What She Ate

by Laura Shapiro

  There is every possibility that Eleanor had never washed a floor or even a dish in her life. But the proponents of home economics, which generations of schoolgirls have experienced as a simple-minded curriculum in cooking and sewing, originally set out to design a far grander and more serious enterprise in women’s education. Eleanor discovered the movement at a time when its rhetoric was echoing through academia, the press, and, increasingly, her own world of politics—which is where she encountered it. In 1925, the New York State Legislature was considering a bill to make the School of Home Economics, founded as part of Cornell University’s College of Agriculture, into the New York State College of Home Economics—still within Cornell, but a change that would confer the stature and dignity of autonomy. Martha Van Rensselaer and Flora Rose, pioneers in the field who had been building up the Cornell department since 1907, were eager to put home economics on this new footing; but the bill had been introduced year after year since 1920, only to be defeated each time. Finally they wrote to Eleanor Roosevelt. Would she help lobby for the bill? Eleanor had campaigned hard for Governor Al Smith’s reelection, and she had excellent connections in the state legislature. A month later the bill was signed into law.

  Everything she heard about home economics made sense to Eleanor. The women promoting it wanted to peel back the sentiment wrapped around domestic life, dismiss its old-fashioned trappings, and free the American home to take its rightful place in the modern world. Under the rubric of home economics, or so its founders dreamed, all women would study the science involved in cooking, cleaning, and child care; and those who wished to study further could earn an academic degree representing their intellectual fitness for the job of wife and mother. Feminists who had been struggling to establish women’s colleges with classical curricula on a par with Harvard’s were disgusted at the notion of recasting housework as a career. But home economists saw it differently, focusing on the good that a woman could do for her family and her nation, once she had been trained in hygiene, child psychology, nutrition, and economics. Male educators, too, could see the value of home economics—not only as an all-female academic discipline, but as a wonderfully convenient solution to the problem of what to do with the women trying to pursue higher education. Surely they could be funneled directly into the home economics department, especially the ones who showed up at school hoping to train for a career in chemistry or biology. Some such students did, in fact, welcome the prospect of working in a field especially designed for women; others resented it; few escaped. Flora Rose, who became one of Eleanor’s cherished friends, had earned a master’s degree in nutrition and decided there was no better way to put it to use than in home economics. “I would not be in this field if I did not believe it to be the most important one in women’s education,” she wrote to Eleanor years later. “To me it represents the thinking which women have done about their own needs, interests and activities. . . . I regard it as the one original contribution which women have made to education.” She herself administered food relief programs in World War I, conducted nutrition and health surveys, and did considerable laboratory research—a career that might never have happened had she tried to work as a scientist outside the boundaries of a woman’s world. At a time when most professions were male by force of implacable tradition, home economics was designed to give women their own careers, not in competition with men but as partners—partners, to be sure, who knew their place.

  As it happened, Eleanor was introduced to home economics just six months after her infuriating experience at the 1924 Democratic National Convention, where women had been rudely shut out of decision making. At Cornell she found a small, enclosed world that operated on very different principles. Women made the rules, women set the tone, and women’s contributions were honored at every level, whether they cooked a well-balanced dinner or taught advanced chemistry. And just as she had made her way into feminist activism guided by her captivating new friends, she was guided into home economics by Martha and Flora, who were longtime partners as well as colleagues. For the next fifteen years, she made sure to schedule a visit to Cornell during Farm and Home Week—an annual display of Cornell’s work in agriculture and home economics—and no other engagement was permitted to override it. On the evening of February 15, 1933, Roosevelt narrowly escaped an assassination attempt in Miami; even so, Farm and Home Week was on Eleanor’s schedule, and she was in Ithaca for breakfast the next morning. Despite her crammed calendar as First Lady, she sometimes managed to spend two full days at Cornell.

  Pearl Buck, the American writer who grew up in China and won the Pulitzer Prize for her novel The Good Earth, was a graduate student at Cornell in 1926 when Eleanor made one of her visits. Buck was new to America and curious about this already celebrated woman, so she joined the committee assigned to meet Eleanor at the train and escort her through the day. “I can remember exactly how she looked,” she wrote, which is understandable. It was seven in the morning, and Eleanor was wearing a long purple satin gown and sturdy brown oxfords. There was to be a reception at the end of the afternoon, and she had decided it would be most efficient to be fully dressed for it now, rather than make time to change clothes later. The shoes had been selected for comfort; she wore them all day and right through the evening. The committee took Eleanor to the home economics department first, where she made a speech, and later came a lunch—“invented,” as Buck put it, by the home economists. “It seemed to be mostly raw cabbage,” she wrote. “They were very proud of it because it cost only seven cents a person. My private opinion of it was that even seven cents was too expensive for it. It was an uneatable meal so far as I was concerned. Mrs. Roosevelt ate it with great gusto, however, and congratulated the head of the department on having achieved this meal.”

  Eleanor always had a hearty appetite for the food associated with the home economics movement. The meals at Cornell came from a laboratory-like kitchen and were designed to deliver proper nourishment at low cost—that was their entire beauty and function. Their simple, scientifically based efficiency made them a useful part of the state and later the federal effort to assist struggling families during the Depression. But these stark combinations of nutrients—creamed codfish, baked-bean soup, fried mush, chopped raw carrots—were aimed at appeasing hunger, not appetite. They certainly had no place on gracious tables such as Sara Roosevelt’s. To Eleanor, this made them manna. The food was utilitarian, not opulent; it was designed to help the poor, not impress the rich; it exuded the spirit of reformers like herself, not gastronomes like Sara. One weekend in 1932, when FDR was governor of New York, a couple of old friends came to visit them in the Governor’s Mansion. They found Eleanor in splendid form, they said, apart from “her disdain for any interest in food!” The meals she offered were “very unattractive,” and she had laughed outright at her mother-in-law when Sara began discussing various possible dishes for a dinner party. “‘As though,’ said Eleanor, ‘anyone now-a-days had time to spend twenty minutes planning what to eat!’” What she gained at Cornell was a usable, guilt-free perspective on food, one that classified it strictly as a management problem, to be handled with all the speed and intelligence a trained homemaker could bring to the task.

  Cornell liberated her. Each time she visited, she saw in action an approach to homemaking that answered her worst insecurities. The messy, intractable difficulties in her life always had to do with home and family—the very realms in which women were supposed to excel, thanks to their God-given natures. For her, it hadn’t worked out that way. She had lost her husband to another woman, she had handed over her children to nurses and governesses to raise, and now they were happier with their grandmother than they were with her. There was nothing to be proud of in her private record as a woman. Home economics couldn’t transform her marriage or make her a different sort of mother, but it could package the traditional responsibilities of womanhood in a way that allowed her to achieve mastery. To remove domesticity from the realm of the emotions a
nd place it among the sciences, to make it an activity for the brain rather than the heart—this was an ideal she could support with all her might. Being a wife and mother, according to home economics, wasn’t a job managed by love, it was a job managed by serious, rational work; and if women learned to do it properly, the whole nation would benefit. Eleanor needed a way out of the corner her husband and family had left her in. At Cornell she found, for the first time in her life, a definition of femininity that made room for a woman like her.

  FDR was inaugurated president for the first time on March 4, 1933, and less than three weeks later Eleanor brought the home economics movement directly into the White House. The idea was to stage a luncheon and feature one of Flora’s low-cost Depression menus, with the press alerted beforehand to ensure maximum publicity. Family members and a few secretaries were summoned to the table, and Eleanor told reporters that the meal was a prototype of what she intended to serve for the next four years. It began with stuffed eggs, more typically a picnic dish but here transformed into a main course by being covered with tomato sauce and served hot. Five eggs were meant to serve six people, so each serving was modest, but it was accompanied by substantial side dishes of mashed potatoes and whole-wheat bread and butter. For dessert there was a watery prune pudding. According to The New York Times, the president was not at the table, but he was served the same meal on a tray in his office and said it was “good.”

  Good or grim, the meal was cheap—seven and a half cents per serving. All over the world, experienced home cooks were feeding their families at low cost by extracting every bit of flavor and nourishment out of the ingredients they had at hand, but Flora and her team were taking a different approach. They weren’t looking for culinary economies based on taste and tradition; they were studying lists of nutrients and figuring out how to apportion them mathematically. In Eleanor’s view, the lunch served every purpose a meal should serve. Nonetheless she assured the press that it would only be family members who ate Cornell meals on a regular basis. When the Roosevelts had guests, the kitchen would turn out more ample fare. As it happened, there were guests at every lunch and dinner she ate at the White House for the next twelve years, so her commitment was never put to the test.

  • • •

  Eleanor had never wanted to be First Lady. She hated the idea of surrendering her independence and pulling back from hands-on political work just to become a hostess. For the sake of the country she was glad FDR had been elected, but she knew exactly what First Ladies did: they got dressed up, they shook hands, and they made small talk, day after endless day. How could she submit to such a role? When FDR was nominated, she was the only person in the room who was stone-faced; and when he won, she wrote later, “The turmoil in my heart and mind was rather great that night, and the next few months were not to make any clearer what the road ahead would be.” As she was organizing the household for the move to Washington, she made a tentative suggestion to FDR: Wasn’t there “a real job” she could do in the White House? Perhaps answer some of his mail? “He looked at me quizzically and said he did not think that would do, that Missy, who had been handling his mail for a long time, would feel I was interfering. I knew he was right and that it would not work, but it was a last effort to keep in close touch and to feel that I had a real job to do.” Eventually, of course, she created that job. She had seen how home economics operated: it was a woman’s profession in a man’s world. No lines were crossed, no fiefdoms challenged, but the women gave heart and soul to work they cared about. Now she, too, set out to find a professional place for herself, even while confined to FDR’s sphere. She couldn’t set policy, but she could travel, meet people, listen to them, investigate, pull myriad strings in Washington, make brilliant use of symbolic gestures, and give speeches that heartened the poor, the exploited, and the powerless. As Blanche Wiesen Cook put it, “Her vision shaped the best of his presidency”—an assessment that would have been supported overwhelmingly by the millions of Americans whose lives she touched, though Eleanor herself would have briskly turned away any such compliment.

  Her first responsibility was one that FDR asked her to take on: he wanted her to manage the domestic side of the White House—a notion that must have reverberated in his mind for the next twelve years like a howl of triumph from Satan himself. Eleanor promptly set out to locate a first-rate housekeeper, someone who would plan and oversee the cooking, cleaning, laundry, and marketing for what was, in effect, a private hotel under public scrutiny. She thought she knew just the right person. Back in 1928, when FDR was running for governor of New York, Eleanor had become involved with the Hyde Park branch of the League of Women Voters and met a local woman who was also active in it: Henrietta Nesbitt, a homemaker with two grown sons and an unemployed husband. She was a strong supporter of FDR’s and went to the same Episcopal church as Eleanor. And her family was hard up. Eleanor saw a way to help. She began hiring Mrs. Nesbitt to bake bread, pies, coffee cakes, and cookies for the constant entertaining that was going on at Hyde Park, and when the Roosevelts moved to Albany Mrs. Nesbitt kept right on baking for them, sending the orders upstate by train. Then FDR ran for president and won. Mrs. Nesbitt was delighted but also a little disappointed. The baking had been “a godsend,” as she wrote in her memoir, White House Diary. Now it was coming to an end, and the Nesbitts, who had been forced to move in with their son and his family, were going to lose their only source of income. But shortly after Thanksgiving, Mrs. Roosevelt stopped by and said she was going to need a housekeeper in the White House. At the time she wrote her memoir, Mrs. Nesbitt was aware that her tenure in the White House was likely to be remembered as a national embarrassment—she had read all the bad press and heard all the complaints—and in her book she made a point of quoting Eleanor’s job offer very precisely: “I don’t want a professional housekeeper. I want someone I know. I want you, Mrs. Nesbitt.”

  It’s not clear why Eleanor was so determined to hire an amateur for a job that called for supervising more than two dozen employees, maintaining sixty rooms and their furnishings, preparing meals for a guest list that often doubled or tripled on short notice, feeding sandwiches and sweets to a thousand or more at tea on any given day, and making sure family members and their innumerable overnight guests had everything they might require around the clock. Eleanor’s contacts in Washington, not to mention her friends in home economics, could have given her the names of many candidates far more experienced than Mrs. Nesbitt. But Eleanor was comfortable with this Hyde Park woman, so loyal and accommodating, whose pies and cookies always arrived at the house when they were supposed to, and who very much needed the work. Why look elsewhere?

  “Mrs. Nesbitt didn’t know beans about running a White House,” recalled Lillian Rogers Parks, who worked as a maid and seamstress for the Hoovers, the Roosevelts, the Trumans, and the Eisenhowers. Known backstairs as “Fluffy”—because she was so very much the opposite—Mrs. Nesbitt had neither the skills nor the temperament for the immense job she had taken on, and she met the situation by becoming officious, overbearing, and peremptory. The staff loathed her. J. B. West, the longtime White House usher, said the mansion began looking “dingy, almost seedy” under her care, and the kitchen saw plate after plate coming back with gray slices of meat and pallid vegetables barely touched. The president complained steadily about the food, and by 1944 he was saying that the main reason he wanted to win a fourth term was for the pleasure of firing Mrs. Nesbitt. But to the end of Eleanor’s life, she insisted she had made a good hire. “Father never told me he wanted to get rid of Mrs. Nesbitt,” she claimed in a letter to her son James, who had described in a memoir FDR’s vehement feelings about the housekeeper. She added that FDR “often praised” Mrs. Nesbitt’s work—an assertion so blatantly untrue that nobody took it seriously except Mrs. Nesbitt, who made the same claim in her own two books.

  Yet Mrs. Nesbitt, the most reviled cook in presidential history, kept a careful record of the lunch and dinn
er menus she had planned at the White House and gave them to the Library of Congress with the rest of her papers. It’s as if she wanted to announce to all future detractors that contrary to her reputation she had done a splendid job and fully deserved the faith that Eleanor had in her. Hence we have a comprehensive picture of what was served throughout FDR’s administration—not just the state dinners, which every administration publicized, but all the other meals as well. They make it clear, in fact they make it vivid, what everyone was so unhappy about.

  Mrs. Nesbitt was under orders to practice strict economy, first because of the Depression and later because of wartime rationing. Beyond this, her only culinary vision was the one she had developed as a small-town home cook who occasionally ate out in modest restaurants. Eleanor looked over the menus every morning, but she was even less adventuresome than Mrs. Nesbitt when it came to feeding people and rarely asked for changes. Apart from this daily conference with the First Lady, Mrs. Nesbitt insisted on absolute control in the kitchen. “Of course, Henrietta did not personally do the cooking, but she stood over the cooks, making sure that each dish was overcooked or undercooked or ruined one way or another,” wrote Lillian Parks. Taste, texture, serving the food at the proper temperature, making sure each dish looked appetizing—these were niceties that did not concern the housekeeper. For dinner she typically offered simple preparations of beef, lamb, chicken, and fish, though by the time they arrived at the table they tended to be cold and dried out. She also deployed an occasional novelty of the sort that appeared in women’s magazines under such names as “Seafood Surprise” and “Ham Hawaiian.” Low-cost main dishes like sweetbreads, brains, and chicken livers appeared frequently, so frequently FDR took to complaining that he was never given anything else. But the greater cause for misery seems to have been lunch, which Mrs. Nesbitt saw as a fine occasion to save money. She built up a small repertoire of dishes based on leftovers and other inexpensive mixtures, and these turned up week after week as regularly as if they were on assignment. Sometimes these mixtures were stuffed into a green pepper, other times into a patty shell, but her favorite way to present them was the most straightforward—on toast. There were curried eggs on toast, mushrooms and oysters on toast, broiled kidneys on toast, braised kidneys on toast, lamb kidneys on toast, chipped beef on toast, and a dish called “Shrimp Wiggle,” consisting of shrimp and canned peas heated in white sauce, on toast.