stand upon the “Chicago Platform.”
When thou didst overcome the sharpness of election, thou didst open the White House kitchen to all believers.
From the satirical poem “To Abraham Laudamus,” 1862
Lincoln’s presidency and the circumstances of the Civil War set several things in motion. First, in antebellum America, recently freed slaves, particularly those with professional skills, flocked to the nation’s capital, which has earned several nicknames over time due to its allure for African Americans: the “Colored Man’s Paradise,” the “Negro Mecca,” and “Chocolate City.” In 1800, 783 free blacks could be found in D.C.; by 1830, 6,152; and by 1860, 11,131, and they far outnumbered the enslaved population.1 Why were freed slaves drawn there? Many slaving states required freed slaves to leave either immediately or within a short period of time. Free blacks were dangerous to the South’s racial caste system because they could be actively working on a slave rebellion, assisting runaway slaves, or simply inspiring other blacks to pursue freedom. In the states where free blacks were permitted to eke out an existence, there were often so many regulations on their economic activity or ability that it wasn’t worth it to stay. After the Civil War began and the conflict raged on, thousands of enslaved blacks journeyed to the nation’s capital from both north and south to live in the contraband camps near the city. Millions of African Americans were physically on the move during the war years.
Second, a significant number of D.C.’s African Americans were moving up the socioeconomic ladder, though the top rungs remained out of reach. From the earliest founding of the city, blacks established schools, built churches, and opened up businesses. The entrepreneurial spirit flourished in other ways. A wealthy white woman named Anna Maria Brodeau wrote in her diary she kept in 1800 that she “bought a wooden tray of a Negro Man, who has purchased his freedom by making them & bowls at his leisure time.”2
Third, blacks were quickly asserting their political power, but it wasn’t easy. In 1867, the Radical Republicans pushed through Congress a bill that gave D.C. blacks the right to vote. This measure was wildly unpopular with whites, and President Andrew Johnson vetoed the bill. But Congress overrode his veto, and the bill became law. That year, “thousands of blacks voted in District elections. In 1868 blacks were elected to local office for the first time. By 1869 there were seven black councilmen. By 1870 the City Council prohibited discrimination in hotels, bars, restaurants and places of amusement. For a short time, at least, segregation had officially ended.”3
Alarmed by the rising political clout of D.C.’s African Americans, members of Congress took steps to make sure that power was muted. The key move was to prevent self-determination, and Congress actually removed the right to vote from all of Washington’s citizens. John Tyler Morgan, the senator from Alabama, starkly explained the legislative action on the Senate floor in 1890: “It was necessary, he said, to ‘burn down the barn to get rid of the rats … the rats being the negro population and the barn being the government of the District of Columbia.”4 Yet, Congress couldn’t stop all black progress, as historians Harry S. Jaffe and Tom Sherwood point out:
What Congress denied in the form of political power, the federal bureaucracy gave back in the form of jobs. A government job was a ticket to the American Dream, and Washington developed the largest and most stable black middle class in the nation…. The black middle class was sandwiched between a small class of black aristocrats and the poor blacks who couldn’t make it out of the alleys. The result was a rigid caste system reflected by skin color. “It was a segregated city among blacks,” says Calvin Rolark, Jr., who came to Washington from the South in 1952 and started a weekly newspaper. “The lighter-skinned blacks didn’t associate with the darker blacks, and the Howard University black didn’t associate with anyone.”5
In terms of workplace status, African Americans were figuratively on the move as well. As free laborers, professional cooks could apply for the job, get courted for the job, bargain for a good wage, show their skill, and, if they so choose, stay on the job through changes in presidential administrations. To understand these dynamics, this chapter looks at the experiences of Cornelia Mitchell, Dollie Johnson, Lucy Latimer Fowler, Alice Howard, Sergeant John Moaney, and Zephyr Wright.
Cornelia Mitchell was the first presidential cook to run the White House kitchen in post-emancipation America. She was a carryover employee from James Buchanan’s administration, and she lived in the White House servant quarters with her children. She was remembered fondly by a coworker for “her meals [that] were always well cooked and good enough to set before a king…. Cornelia was cultured and of a splendid old Southern family background. She was well educated for a colored girl of her day, and could prepare any dish from ‘old corn pone and cabbage’ so much liked by President Lincoln, to the finest dishes with lobster and terrapin. She was noted as one of the best cooks in the District.”6 Mitchell handled almost all of the cooking duties for private and public events, but extra cooks and kitchen help were hired for big events.7 Mitchell also supplemented the presidential meals with fresh vegetables from a White House garden kept at that time.8
As the Civil War raged on, Mitchell’s kitchen operations remained rather routine. Still, there were some unexpected interruptions. The most significant was moving the White House kitchen from the basement’s Central Hall to its present location. As one Lincoln historian explains:
The White House’s lower-level kitchen was originally located in the center of the ground floor, which could be considered a partial basement. It had north-facing windows. Sometime in the middle of the nineteenth century, the kitchen was relocated to the northwest corner. This may have been one of Mary Lincoln’s improvements to the living conditions of the White House. After the North Portico was constructed in 1830, the kitchen windows were blocked by this new entrance to the White House. Relocating the kitchen to a corner with windows made sense.9
Another interruption occurred in late August 1861, while President Lincoln was at the Old Soldiers’ Home, some unexpected dinner guests arrived—the Norway Light Infantry of Maine. According to what we would now describe as an “embedded reporter” with the infantry,
the “grub” was bad for a few days, and so our heroes strolled “down town” to see what could be done. They proceeded directly to the President’s House. Without ceremony they wended their way quietly into the broad kitchen—“bowing to a tall man” on their passage—and, carefully selecting what they thought would “go round,” made the following speech to the cook: “Look, here, we’ve sworn to support the Government; for three days we’ve done it on salt junk [salt pork]; now, if you would spare us a little of this, it would put the thing along amazingly!” It is needless to say that the boys had an abundance that day.10
The “tall man” in this anecdote may have been the butler Paul Brown; the unnamed cook was Cornelia Mitchell. Whatever the soldiers ate from the White House larder, I think that it’s safe to say it was not salt pork.
Mitchell was just one person in a collection of culinary stars working in our nation’s capital during the nineteenth century. Before her were free entrepreneurs of color like the aforementioned Beverly Snow, who ran D.C.’s finest, and possibly earliest, modern restaurant in the 1830s. Another notable figure was Augustus Jackson, who cooked in the White House as late as the Andrew Jackson administration before leaving to stake his claim as an ice cream empire maker. Many now credit him with inventing an eggless ice cream “made of sweetened-and-flavored cream and nothing else.” This would eventually be called “Philadelphia-style” ice cream, as compared to the more familiar “New York–style” ice cream made with an egg-based custard.11
Yet Augustus Jackson did not always get the credit he deserved. Three different ice cream origin stories floated around in American popular culture during the 1800s. The first claimed that an unnamed African American cook for Abigail Adams accidentally invented an eggless strawberry ice cream in a hurried effort to please the Adamses’ special guest: President George Washington. Another theory was that it was Elizabeth Schuyler Hamilton (Alexander Hamilton’s wife) who invented this type of ice cream, also to cap off a dinner served to President Washington.
The most enduring origin story goes to Dolley Madison, the former First Lady. As the story goes, while Augustus Jackson worked for President Jackson, he simply followed the ice-cream-making directions he received from Dolley Madison, who handled White House entertainment for the widowed president. In time, Dolley Madison became synonymous with ice cream. By the 1930s, “Dolly” Madison ice cream stores started to proliferate around the country; many of these stores stayed in business for decades.12 Whatever we make of the competing origins, Augustus Jackson did in fact know how to make an eggless ice cream, and he used the knowledge to run “a confectionary store in Washington, filled quart cans with custard and embedded them in tubs of ice. These he sold for $1 each. Others followed him, but he retained the reputation for making the best ice cream, and became rich as a result.”13 Jackson ultimately relocated his business to Philadelphia in the 1830s, perhaps because of the increasingly restrictive black codes enacted in D.C. The clear message was that D.C. whites were hostile to black success.
Domestic staff for President Hayes, March 1877. Courtesy Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Center.
Another notable black entrepreneur in Washington was the caterer James Wormley, who operated a high-end hotel not far from the White House and catered some White House events. As one newspaper posthumously reported of the Wormley Hotel, “All the late presidents, Mr. Hayes excepted, enjoyed the hospitality of its well-known proprietor.”14 Another newspaper recounted, “When Tad Lincoln was sick the president sent for Wormley and he nursed the boy at the White House.”15 By some accounts, he was the only African American man in the room when President Lincoln was on his deathbed and served as an honorary pallbearer at Lincoln’s funeral.16 Wormley was also in the presidential limelight for nourishing a mortally wounded President James Garfield with a beef tea made from the boiled-down essence of porterhouse steaks.17
Wormley was an immensely wealthy and socially connected man, and he used both resources to press for racial justice. He was friends with many of the Radical Republicans of the 1860s and 1870s, particularly Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts. One newspaper noted that, even though his hotel was for “whites only,” “among the colored population [in D.C.] Wormley was held in the highest esteem. He had more influence than Fred Douglass, for the reason that Douglass has always been suspected of trading his power with them for his personal advantage. Wormley, on the contrary, studiously avoided the whirlpool of politics, and devoted himself almost exclusively to his hotel business, in which he amassed a considerable fortune.”18 But the picture is complicated by another newspaper account, which reported that “Mr. Wormley did not enjoy any great popularity among the people of his own race. He was considered by them as austere, remote, and desiring to live apart and to cultivate the society of whites.”19
We know, however, that Wormley made several contributions to the local black community. He led the successful effort to convince Congress to create the first free school for African Americans, went on to fund a number of schools for African American youth, and supported local stations in the Underground Railroad. Wormley also used his talents to enhance social events for black elites. For example, on 10 October 1865, he catered a banquet for the First District of Columbia Colored Troops Regiment that was “talked about town” for some time.20
Wormley’s legacy with respect to race relations in D.C. garnered a mixed assessment in the press. His last major involvement was indirect, dripped with irony, and sent shockwaves throughout the nation. The compromise of the 1876 presidential election—which delivered the presidency to Republican candidate Rutherford B. Hayes over Democratic candidate Samuel J. Tilden and effectively ended the Reconstruction experiment in the South—was finalized in his hotel.
Along with the reconstituting of southern political power, certain traditions in southern culture waxed in influence as well, such as southern cooking: “Naturally when a Southern gentleman went to Washington to represent his state in the House or the Senate he took his cook along. Southern cooking predominated in the White House for a good many years. It was here that Mammy turned professional and went to cook for the famous restaurants, and Washington’s culinary reputation was born.”21 The use of the term “Mammy” did not bode well for the prospect that black people would be accepted in the post-Reconstruction era.
Numerous black cooks made their living in D.C.’s private wealthy homes, but they also starred in high-end restaurants and hotels. John Chamberlin ran an eponymous restaurant that was also one of D.C.’s fanciest in the late 1800s. As one local newspaper observed, “It was long known as the highest priced restaurant at the capital; in fact, Chamberlin prided himself on the altitude of his rates, as well as the excellence of his cuisine…. Mr. Chamberlin had no French chefs and no foreign cookery. His cooks were negro women, but it was his taste that dominated everything. He bought the best to be had in the market, and by many, his restaurant was considered superior to anything in New York.”22 Emeline Jones was one of Chamberlin’s cooks, and she, and her food, became indispensable to any dinner, public or private, hosted by a member of Congress during the 1880s. Her terrapin dish graced the White House table during the brief Garfield administration.23
Wealthy private homes and fancy restaurants proved to be excellent talent pools for cooks for the chief executive’s kitchen. During his first term, Grover Cleveland, according to the Boston Herald, suffered first under an Irish cook and then under a French cook before seeking help. He entreated Chamberlin to “find a colored woman who understood the art of cooking in the Maryland style, and could do up oysters, clams, crabs, and terrapin in a superior manner.”24 The president called on the right man. A local newspaper gleefully reported that “Mr. Chamberlin had an old ‘nanny’ at his restaurant, and offered to loan her to the President for the Summer, while business was dull, and in the mean time would try and find a substitute. The offer was accepted, and now the presiding genius of the White House basement is an old colored woman, weighing about 300 pounds, black as coal, and wearing a yellow plaid turban.”25 Even as this black woman was being celebrated for her professional achievement, the writer still felt it necessary to end the newspaper article by reviving the mammy stereotype that would take several decades to die.
The most celebrated African American presidential cook of the latter nineteenth century was Laura “Dollie” Johnson.26 She took an unusual path to the White House kitchen in that she neither was the personal cook of a presidential candidate nor was already living and working in the Washington, D.C., area when offered the job. Johnson, who was biracial, was born in Louisville, Kentucky, circa 1852.27 Other than this fact, there are competing versions of Johnson’s biography and path to the White House that play out in various newspapers. One version establishes Johnson as a successful caterer and chocks up a win for black chefs in their rivalry with French chefs. “[President Benjamin] Harrison complained that [White House chef] Madame Pelounard’s sauces and pastries were too rich and ‘laid him out,’” according to one newspaper report of the times.28 The president asked for simpler fare, but she refused—so the president fired her. First Lady Caroline Harrison wrote to Mrs. H. M. Skillman of Lexington in search of a Kentucky cook. Skillman recommended Johnson, a well-known Lexington caterer, the Lexington Leader reported on 3 December 1889.29 Another version is that Johnson had previously cooked for the Harrisons while they lived in Indiana, well before Harrison become president.30 Of all the “how Dollie got the job” anecdotes, the following is my favorite.
Dollie Johnson in the White House kitchen, circa 1890. Courtesy Library of Congress.
At the time of her hire, Johnson was described as “about thirty-seven years of age, and is a mulatto. She has a dignified and refined appearance, and has a fairly good education. Some three months ago she left Col. [John Mason] Brown’s service, and went to her old home in Lexington, having accumulated quite a sum of money, intending to take life easy for the remainder of her days.”31 As fate would have it, an up-and-coming politico named Theodore Roosevelt once dined with Brown and feasted on Johnson’s cooking. Roosevelt would later describe it as “one of the best dinners he ever had” and highly recommended her to a friend in search of a cook. That friend happened to be President Benjamin Harrison.32 Not knowing of Roosevelt’s lobbying effort, Johnson received a random letter from President Harrison’s White House steward, Hugo Zieman, which requested her services at the White House. She didn’t respond immediately but sought the counsel of her friends and Colonel Brown. Only then, and several months after the Harrison presidency had begun, did she agree.
Regardless of how she got there, Johnson’s hire made an immediate splash. Newspapers across the country boldly announced her hire and even included her full name without putting “Aunt” or “Auntie” before it. This was a rarity during a time when most media took every opportunity to belittle African Americans and indicates how much cultural cachet Johnson had. Even so, many articles in the news were disparaging, dwelling, along with Johnson’s cooking prowess, on her physical appearance.
Johnson’s second stint in the White House kitchen, under President Cleveland, stoked a simmering interstate cooking rivalry. One newspaper editorialized, “Mr. Cleveland, in selecting those to fill important posts in his household, official and domestic, has, we think, discriminated in favor of Kentucky. Two important positions so near to the President, are too many for any State—South Carolina could certainly have furnished most superior material for at least one of these offices.”33
However, Johnson did have some detractors. Political patronage had become such a problem that the U.S. Civil Service Commission was formed so that government jobs would be filled based on merit rather than due to cronyism. Her hire seemed like just the kind of backroom deal that a politically astute Roosevelt and President Harrison would have known to avoid. Under such scrutiny, a scratch cook like Johnson who lacked any formal culinary training seemed unqualified for such a prestigious job when compared to a typical French chef—that is, until one tasted her food and all doubt about her qualifications were banished. President Harrison and White House steward William Sinclair brushed aside the criticism, and Dollie Johnson got the job. This appointment thrilled the president’s African American constituents. One newspaper announced, “There was a great deal of joy among the colored people of Washington over the announcement that a negro cook had been selected for the White House.”34 Such news was a relief to President Harrison, whose nascent administration was dogged by rumors that his First Lady, Caroline Harrison, did not want any black employees at the Executive Residence. Had that been the case, it would have been a real political problem for a Republican president for whom African Americans were a core constituency.
Johnson’s biggest critic was Madame Pelounard, mentioned earlier as the French cook who already had the White House’s head cook job.35 In a newspaper interview soon after the hiring, White House steward Zieman said Pelounard
had been cooking for the English Legation, and I gave her the same place in the White House and told her husband [Marcel] that I might make him butler. He went away to Europe. While he was gone Mrs. Harrison became disgusted with the woman’s cooking. The President’s wife wanted plain food and the cook insisted on serving rich pastry and sauces. Mrs. Harrison never was used to that sort of thing. Plain meat, potatoes and white bread suited her better. The President is troubled with indigestion sometimes and the new cook’s dishes laid him out. So I discharged her.36
This very French cook had some very American reactions to the entire situation. She filed a lawsuit against President Harrison seeking monetary damages for unlawful discharge (a presidential first), and then she went to the press.
Pelounard attempted to spin the press coverage back into her favor by dishing on the bad food habits of the First Family. She disparaged their diet by describing how stingy they were and how gauche their diet was because they ate ham and eggs all the time and even had pie for breakfast. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch editorialized, “Large allowances must be made for the tongue-lashing propensity of a French woman scorned as a professional cook, but a bad lot of civil service appointments has long satisfied the public that there was something wrong in the White House bill of fare. A constant diet of fried ham and eggs is a very plausible explanation of the trouble, and the liberality of Indianapolis packers may in the next four years inflict untold misery upon the country at large.”37 The fact that diet may affect political appointments brought new meaning to the term “food policy.” Pelounard’s case was ultimately resolved out of court and never made it to trial.
With the controversy behind her, Johnson could finally focus on cooking, and things went well. A contemporary newspaper reporter noted,
The busiest place in the whole executive mansion is the two rooms in the basement over which Dolly Johnson, the colored cook, presides…. Mary Robinson, a dark-complexioned African American from Virginia, makes the pies, bakes the bread and fries the crullers, and is the assistant of Mistress Dolly Johnson, who confines [Mary’s] ambitions to browning soups and basting meats. The two of them can get up a dinner that would put Phillipini, Nicollini, and all the other $10,000 chefs to the test. Delmonico has no more juicy meats than Dolly draws from her oven, and Vanderbilt’s own chef cannot put up a better pastry than the “Vaginny girl.”38
The article went on to describe their cooking wardrobe: “They both wear tidy dresses of Dutch blue calico, and big white aprons that cover them from head to foot. Dolly wears a bandanna crossed on her capacious bosom in a picturesque fashion, but neither of them wear caps, as the least suggestion of livery is unallowable at the White House.”39 Once again, the mammy imagery rears its ugly head.
Johnson and Robinson plied their trade under trying conditions. It wasn’t that the president, the First Lady, the White House steward, or any other humans made their life difficult—it was all of the critters that frequently visited the White House kitchen. Thanks to accounts from Hugo Zieman and First Lady Caroline Harrison, a shocked public learned that the White House kitchen (and other rooms as well) were overrun with red ants, cockroaches, and rats. Zieman accentuated the point by admitting, “I never saw anything to equal the way that old house is overrun with vermin.” Zieman also claimed that the hungry rats ate a painting of Abraham Lincoln hanging in the Cabinet Room.40 The Harrisons tried to use such revelations to their advantage, hoping that their plight would allow them to both relocate and build a new White House or drastically renovate the current location. Neither Congress nor the American public had an appetite for either, so the Harrisons had to keep calm, persevere, and exterminate extensively.
Dollie Johnson’s White House tenure was not long. In less than a year, she returned to Kentucky to tend to her sick daughter. However, at least one of her White House meals was memorialized. Here’s the menu, formatted as the Chicago Tribune reported it:
The Christmas dinner for the President and his Cabinet will be like yours. They will have their turkey and their plum pudding, and at the White House the menu which has been written out for you by the President’s cook will be as follows:
PRESIDENT HARRISON’S CHRISTMAS DINNER
MENU
Blue Point Oysters, Half Shell
Soup.
Consommé Royal.
Entrée.
Bouches à la Reine.
Roast.
Turkey, Cranberry Jelly.
Potatoes Duchesse. Stewed Celery.
Terrapin à la Maryland.
Lettuce Salad. Plain Dressing.
Sweets.
Mince Pie. American Plum Pudding.
Desserts.
Ice Cream. Tutti Fruitti.
Lady Fingers. Macaroons. Carlsbad Wafers.
Fruits.
Apples. Florida Oranges.
Bananas. Grapes. Pears.
Black Coffee.41
When Grover Cleveland succeeded President Harrison, he had White House steward William Sinclair, an African American man, try to woo her back. At the time, she was cooking for Mrs. Rosa Vertner Jeffrey, a well-known poetess in Lexington.42 In President Cleveland’s second administration, Johnson returned to work as the White House’s head cook.43 Jerry Smith, an African American man who performed a variety of odd jobs around the White House, salivated for Johnson’s return. After heavily criticizing French cooking, Smith said, “The introduction of a colored woman from the South into the White House to preside over its kitchen would be one of the greatest acts of the present Administration, and added years to the lives of the members of the Executive Family.”44
In the last chapter of her life, Johnson returned to Lexington, where she married Ed Dandridge on New Year’s Day 1894, took her new husband’s surname, earned a living hosting special engagements at high-end venues for about a decade, and began opening a succession of restaurants in that city. In 1905, Dandridge opened her first restaurant at 152 S. Limestone Street. Dandridge’s notoriety drew all kinds of customers, ranging from U.S. senators to curious schoolgirls.45 Dandridge closed that restaurant within the next five years, and by 1910 she was on to a new venture:
Dollie Johnson restaurant advertisement. Lexington Morning Herald, 2 October 1905.
The [Lexington Leader] reported on November 30, 1910 that Dolly (often spelled Dollie) Dandridge would soon be opening a restaurant, the White House Café, at 215 E. Main St. “She will serve regular meals and also special orders, and will make this the headquarters of her general catering for entertainments,” the newspaper reported.
But by March, the Leader reported, she had closed the café because she was hired to reopen the dining room at the Central Hotel at the corner of Short and Upper streets. Over the next few years, Dandridge moved her business to several other downtown locations. “Dollie Dandridge, the White House cook, has closed her dining room at 203 South Upper Street for the summer, owing to the heat and the torn-up condition of the nearby streets,” the Leader reported on July 11, 1912. “She will devote her entire attention to catering for weddings and parties.”46
The next year, Johnson performed her last known presidentially related culinary act when she sent President Theodore Roosevelt’s daughter Alice a pecan cake to celebrate her nuptials with an upstart politico named Nicholas Longworth. Despite her fame, Dandridge’s life came to an obscure end. As Tom Eblen of the Kentucky Herald Leader wrote in a tribute piece, “Dandridge died Feb. 1, 1918, at a niece’s home, a small shotgun house behind Hampton Court, and was buried in African Cemetery No. 2 on East Seventh Street. The Leader’s funeral notice—the third small item in the ‘Colored Notes’ column on page 11—made no mention of her fame.”47
Johnson’s life illustrates an African American presidential cook at the height of her profession and loaded with bargaining power. Being unfettered to a particular president gave her the freedom to control the duration of her White House stint. A cook who worked for someone before he became president felt more pressure to stay during an entire presidency and return to private life with the retiring president. During the Reconstruction era and beyond, more chefs made it their career to be a presidential cook on staff through several administrations. Though most of these staff cooks were anonymous to the general public and toiled in relative obscurity, a few were profiled in the media. One exception to the enduring anonymity was Lucy Latimer Fowler.
According to a newspaper article, Fowler was born in an elite household in Georgetown, Maryland, and “belonged to the Mackall family, one of the most aristocratic and influential of Maryland’s famous gentry. The Mackalls are connected with the Bowles, Keyes, and other prominent families of Prince George[’s] county.”48 The same article condescendingly added, “It was an admitted fact that Lucy’s mother was related by blood to one of the fine old families of Maryland, which no doubt accounts for the unusual intelligence and refinement of this little colored woman and her exceptional characteristics.”49 Though she was born in slavery, her white slavers taught her how to knit and sew and, unusual for those times, how to read and write.
Upon her master’s death in 1857, she was freed as a fourteen-year-old and went to live in southwest Georgia. As an adult, she returned to Washington, D.C., and ended up working for Horace Porter, a former Union army officer who then served as private secretary to President Ulysses S. Grant. When the Grants dined with the Porters, they were repeatedly impressed by Fowler’s hot rolls and Washington cream pies. The Grants were also floored by a meal that she once prepared for their train ride from Long Branch, New Jersey, to Washington, D.C., in the days before railway dining cars. With those successful “auditions,” President Grant hired Fowler to be his White House cook.50 Fowler worked for three more presidents after Grant, but it wasn’t always smooth sailing.
One incident involved President Rutherford B. Hayes. On a morning in late November 1876, President Hayes’s day started off with a bang—or more precisely, with a loud crash he heard coming from the White House basement. He dispatched his security detail to investigate the noise, and they discovered that Fowler was fighting with one of the butlers. One newspaper reported, “Lucy Fowler, a colored cook, struck John D. Whitton, a colored waiter employed there, a vigorous blow over the head with a rolling pin, inflicting a severe wound. John rallied and struck Lucy in the neck with a large plate. The President heard the commotion in the kitchen and sent one of the police officers detailed in the White House down to the kitchen to make a reconnaissance. The officer arrived just in time to prevent a renewal of hostilities and quelled the disorder by arresting both belligerents.”51 Fowler was described as “a small mulatto woman, scarcely over five feet tall.”52 Given her height, I do wonder how she was able to hit someone upside the head, but it happened. No reason is given for the skirmish, so we are left to speculate that perhaps it was due to mounting pressure to cook an excellent Thanksgiving meal later that week. However, Fowler did not come up short in terms of publicity. One newspaper decided to have some fun with the incident and printed a hyperbolic headline that read, “War has begun in the White House, and Sherman has now the opportunity to take the field.”53 The Fowler incident made the Washington, D.C., Evening Star’s crime section, where it was reported that she got “bonds to keep the peace.”54 Remarkably, Fowler and Whitton returned to work, side by side, in the executive kitchen without further incident.55
Only one other person had the guts to cross Fowler, who was now known as someone who took no mess. That brave soul was White House steward William T. Crump. Crump fired Fowler for stealing, and she responded by filing a $10,000 wrongful termination suit against Crump.56 Fowler’s lawsuit was ultimately resolved, and once again, she got her old job back. Her tenure ended when President Chester Arthur decided to hire a French chef. Fortunately, her former employer Ulysses Grant retained fond memories of Fowler’s gingerbread. Upon hearing that Fowler was now available, the former president immediately hired her to be his and Mrs. Grant’s private cook—a position she held until Grant’s death in 1884.57
Samuel Fraunces, presidential steward, n.d. Courtesy Fraunces Tavern Museum, New York, N.Y.
Gilbert Stuart, A Cook for George Washington, a portrait of Hercules, circa 1795–97. © 2016 Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza/Scala, Florence.
Eserline Dewberry (third from right) and Raymond Jackson (far left) with the Kennedy administration White House kitchen staff, circa 1961. Courtesy John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum.
Charles Ficklin, White House maître d’hôtel, circa 1959. Courtesy National Geographic.
Eisenhower era head chef Pedro Udo (left) and an unidentified White House kitchen staffer, circa 1959. Courtesy National Geographic.
Franklin Blair, White House kitchen staffer, circa 1967. Courtesy National Archives.
White House kitchen staff preparing for a Ford-era state dinner, circa 1974. Courtesy National Archives.
President Reagan shakes hands with a White House Mess chef, 1986. Courtesy Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum.
John Ficklin, White House maître d’hôtel, n.d. Courtesy Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum.
State dinner place cards for John Ficklin and his wife, 1984. Courtesy Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum.
Senior Master Sergeant Wanda Joell, Air Force One flight attendant, 2010. Courtesy Wanda Joell.
White House Mess executive chef Charlie Redden with President Clinton. Courtesy Charlie Redden.
Alice Howard was another notable White House assistant cook who worked for several presidents. There isn’t much biographical information available on Howard, but there are many accolades to her culinary skill. A 1914 newspaper article described her as “colored, widow, fifteen years assistant cook in the White House kitchen, whose well prepared dishes did more to put weight on William H. Taft than anybody else’s, and whose remaining at the White House has been responsible for the ex-president’s having thirty-five pairs of trousers cut down at the waist line.”58 Reportedly, Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson loved the way she made chicken, hoe cakes (a lightly leavened or unleavened cornbread), griddle cakes, and waffles.59 But as much as the press wrote about the presidents showing appreciation and love for her food, it was her own love life that gave her notoriety.
One day in January 1914, without any advance warning to anyone at the White House, Alice Howard eloped with a African American stonemason named William Clements. Howard’s white colleagues seemed rather ambivalent about her nuptials except for how it would impact her colleagues’ White House lives. One of the lingering questions in the media was where the newlyweds would live. One newspaper sought answers from Howard’s White House kitchen colleagues and got some limited and unsatisfactory responses:
“Where’s she going to live now?” “Too much for me. She’s always had her quarters here. Hardly think that she could bring her husband here.” Even in the kitchen information as to Alice was mighty scarce. The cook and the other assistants are white girls who claim that matrimonial affairs have no interest to them, and all they knew was that the assistant cook was absent on leave…. There was unanimous agreement on one point among the White House help—Alice is a crackerjack cook, and if William Clements is able to supply the raw materials, he will have mighty good eating around where the two make their home.60
Alice Howard eventually left the White House to cook in the home of Admiral Cary T. Grayson, President Woodrow Wilson’s physician.
During the presidential culinary adventures of Johnson, Fowler, and Howard, D.C. was a place of increasing contradiction. A number of blacks were flocking to the city for a chance at the good life, and many got to live it, as evidenced by a growing black upper-middle class. The local newspapers printed several accounts of “The Colored Aristocracy” and members’ colorful social customs. Yet, in sharp contrast to increasing black success within D.C., the slight economic, political, and social gains that African Americans made after emancipation were being erased in all segments of society. Though slavery was now illegal, a new racial caste system reconstituted itself with the 1896 U.S. Supreme Court decision of Plessy v. Ferguson. That court case marked the official birth date of “Jim Crow,” a nickname for legalized racial segregation. Oddly, and counterintuitively, elite attitudes about black servitude were changing as well during this time period. More and more press reports surfaced about the “servant problem” that whites had with blacks. Newspaper editorials increasingly called for ethnic emigrants from Europe, not necessarily considered “white,” to be hired instead.
Segregationist thinking and the growing preference for non-black servants infected life in the White House. Though blacks like Alice Howard were on staff as assistant cooks, every president from Theodore Roosevelt to Herbert Hoover had either an Irish or a Swedish woman installed as the head cook of the White House kitchen. President Taft’s housekeeper, Elizabeth Jaffray, segregated the residence staff’s dining area, and Woodrow Wilson hosted a private screening of the incredibly racist film The Birth of a Nation. Whites (mainly in the South, but also in the North) lost their collective mind when Theodore Roosevelt had lunch with Booker T. Washington and when Mrs. Herbert Hoover hosted Jessie DePriest (wife of Congressman Oscar DePriest) for a traditional, annual congressional wives’ tea. President Roosevelt tried to explain away his controversial meal with the prominent African American by saying it was just an impromptu meal at his work desk, not a formal dining scene. It didn’t work, and the racists raged on for several weeks in newspaper pages and in the chambers of Congress.61
During this time, members of the Executive Residence staff ate their meals in the White House out of convenience and necessity. In 1907, an anonymous essay titled “What It Means to Be Colored in the Capital of the United States” appeared in Independent magazine. Though not written by a White House employee, the author makes some poignant observations on what Jim Crow life was like in the “Colored Man’s Paradise”: “As a colored woman, I may walk from the Capitol to the White House, ravenously hungry and abundantly supplied with money with which to purchase a meal, without finding a single restaurant in which I would be permitted to take a morsel of food, if it was patronized by white people, unless I were willing to sit behind a screen.”62 Jim Crow’s wings were slightly clipped within the White House when Eleanor Roosevelt became the First Lady. One of her first acts to end segregation among the residence staff was to fire all of the white people save for the supervisor. Thus, technically, there could not be any segregation since every servant was of the same race. I’ll let you decide if that’s “racial progress.”63
One of the most interesting White House kitchen teams ever assembled was the staff that cooked during the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration. The head cook was an African American woman named Ida Allen. Allen was described by her immediate supervisor, White House housekeeper Henrietta Nesbitt, as “temperamental,” “a born leader,” and “someone who could meet any culinary challenge.”64 Allen’s main assistant cook, known as the “second cook,” was Elizabeth Moore, another African American woman and transplant from the Roosevelt home in Hyde Park, New York, who had a “wonderful disposition.”65 Akin to Edith Fossett from the Jefferson administration, Moore had a child during her White House stint (delivered at a local hospital rather than in the basement, as Fossett had), and her baby was known as the “firstborn to the White House household.”66 An all–African American kitchen thus nourished one of the most consequential presidencies in our nation’s history. However, there was just one problem: the food served in FDR’s White House had a horrible reputation, to the point where invited guests thought twice about accepting the invitation or decided to eat before they headed to the White House for an event. What led to such a problem with good food in the FDR White House? The answer lies in the old adage “It’s good to have friends in high places.”
Henrietta Nesbitt was the only white staffer exempted from Eleanor Roosevelt’s turnover of the Executive Residence staff. Nesbitt survived because she had a special place in the First Lady’s heart. Nesbitt had become friends with Mrs. Roosevelt back when Franklin Roosevelt was governor of New York. Eleanor Roosevelt, who was active with the League of Women Voters while her husband had campaigned for the governorship, asked Mrs. Nesbitt, who ran a successful bakery in Albany, if she could supply the campaign with baked goods. Later, Mrs. Nesbitt went on to supply the Governor’s Mansion with her locally renowned bread and pies. Eleanor admired Nesbitt’s pluck as the main wage earner in her household, as her husband was often down on his luck. When it came time to hire a White House housekeeper, Eleanor remembered her friend Henrietta and tapped her for the position.67
But Mrs. Roosevelt, unfortunately, was not sufficiently concerned about Nesbitt’s qualifications for the job. In his memoirs, White House chief usher J. B. West shared the president’s blunt assessment: “Mrs. Roosevelt didn’t pay much attention to White House food … but the President did. He couldn’t stand it. ‘I wish we could do something about Mrs. Nesbitt,’ he said to [White House usher] Mr. Crim, in mock surrender, ‘but Mrs. Roosevelt won’t hear of it.’ Henrietta Nesbitt prided herself on her friendship with the First Lady, and blithely instructed cook Elizabeth Moore to carry out her menus, no matter what the President requested. ‘The food around here would do justice to the Automat,’ the President said.”68 White House maid Lillian Rogers Parks remembers Nesbitt standing behind White House cooks Ida Allen and Elizabeth Moore as they worked and ordering them to adjust food preparation from what they would normally do.69 All of this spelled culinary disaster in the White House kitchen. Normally, one would expect Nesbitt to be fired for such results, but FDR had ceded all control of the domestic operations to his wife, and he wouldn’t intervene.
Yet, no matter what obstacles are thrown his way, a president is going to get the food he wants to eat. Rather than sit idly by in perpetual indigestion, FDR resorted to a strategy of confrontation and subterfuge. He ordered that a small kitchen be built on the White House’s third floor and relocated Mary Campbell, a white cook from the Hyde Park residence, to the White House to cook in this new kitchen. He then bypassed the main kitchen and had Campbell prepare a number of his meals. Eleanor Roosevelt and Nesbitt protested, but there was nothing they could do.
Another type of presidential servant is a valet. Many of our military veteran presidents had African American valets who served them both in the military and in private life (such as John Amos for President Theodore Roosevelt), but hardly any relationship was closer than that of Sergeant John Moaney and President Dwight D. Eisenhower. Traditionally, a valet is not a cook but rather more like a personal servant who does everything else—much of it unglamorous. But Moaney did help with some food preparation. For example, Moaney usually began his White House workday by waking President Eisenhower up at 6 A.M. and assisting in dressing him by holding out the presidential undershorts—which the president would step into!70 Moaney then typically prepared the following for President Eisenhower’s breakfast: “orange juice, a little fried egg, a piece of bacon and toast and pineapple jam.”71 According to Moaney, this simple breakfast was indicative of the president’s tastes. “All the other meals, he never liked them real fancy—always liked just plain cooking,” Moaney once said.72
John Moaney Jr. (“Moaney”) grew up in Easton, Maryland, and was drafted into the U.S. Army in 1942.73 In September of that year, he became General Eisenhower’s personal valet and served in the European theater and Africa during World War II. After the war, when Eisenhower went into private life, Moaney and his wife, Delores, whom he married in 1946, became the primary personal servants for the Eisenhowers, with John continuing as Dwight’s valet and John’s wife becoming Mamie’s maid in 1948. One of Sgt. Moaney’s first assignments when he was back in the U.S. at Fort Meyer, Virginia, was to feed General George Marshall’s chickens.74 The Moaneys worked for the Eisenhowers during their days at Columbia University; at their winter home in Palm Desert, California; at the White House; and finally in their retirement at their farmhouse in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. Though initially hired for other tasks, the Moaneys soon became a culinary duo with Delores as the family’s private cook at Gettysburg and John serving as the presidential sous chef.75
During his military service, Moaney earned a reputation for making meals that “tasted like home.”76 Moaney shadowed General Eisenhower during the war and, along with another African American man named John Hunt, cooked most of the general’s meals—even during the D-Day invasion of 6 June 1944.77 Though they sometimes used local ingredients in Europe, they mostly cooked out of American rations.78 Cooking for Eisenhower was easier than cooking for a number of other presidents, because Ike himself loved to cook and even installed a state-of-the-art grill on the White House rooftop. When the president grilled steaks, the rising smoke alarmed passersby on Pennsylvania Avenue.79
President Eisenhower and Moaney teamed up to make a variety of dishes: chili, fried fish, pancakes. Yet Ike’s most iconic dish, and one of his favorite things to make, was a beef-laden vegetable stew. Lillian Rogers Parks remembered,
President Eisenhower left the complete running of the house to his wife, except for his personal bouts in the kitchen with his cooking. He used to let the beef for his soup simmer in the kitchen next to my workroom for hours and hours until we would all be drooling. It had a most delicious odor. Every once in a while he would pop into the kitchen to check on it, and I would supervise the preparation of the vegetables until they were just so. He loved to don an apron and do his own mixing at the pot. Once, when he went to Palm Springs, California, for a rest, he took his whole container of soup with him because he hadn’t had time to eat it at the White House. We love this human touch in the dignified General-President.80
John Moaney grilling with President Eisenhower, n.d. Courtesy Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library, Museum and Boyhood Home.
As a nod to his cooking abilities, Rogers also knitted him an apron as a gift, which he proudly wore when he cooked.81
When it came to the famous dish, Moaney played a special role. Chief usher West recalled, “‘Ike’s stew,’ a recipe passed reverently around official Washington, was known unofficially at the White House as ‘Moaney’s stew.’ The good-natured sergeant chopped up the meat and onions in the diet kitchen on the third floor, assembled all the ingredients, and stood patiently beside the pot like a surgical nurse, handing the President parsley, paprika, garlic, as Mr. Eisenhower asked for each.”82 Moaney also recalled in an interview that in addition to the famous vegetable soup, President Eisenhower magnanimously taught him how to make other things like potato salad.83
The Eisenhower presidency witnessed several seminal events in the accelerating civil rights movement: the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision by the U.S. Supreme Court, the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955, and the use of federal troops to help desegregate Little Rock High School by nine African American students in 1957. Public perception of President Eisenhower’s civil rights record was divided. Some believed that he took courageous, measured steps to advance the cause of black progress in the South and in Washington, D.C., by dismantling Jim Crow practices in federal government, appointing African Americans to key positions in his administration, and melting social taboos by entertaining African Americans at the White House.84 Others felt that he never did enough.
As African Americans closely associated with President Eisenhower, the Moaneys felt a constant pressure to defend the president’s civil rights record to other African Americans. Susan Eisenhower wrote in her biography of her mother, Mamie Eisenhower,
Delores has always been perplexed and upset by the notion, conveyed by some, that Ike and Mamie were racist…. She remembers the Eisenhowers would decline invitations if Delores and Moaney were not given proper accommodations or treated equitably with their white counterparts. And neither of them would tolerate the expression of racism in their presence. Once, at the White House, a guest used a pejorative word for Negro, and Ike jumped from his seat with an angry retort: “You will not talk that way in my house again!”85
Yet the Eisenhowers seemed to pick their battles on advocating for racial equality. Traphes Bryant, the White House pet keeper who wrote a tell-all book, claims that Mrs. John Doud, the president’s mother-in-law, used a racial slur within earshot of the president, but he didn’t do anything about it.86
Still, Moaney and Eisenhower went together like beans and rice (and garlic and onions). When General Eisenhower decided to run for president and tried to relieve Moaney of his valet duties and say good-bye, Moaney reportedly replied, “Me and you can always make it. Don’t worry about a thing.” That remark cemented an enduring friendship. One newspaper reported, “Eisenhower was so heartened that he agreed to take Moaney with him. The veteran black sergeant became the closest man to Eisenhower. ‘He woke him up and put him to bed,’ said an associate, ‘and nobody could get away with what Moaney did. Moaney was the only man to tell Ike what to do. He’d snap at Ike and tell him what suits to wear and so forth. And in Ike’s presence, not a person uttered an unkind remark about Moaney.’”87
Moaney served Eisenhower until the former president died in 1969, and then he served Mamie Eisenhower at the Gettysburg farm where his wife, Delores, was securely installed as the cook. For his dedicated service to the president, Moaney was ultimately awarded the Legion of Merit for meritorious service.88 There is probably no better benediction for this friendship than what the former president wrote a couple of years before his death: “Of Sergeant John Moaney, I have only this to say: He and I have been inseparable for almost a quarter of a century; in my daily life, he is just about the irreplaceable man.”89 John Moaney died on 19 February 1978, and Delores Moaney resided in the Washington, D.C., area until she died in 2014 at the age of ninety-eight.
Not all presidential personal cooks have been as “irreplaceable” as Sergeant Moaney, and that was certainly true of Pearl Nelson. Nelson was a private cook who worked for the Kennedys while they lived in Georgetown and came with them to the White House. She fully expected to make meals in the newly constructed second-floor kitchen. Even though JFK loved the way that Nelson cooked his favorite New England seafood dishes like clam chowder, First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy set her heart and mind on having a French chef handle all of the presidential cooking. She got her wish when she hired René Verdon to run the White House kitchen under the newly created title “White House Executive Chef.” The First Lady tried to fire Nelson several times, but Nelson had a knack for talking her out of it every time the subject was broached, thus saving her job. Exasperated, the First Lady asked chief usher J. B. West to fire Nelson for her. The first time West tried to do so, Nelson put up a good fight, just as she had with the First Lady. West then resorted to bribery. He offered Nelson a free two-week stay in the White House as a guest, where she would get the VIP treatment from the residence staff—chef-made meals, her bed made up every morning, and chauffeured rides in presidential cars. Thus Nelson’s mercurial White House stint came to an end. As West elaborated, “Mrs. Kennedy ran into me in the center hall during Pearl’s first week in residence. ‘I just saw Pearl!’ she exclaimed, eyes wide. ‘Did you give up, too?’ ‘Not at all,’ I said, and explained my delicate maneuver. Mrs. Kennedy was delighted. ‘That’s splendid,’ she said. ‘Just splendid!’ She grinned impishly.”90 Jacqueline was certainly color-blind in executing her plans. Seeing how skillfully West handled Nelson, she asked him to handle getting rid of a white staffer in the main kitchen.91
Lyndon Baines Johnson was the last president to bring a longtime African American personal cook to serve on the White House kitchen staff, and that person was a remarkable woman named Zephyr Black Wright. Zephyr Wright was born near Marshall, Texas, in 1915. She spent the first eleven years of her life on a farm being raised by her maternal grandparents. She later graduated from high school and then from nearby Wiley College, where she majored in home economics. As was common at the time, she planned to be the domestic servant or cook for some private family in her hometown. Little did she know that she was being prepared for something better. Two Wiley College professors, Dr. Melvin B. Tolson and Dr. Matthew Winfred Dogan, took an interest in Wright and mentored her on her critical thinking skills and public speaking. When Claudia Alta “Lady Bird” Johnson came to town seeking a family cook, the Wiley professors happily recommended Wright.92
Though they didn’t know each other personally, Wright and Johnson had much in common: both were born in rural Texas, in towns not far from Marshall; both graduated from Marshall High School; and Wright’s aunt had worked for Lady Bird Johnson’s father. Wright remembered when she finally met Mrs. Johnson in person:
When I went to Wiley that September I talked with Dr. Dogan about working, and it was just a coincidence that Mrs. Johnson also went to Wiley and talked to Dr. Dogan about someone to work for her. He had told me that he thought I could help him in many ways, with even cooking and probably something in the office, or just work around there in order for me to go to school. Then after Mrs. Johnson had talked to him, he asked me how I would like to go to Washington. I was quite elated when he spoke of going to Washington, because I knew I’d never have an opportunity to go anywhere. You know, I just thought in terms of always being in Marshall.93
The chance to work in Washington greatly expanded her universe and possibilities beyond anything that Wright could have previously conceived.
Wright joined the Johnsons in D.C. soon after LBJ won his first congressional race in 1942. They quickly took to Wright’s homey southern cooking, particularly her brownies, fried chicken, hash, popovers, peach ice cream, roasts, spoon bread, and Pedernales River Chili.94 During Johnson’s political career in the House and Senate, the broader Washington community became familiar with Wright’s cooking through the many meals hosted by the Johnsons. Longtime and legendary Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn (D-Tex.) called Wright “the best southern cook this side of Heaven.” Another said that Zephyr’s dishes are “as light as her name.”95
The Johnsons introduced Wright to the nation when they gave her a VIP seat at President Johnson’s 1964 inauguration. As the New York Times reported, “Mrs. Zephyr Wright, the Johnson family cook for 21 years, occupied the Presidential box in the House gallery with Mrs. Johnson, members of the family and a few honored guests.” Anticipating that a certain current White House executive chef might be reading, the Times also clarified that “Mrs. Wright is expected to cook for the family or for small private gatherings. She is not expected to take over the job now held by René Verdon, the French chef who has been in charge of state dinners and other social gatherings at the White House during part of the Kennedy Administration.”96
Despite the initial excitement, life in the White House was not a rose garden for Wright. Her first challenge was forging a decent working relationship with Chef Verdon. As the Johnsons became increasingly dissatisfied with Verdon’s French dishes, they asked him to prepare more familiar southern and Tex-Mex dishes. How did Verdon feel about cooking such fare? Well, he once derided the melted cheese dip called chile con queso as “chili concrete.” Whenever Verdon messed up cooking a “homey dish,” President Johnson would instruct Verdon to have Zephyr show him how it was done. I imagine that this irked Verdon a great deal. In time, Zephyr was doing all of the cooking, with Verdon handling the state dinners and family cooking on her days off. The last straw for him was when the Johnsons hired Mary Kaltman in 1965 to help control food costs and menus.
One can feel for Verdon as he endured such a sharp contrast from his elegant days in Camelot. He eventually resigned. The entire episode gave Wright a chance to leverage her importance into several raises that put her salary on a par with what prestigious French chefs could command ($9,000 a year). After the Jacqueline Kennedy and Pearl Nelson matter had ended a decades-long winning streak in the ongoing rivalry, an African American cook bested a French chef.97 Following Verdon’s departure, a classically trained Swiss-born chef named Henri Haller filled the vacant executive chef position and stayed there until he retired in 1987. When Wright found out about Haller’s starting salary, she blew another gasket and successfully lobbied the First Family to be paid a better salary, since she had more seniority than the new chef.98
After kitchen relations went from boiling back to a simmer, Wright had the Herculean task of managing LBJ himself. President Johnson was notorious for coming back to the White House late in the evening to eat his meals, bringing more guests over for meals than were expected, and demanding perfection, regardless of how difficult he made the circumstances. The scheduling unpredictability—and the predictability of LBJ’s temper—put a tremendous strain on Wright and the rest of the kitchen staff. However, decades of familiarity equipped Wright with the ability to roll with the punches and give back to LBJ as good as she got it. She dealt with unexpected invitees by coordinating with the butlers to liquor up the guests to keep them distracted and happy while staggering how the courses were served so that she could prepare additional items on the fly.99 Ultimately, the job pressures took their toll. Wright, echoing the sentiments of previous presidents, called the White House “a prison.” She gained eighty pounds in the five years she worked there, and she was very unhappy.100
Though her own health suffered, Wright was charged with keeping the president healthy. She was the primary enforcer of the low-fat diet Johnson had been on since he had experienced a heart attack in 1955.101 That health event began an elaborate and repeated dance where Lady Bird Johnson planned and Wright cooked the president’s low-fat diet—which the president broke whenever he could. This tragicomedy came into sharp relief when Johnson had a showdown with U.S. senator William Fulbright of Arkansas over the Vietnam War. Fulbright served as chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee during this turbulent time and was a strong critic of Johnson. Fulbright once said that under LBJ’s leadership, the nation was “gradually but unmistakably … succumbing to the arrogance of power.”102
President Johnson got wind of what Fulbright said and barred the senator from White House social functions but eventually relented and invited Fulbright to a diplomatic reception held in the White House’s Blue Room in May 1966. When Johnson finally spoke with Fulbright, he said,
“A man can hardly have an arrogance of power when he gets a note from his cook talking up to him like this.” LBJ then took from his pocket a note that Wright had slipped under his dinner plate and read it to Fulbright: “Mr. President, you have been my boss for a number of years and you always tell me you want to lose weight, and yet you never do very much to help yourself. Now I am going to be your boss for a change. Eat what I put in front of you, and don’t ask for any more and don’t complain.” With a smirk, Johnson reinforced the point that “If and when I feel arrogance of power,” he reassured the doubting Senator, “Zephyr will take it out of me.”103
Aside from the Vietnam War, the civil rights movement was the burning social issue of the day, and unwittingly, Wright’s personal experiences with Jim Crow became a powerful rhetorical tool. From the Civil Rights Acts of 1956 and 1964 to the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Congressman and then President Johnson made civil rights a cornerstone of his congressional and presidential legacy. He often consulted with Wright to check the African American pulse on what he was doing. As Wright said in an oral history interview, “He seemed very disappointed that I hadn’t noticed what he had done for this civil rights bill [of 1964].”104 Most of the time, Wright was abreast of the latest happenings and discussed things with the president. She firmly believed that her major contribution was to give LBJ a unique perspective on African American life. As civil rights leaders had approached Lizzie McDuffie (with FDR) and the Moaneys (with Eisenhower), they bent her ear several times in the hopes that she could bend the president’s ear on some pressing issue. Whether she did or didn’t often depended upon her mood. Above all, she felt that the president was doing a lot for African Americans, and she was mystified that others didn’t agree.105
Before introducing legislation to Congress for the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964, President Johnson began “working” members of Congress, the media elite, and the social set in Georgetown to support the bill. Though he made a number of arguments, his most well worn stories milked the Jim Crow experiences of Zephyr Wright. The essential facts were that the Johnsons and their staff would drive back and forth between their home in Stonewall, Texas, and Washington, D.C. As this trip ran through the Jim Crow South, any African Americans traveling with the Johnsons were denied hotel accommodation—even when Lady Bird Johnson argued with hoteliers to give them shelter. The indignities piled up so high that Wright finally had enough, and she stayed in Washington year-round rather than travel between the capital and Texas. The Johnsons thus had to find others to cook for them while they stayed at the LBJ Ranch. The president’s stories got more action-packed and emotionally wrought with each telling, but ultimately he persuaded enough members of Congress to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964. At the signing ceremony, hundreds of people attended, and he used several pens to sign the bill. When he finished, he gave Wright one of the pens and said, “You deserve this more than anyone else.”106
That same year, the White House was embroiled in the “Great Chili Controversy of 1964,” which electrified the voting public. The White House runs a great risk when it releases recipes, but it does so occasionally. Liz Carpenter, Lady Bird Johnson’s press secretary, was always nervous when a Zephyr Wright recipe was released because she suspected that some key ingredients were purposefully left out. This is what is known as a “less-er-pe (less of a recipe),” and it’s a much-utilized tactic by secretive cooks. Still, in her memoir, Carpenter could not help but laud Wright’s strategy: “Zephyr remains one of the great cooks of the world by not divulging her recipes entirely.”107 On this occasion, Wright seemingly left one ingredient out of her recipe for Pedernales River Chili (named after the river that runs along the LBJ Ranch): beans. However, this was not an act of subterfuge on Wright’s part but a bold adherence to a culinary tradition.
Ask any Texan, and they will tell you that a true chili is beanless. After all, “chili” is a contraction of the Spanish term chile con carne (chile peppers with meat), not chile con frijoles (chile peppers with beans). Yet people who live outside of Texas are accustomed to eating a bastardized chili loaded with beans. When the White House published the chili recipe, it “spilled the beans” that President Johnson ate a beanless chili. People who lived outside of Texas went nuts. The White House mailbox and switchboard were flooded with letters and calls from the public wondering if their president liked the “correct” version of chili. Better yet, they wanted to know if their president even liked beans. The public, though, failed to understand just how much chili meant to the Johnsons. President Johnson once said, “Chili concocted outside of Texas is usually a weak, apologetic imitation of the real thing. One of the first things I do when I get home to Texas is to have a bowl of red. There is simply nothing better.”108
With such expressed passion, one would have expected those in the Johnson White House to put up a fight. Instead, the fervor put them into spin control. Who could they call upon? Zephyr Wright, their own resident expert on chili and beans, answered the call. On 18 March 1964, President Johnson’s private secretary Juanita Roberts phoned Wright to get the low-down on the president’s bean preferences. The fascinating conversation sounds like two experienced scratch cooks comparing notes rather than two White House colleagues doing some troubleshooting. For the first time for public consumption, here is the entire conversation transcribed from a tape in the Johnson Presidential Library Audiovisual Collection:
Roberts: We have correspondence asking us if the president and the First Family, like beans. Well, I know enough to say “Yes” [laughs] but I wanted to check with you. What would you say if you were asked that question by a responsible person?
Wright: Oh, I would say yes!
Roberts: And …
Wright: They didn’t ask what kind, did they?
Roberts: No, but I know that he, particularly likes, pork and beans.
Wright: He like pork and beans, he like pinto beans, he like, lima beans, green beans …
Roberts: And that’s green limas or dried?
Wright: Green limas.
Roberts: Green?
Wright: Mmm, hmm.
Roberts: And the green, fresh green beans?
Wright: And he like the Blue Lake canned green beans, you know, marinated and use it in a salad … marinated in French dressing. And he like—well that’s not a bean though, it’s a pea, I started to say green peas, but he just like beans.
Roberts: Now the green limas—
Wright: The baby limas—
Roberts: The green baby limas … how do you prepare those for him?
Wright: Just in salty water, cook ’em and add a little oleo-margarine and pepper and cook them for a good long while until the juice in them is kinda thick.
Roberts: Yes. You used to use the Velveeta, but you don’t do that anymore?
Wright: Well, I do that for parties. We use the Velveeta, also mushrooms. You know, you call it lima beans with cheese and mushroom sauce.
Roberts: And the pinto beans I guess you cook like I do, with salt pork or hambone?
Wright: That’s right.
Roberts: The pork and beans, do you doctor them up?
Wright: Not for him, he like them just plain. He doctors them himself with some kind of pepper sauce or something like that.
Roberts: All right. Zephyr, do you know where any of the chili cards are, the chili recipe cards?
Wright: Hmm, hmm. I sure don’t. I may have one or two here.
Roberts: Well, somebody’s got one and I’ll find it because I need that one also. Okay, nice talking to you.
Wright: Okeydoke.
Roberts: Thank you a lot. Bye.109
Ah, those recipe cards. The White House successfully doused the publicity brush fire, and the recipe cards, according to Lady Bird Johnson, were “almost as popular as the government pamphlet on the care and feeding of children.”110 Though the Pedernales River Chili recipe cards are long out of print, I’ve included the recipe at the end of this chapter.
In late November 1968, Wright announced that she would retire from private cooking once the Johnson administration ended. In a newspaper interview, she shared, “I’m going to be lost,” and explained that she was “retiring because of her health.” Wright added that “she enjoyed her job more when the Johnsons were a private family because in the White House ‘it’s a little hectic around here.’”111 She also had dream projects for her “retirement”: “One of the things that I really would like to do is this cookbook […] showing how a menu or a recipe can be made into a diet recipe. Because this is what I had to do, use skim milk and Sucaryl [a sugar substitute] and stuff like that to make it where he [Johnson] could eat it and everybody else could eat it, too, and it would taste good.”112 It would have been a fascinating, groundbreaking read for its time, but it wasn’t meant to be. Wright was so burned out after her White House experience that she didn’t even return to Texas with the Johnson family after working for them for nearly three decades. She did, however, stay connected with the family. After a brief retirement, former First Daughter Lynda Bird Johnson Robb hired Wright to privately cook for her family. Wright lived out the rest of her days in Washington, D.C., and died there in 1987.
Paula Patton-Moutsos, White House assistant chef, 2003. Courtesy George W. Bush Presidential Center.
Zephyr Wright’s tenure marked the zenith of African American influence in the White House kitchen. When Jacqueline Kennedy created the position of White House executive chef (before that, this person was just called cook, chief cook, or head cook) and hired Frenchman René Verdon to fill that position, she set—revived, really—the standard from the era of Thomas Jefferson: the White House kitchen should be run by classically trained (read European) chefs preparing European food. Since then, African Americans have served only as assistant chefs in the White House kitchen, with an occasional guest spot by an African American chef. But although African Americans lost some status in the main kitchen, they still presided over many other aspects of presidential food service. In the next chapter, we will see how centrally positioned African American staff was when it came to feeding our presidents when they traveled outside of Washington, D.C.
Recipes
PEDERNALES RIVER CHILI
Here’s the chili that got the Johnson administration in a lot of hot water. You may vary the heat level or taste by changing the amount or type of chile powder used. I personally like to use 1 tablespoon of cayenne chile powder and 1 tablespoon of ancho chile powder. Please note that absolutely no beans were harmed in the creation of this chili con carne!
Makes 12 servings
4 pounds chili meat (coarsely ground round steak or well-trimmed chuck)
1 large onion, chopped
2 garlic cloves
1 teaspoon dried oregano
1 teaspoon cumin
2 tablespoons chili powder, or more to taste
1 1/2 cups canned whole tomatoes
2–6 generous dashes liquid hot sauce
1 teaspoon salt, or to taste
2 cups hot water
1. Place the meat, onions, and garlic in large, heavy pan or Dutch oven and cook over medium heat until light in color.
2. Add the oregano, cumin, chili powder, tomatoes, hot pepper sauce, salt, and hot water and bring to a boil.
3. Lower the heat and simmer for about 1 hour, skimming off the fat as it cooks.
PRESIDENT EISENHOWER’S OLD-FASHIONED BEEF STEW
Few presidents who lived in the White House enjoyed cooking as much as Eisenhower. Not only did the aroma of this stew linger around the Executive Mansion, but it also permeated homes around the country, since during the run-up to the 1956 election, the Eisenhower campaign widely circulated the recipe to supportive housewives who could host stew suppers in their homes and persuade their friends to vote for Ike.
Makes 8 servings
For the bouquet garni
2 peppercorns
1 bay leaf
3 whole cloves
1/2 teaspoon thyme
Pinch of cayenne pepper
1 garlic clove, halved
For the stew
2 pounds beef stew meat
3 cans beef bouillon
1 pound small white potatoes
1 bunch carrots, sliced
8–10 small onions
2 tomatoes, chopped
3 tablespoons all-purpose flour
3 tablespoons water
1. To create the bouquet garni, combine the spices, wrap them in cheesecloth, and tie with kitchen twine.
2. Place the bouquet garni, meat, bouillon, potatoes, carrots, onions, and tomatoes in a large stockpot and simmer on low heat for 40 minutes, or until the vegetables are tender.
3. Remove the bouquet garni.
4. In a small bowl, combine the flour and water and 3 tablespoons of stew stock until well-blended.
5. Add the flour mixture to the stew, stirring well.
6. Simmer until slightly thickened.
CAROLINE HARRISON’S DEVILED ALMONDS
No known recipes attributable to Dollie Johnson currently exist. Caroline Harrison, however, left some recipes behind, and it is not unlikely that Dollie Johnson had prepared these addictive snacks during her brief tenure in the White House kitchen. I’ve served these as an amuse-bouche at my presentations on African American presidential chefs, and I can testify that they are addictive.
Makes 4 servings
1/2 pound almonds, blanched
4 tablespoons butter
Cayenne pepper to taste
Salt to taste
1. Heat a large skillet over medium heat.
2. Add the almonds and butter and sauté the almonds until they are light brown.
3. Drain on paper towels.
4. Place the almonds in a cake pan and lightly season with cayenne and salt.
5. Serve hot.