Cottage cheese, possum, aspic: How to eat like a president

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0:42I'm Chris Bentley.

0:52Today is President's Day, which was created initially to celebrate George Washington's birthday, HBDGW. George Washington may have had a bit of cachet in his day, but it's safe to say presidents these days have an additional air of celebrity. Jimmy, POTUS stands for President of the United States.

1:19We'll look at how leaders past and present have used that star power, for better or worse. But first, no amount of celebrity or power can buy good taste. And we mean that literally with our first conversation today, because we're talking about what the presidents ate in the White House. Your server today will be Scott Tong. And a warning, this is going to get a little weird. For instance, who began his day with grape juice mixed with two raw eggs? Woodrow Wilson. Named the president who ate eight hard-boiled eggs at breakfast, drank 12 cups of black coffee a day. I guessed Taft. Wrong. it's Teddy Roosevelt, and corn soup and corn on the cob in the same meal, that would be William Henry Harrison.

2:09We know all this thanks to Bennett Ray, writer and chef who is behind the Cooking with Congress videos on Instagram and TikTok and YouTube, and he joins us now. Bennett, welcome to the program. Thanks for having me, Scott. My goodness, where did you find these presidential recipes? It's one of the most delightful parts of this project is that so many of them come from analog source material. So old cookbooks, old cookbooklets, you know, the spiral bound type, great biographies out there. And even some archival, you know, New York Times, Washington Post articles can dig into the later presidents, you know, Jimmy Carter and John F.

2:47Kennedy. A lot of these strike me as rather weird. Did you pick the weird ones or this is just what you found? Yeah, you got me there. I definitely am drawn to the ones that are unique or different or I kind of follow the fun in terms of a recipe when I find it. If it's a favorite recipe of theirs or one that they have themselves submitted to the world, the ones that have the most fascinating ingredients or a strange name or something we've never heard of like mugwump in a hole, that was a Chester Arthur favorite. Well, lots of fun. I enjoy your videos too. So we're going to listen to a little bit of your video of eating like William Howard Taft for a day.

3:24Here is his dinner. Okay, deep breath here. A vegetable salad with olives and hearts of palm, a rich lobster stew, roasted turkey with potato salad and green peas, an eight-ounce steak with cabbage side salad, a filet of salmon, and the crown jewel of dinner, possum with sweet potatoes. Yes, possum. Yes, possum. I guess I want to ask you, Bennett, is there something serious you learned about particular presidents based on what they ate? Yeah, I started this whole series out of curiosity. I wanted kind of the experiential side of presidents, right? I saw some of the recipes, I tested them out. I've eaten like, I think 41 out of the 45 presidents so far.

4:05But you kind of learn a lot in different periods of time, I think. There's like a 40-year span where everyone's eating steak for breakfast, which is fascinating. And then there's a 40-year span where cheese gets really trendy. And so that's like the consistent lunch, whether you're having it with a martini like Gerald Ford or with ketchup like Richard Wilson. So I think you learn a lot about specific eras of time, but also about the presidents themselves. Who treats food as something they enjoy and something to be treasured and something that brings people together and who treats food like fuel.

4:37All right. So I made one recipe from your site, from your collection. Crustless coconut pie. Sounds really good. Milk and eggs, nutmeg, coconut flakes, tiny bit of flour. Let's talk before we give away who the president is here. And you note it's important to use freshly grated nutmeg. I listened to you. How do you like it? You picked a recipe that was guaranteed to be delicious, which was smart. As a lot of the recipes, especially back in the 50s, 60s, 70s, can be a little intimidating if you're not into gelatin mixed with seafood. Yeah. Give us the reveal. What president does this come from and what do we learn from this?

5:15Yeah, crustless coconut pie. This is a Barack Obama recipe, actually. So more recent president. It's delicious. It's custardy. It's also just kind of goes along with a lot of his other foods that he ate on a daily basis. A bit unique, right? Efficient, a little on the healthier side. Kind of fits with Barack Obama's general image. You not only list the recipes, you try them. So some of them I do want to talk to you about. Forgive me for re-traumatizing you. Aspic of chicken, FDR. What is that? Aspics are so interesting to me because they started off as this very, you know, high cuisine, right?

5:53Like French cuisine, very popular and really only for the elites, only for wealthy folks for many years. And then eventually Jell-O came along and kind of brought gelatin to the masses. So let me pause you for the rest of us. What are aspics? Sorry. Aspix, it is safe for work. Aspix are a savory gelatin dish, right? So you'll see something like asparagus and duck suspended in what looks like what we modernly call jello. They're usually savory. They usually have meat, fish. Sometimes you'll see eggs involved as well, but it's very time intensive. it you know takes days to boil the calves feet uh you know in the 17 1800s that's what they were using um it's a very expensive process it's laborious and so uh it was not very popular for most people to be eating gelatin in the states at least until the 40s and 50s and beyond and that's what takes us to fdr's recipe yes what's in it there's not much to it when you see it it's mostly just shredded chicken suspended in a broth-based gelatin So it's salty, it's brothy.

7:01It almost might be better on a sandwich, like between two pieces of bread with a little bit of mayonnaise, rather than just kind of dug into straight as a luncheon item. The funny part about FDR's pretty much entire culinary history and his daily diet is he didn't like the food that he was eating in the White House very much. So we don't know whether he even enjoyed this dish. He had a very worldly palate, but due to the Great Depression and Eleanor Roosevelt's very kind of keen insights on maybe not eating fancily while in the White House, he was not eating food that he adored while president.

7:34Oh, food for the people. Okay. Now let's talk about Richard Nixon's ham mousse. We first have some audio of you talking about how you make it. Ham mousse by President Richard Nixon. It is an unholy combination of ground ham and whipped cream. plus tomato juice, beef consomme, and gelatin. You're going to mix it all together until it's beige and thick, and then put it into a mold, and you're going to get this shiny, gelatinous creature. Ben, I kind of know the answer here. What's your verdict?

8:09I mean, talk about re-traumatizing. Even to hear the sounds kind of make the hair on the back of my neck stand up. It is a completely foreign concept to me to mix whipped cream and ground ham. So this is a bottom five recipe for me, for sure. Yeah. You've tried all these things. I'm just kind of curious. Are you just somebody who is okay eating a lot of different kinds of things? Or did you become okay at it? I think I always had a curiosity. And I don't kind of cross off a lot of foods into my like, oh, I won't try that. I think a little bit of both. I'm constantly training myself to try new foods by doing this series.

8:49And there's really relatively few that I wouldn't try in the world. I'll try that like, you know, 100-year-old duck egg or whatever. I'll give it a shot. That you need to try because I endorse it. Okay. Lots of pies. Pork apple pie, Coolidge. Clam pie, John Tyler. And George Washington's Yorkshire pie. Wow, squab, duck, turkey, guinea fowl, pheasant, quails, and chicken. What was that like just to assemble and then eat? So I had to work with a team on that one. We basically had four of us who were prepping all the birds, which was a lot of birds, and then we're filling this medieval pie crust.

9:31It's enormous. And it was really difficult. It's actually one of the toughest recipes I've ever done because you have to build this crust and you're essentially like an engineer. It's purely like to hold all the birds and the bird juices. We had some collapses. We eventually got it to work to a certain degree. And then at the end of it, we tried it. We're like, it's fine. So it was such a disappointing after like five to seven hours. Oh, really? Not better than fine. Fine. It was all right. It was okay. But sure was fun to try it out. I don't know if I'd do it again. Ben, and finally, for listeners who know or may go on to your site, your collection of videos, Cooking with Congress, anything you would suggest we try because you think it's good?

10:24I really like a lot of the kind of Gilded Age food that came about. So William Taft, this is post-Gilded Age, but William Taft's rich lobster stew. Some of the odder recipes from McKinley and Hoover even. There's caramel tomatoes. There's a four-color cream fruit pie. I'm at work on a cookbook with all of this, so soon there will be more recipes for folks to go to. I would also recommend Harry Truman's Day of Eating. It's particularly interesting, filled with vegetables, and it's got a great pineapple fairy fluff at the end of the day. that's light and flavorful and just kind of a perfect way to end a full day of eating.

11:04So I'd go check that one out. We've been talking to Bennett Ray, chef, writer, and the man behind the video collection, Cooking with Congress. Whole lot to see go there. Bennett, thanks for the time. Nice to talk to you. Scott, great to talk to you too. Thanks for having me.

11:25Lots to chew on there, huh? Reminds me of a book I read recently called A Man of Iron by Troy Sinek about President Grover Cleveland. One of the things that stuck with me was that Cleveland didn't much care for the fancy food he was being served by the French chef that was employed at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave in those days, and how he caught a whiff of the staff having corned beef with cabbage and requested that for dinner instead. Our friend Bennett Ray ate like Cleveland for his video series as well, of course, including the four plus beers a day that Uncle Jumbo would put down. Cheers, Bennett.

12:07Coming up next, Tiziana Deering explores the evolution of the presidency into a seat of celebrity and what that means for the office today. Stick around.

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13:02Maybe you've seen that black and white photo of California Governor Gavin Newsom, button-down shirt, jeans, staring into the camera. It's part of a new Vogue profile in which reporter Maya Singer writes that he is, quote, embarrassingly handsome. Newsom is believed to be eyeing a presidential run in 2028. So how big a role does celebrity and riz charisma play in getting candidates to the White House or getting a president's message across? Let's take a few minutes on this President's Day to look at the razzle-dazzle that's now part of the presidency with Catherine Brownell, a professor of history and director of the Center for American Political History, Media and Technology at Purdue University.

13:46Professor, welcome. Thank you so much for having me. So for decades, politicians have used glitz and glamour, or they've turned to celebrities to help with messaging. From FDR to JFK, Ronald Reagan. We'll get to those examples in a minute. But is there something different in what's happening now and how different? One thing that is very different in our modern environment is the nature of celebrity has changed. There are many more platforms in which people can craft a following, and it's a more narrow following than you used to have in the age of film and broadcast television. So we actually have a president in the White House now who was a celebrity first, hosting the television show The Apprentice, more than a decade doing that.

14:32Has that fundamentally made him a different kind of president? Well, one of the things that's really interesting with Donald Trump is that he crafted his celebrity in an age of reality television, where it's much more about branding and kind of a personal brand that he used. Of course, he became well-known through The Apprentice. And I think that that really, that idea of shock and awe and the emphasis on an individual brand, rather than, you know, the previous era of Hollywood film and broadcast television, where it's much more about production and performance, a well-crafted production. And, you know, what Donald Trump does is he garners a particular name recognition, that shock and awe style that he then credits for his political legitimacy and his continued reference to his ratings, bringing in that reality style to governing is very much a product, again, of this different style of celebrity.

15:35And I do want to stick with that reality style of governing for a minute, although I'll note shock and awe takes me all the way back to the early 90s and the Gulf War. You know, this is a president who televises heads of state meetings There was the everybody get ready for Liberation Day, right, a branded day, which was the announcement of tariffs. Is this the way it's going to be now? Well, that remains to be seen. One of the things that I look at as a historian is what is deemed successful and should be a priority moving forward. And so I think in our current moment, if candidates and elected officials and future presidents look at Trump's style as being effective, they're going to emulate it.

16:21However, they could also look at that and choose different directions as well. So that's looking forward. Let's take a second now to look back. You reminded us earlier of Franklin D. Roosevelt. During World War II, FDR was trying to get people to buy these war bonds to help fund the conflict. And he turned to actress Betty Davis to convince people to buy the bonds as Christmas gifts. Here's a public service announcement she did. Any bond that you or I give as a present is much more than a gift. It's a Christmas blessing to those men who will be far away on this Christmas day. FDR made massive changes.

16:58It was a time of war. Talk a little more about how he turned to celebrities to sell parts of his agenda. Absolutely. So even before the outbreak of war, he cultivated relationships with key people in Hollywood. Jack Warner, for example, was a big supporter of Franklin Roosevelt's. And a range of different actors would travel to the White House every year to celebrate his birthday and raise awareness for philanthropic causes like the National Infantile Paralysis Foundation. And so there is this relationship, and Hollywood advocates and sells key aspects of the New Deal. And that is really important because overwhelmingly during the 1930s, information that people read about politics was coming from newspapers.

17:45And newspapers overwhelmingly were conservative and run by Republicans who were against his New Deal. And so motion pictures became a way for him to communicate and sell his New Deal agenda and control a lot of that messaging as well. That continues during the war. And Hollywood plays a really instrumental role in selling the idea of the war, the notion that it's being fought for the four freedoms, and also for raising money as well. So let's fast forward a little. Now we go to 1968. Richard Nixon, running for president, does a cameo on a sketch comedy show that was sort of SNL before SNL, Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In.

18:25Nixon delivered the show's signature line. Socket to me? Okay, we might argue he didn't necessarily deliver it well, but it was a joke. You know, the whole gag was to get somebody to say that line. Why does he go on laughing? What's he trying to do? First of all, that happened after many, many takes. It's as awkward as it sounds. It was really planned and very carefully crafted because the goal was to try to humanize his candidacy and who he was to television viewers. who might not have been paying attention closely to the presidential election that year. And it's a dramatic shift from how he approached running for the White House eight years earlier in 1960.

19:12During that year, he actually criticized his opponent, John F. Kennedy, for relying too much on a celebrity persona. And he frequently claimed that Jack was all about style and glitz and not about the serious substance that went into the presidency. And so Richard Nixon, when he was thinking about what why he lost the 1960 election, he credited John F. Kennedy's celebrity style as the key to his success. And that completely changed the way he thought about political power, the way he thought about campaigns. and it led him to emulate rather than criticize Kennedy and appear on Laffitt. So fascinating because it's significantly obviously less controversial now and momentum for presidents using the TV picks up.

20:02I remember Bill Clinton playing his saxophone on Arsenio Hall during the 92 campaign. You've got President Obama who turns to late night TV after getting into office to get his messages out. Here he is on The Tonight Show starring Jimmy Fallon. The reason it's so important to keep down costs is so we keep college affordable. And the president knows his stuff, y 'all. That's why they call him the POTUS, which means person on top. What is it? Jimmy, POTUS stands for President of the United States. He's the POTUS with the most of us. So there he is, slow jamming the news. he wants Congress to halt a rate increase on student loans.

20:48What power does it give a president like Obama to do something like late night television? Yeah, I think you see Obama really turning to entertainment and putting himself in the role and celebrating and using his role as entertainer in chief, not just to win elections, but also to govern and to reach out, especially to younger voters. He goes on the YouTube show Between Two Ferns with Zach Galifianakis to try to get younger viewers who are tuning in to buy into the Affordable Care Act and to support his legislative agenda. So he very much uses it as a tool to govern, not just win elections. Katherine Brownell, is there a downside to politicians capitalizing on celebrity?

21:35Well, I think that what you see is it can broaden their reach. They can connect to different demographics who might not always be paying attention to politics. But of course, these conversations are not always serious. In fact, they actually do better at entertaining people when they are not. And so they do not get into the nitty gritty of what the affordable health care, what student loan caps actually look like. And it also affords the president a tremendous amount of control over the messaging. When he's going on interviews with Jimmy Fallon, they're not getting the harder questions from journalists.

22:13And so there's an aura of transparency. But, in fact, there's tremendous control and abilities by those using entertainment to control it to their means. Katherine Brownell is professor of history and director of the Center for American Political History, Media and Technology at Purdue University. Thanks for joining us. Thank you so much for having me.

22:49We've got to take one more short break now, but we'll be right back.

23:00It may be a holiday, but the news has not stopped. One thing we're following is the American military buildup in the Middle East. On Friday, the Pentagon said it was sending a second aircraft carrier and its 4 ,000-plus sailors to the region, reportedly in preparation for a possible attack on Iran. In Tehran, State TV reports the Iranian Navy is also preparing for possible war, as the U.S. and Iran are set to meet for indirect talks this week in Geneva over Iran's nuclear program. Here and now, security analyst Jim Walsh joined Tiziana Deering to share some thoughts on the situation. We've sort of rushed all the assets in, and we've made the threats, but it's not clear why we're doing what we're doing.

23:48Iran is not threatening the United States. It hasn't attacked the United States. We were the party that attacked them six months ago. Different justifications have been offered. The nuclear is one, but most of Iran's nuclear installations were badly damaged and they have not begun reconstruction. So I'm not sure where that is. And, you know, this is partly the result of the fact that we had no nuclear agreement. When we had a nuclear agreement, then we knew what was going on and everything seemed to be fine. And then we got rid of it and now we're in this. So whether it's missiles or domestic human rights or the nuclear program, it's not yet well defined.

24:28We do know that there is this meeting coming up, at least ostensibly, Jim, about a nuclear deal. You've mentioned the attacks last June on Iran's sensitive nuclear sites. Those have not been reconstructed or restarted. So what kind of deal would leave both sides satisfied? I do think there's a deal here, actually, on nuclear, not on missiles. Missiles are Iran's last line of defense. No country's going to bargain away its only means of self-defense. Although Israel wants that, right? Or does Israel want to sort of gum up the works on getting an agreement, you know, by making demands that are not able to be met?

25:05But let's limit the discussion to nuclear. Is there something possible here so that both sides can gracefully back down? I think so. Iran insists that it has a right to enrich, but it can insist on that and nevertheless agree to suspend enrichment. Basically, if they're not enriching now, they can simply pledge to continue not doing that for some period in the future. You'll remember President Trump's agreement with North Korea in his first term. It was a freeze for freeze where North Korea stopped having long-range missile tests and nuclear tests and we stopped having exercises, you could get a freeze for freeze here where Iran promises not to do anything and we hold off for some period of time.

25:45I'd say that's one of the ways to thread the needle here. So short of a deal, it does feel like, Jim, we've been in a holding pattern, right? For a few weeks, U.S. and Iran could jump into a wider conflict. Are you concerned that we are getting closer to a war with American troops involved? Well, sure. Or, I mean, we keep saying we're going to bomb them and we're moving assets there. So that's a possibility. And at some point, you know, you worry that the parties are going to back themselves into a corner, that they've invested so much of their credibility or whatever, their ego, that they feel like now if the other side doesn't capitulate, they have to follow through.