What She Ate

by Laura Shapiro

  Another way to stretch just about any sort of food was to turn it into a creamed entrée or side dish, so day after day the Roosevelts and their company encountered creamed codfish, creamed finnan haddie, creamed mushrooms, creamed carrots, creamed clams, creamed beef, and creamed sweetbreads. Egg dishes also appeared with some persistence: she offered stuffed eggs and shirred eggs, and she featured “Eggs Benedictine” until 1938, when somebody finally corrected her. Sometimes the menus make it clear that she was at wits’ end: we see her resorting to a dish she called “Stuffed Egg Salad” for two lunches in a row, and on another presumably frantic day it was sweet potatoes at both lunch and dinner. (She did vary them, adding marshmallows at lunch and pineapple at dinner.)

  When it came to the salad course, Mrs. Nesbitt’s interpretation of the possibilities came from a long, uniquely American tradition in which any combination of foods, however unlikely, could be designated a salad simply by serving them on a lettuce leaf. “We leaned on salads of every variety,” she wrote in The Presidential Cookbook, her collection of White House recipes. “Mrs. Roosevelt was especially fond of salads. . . . And even the men, who seemed inclined to frown on vegetables in any form, showed a definite interest in greens when they were fixed in appetizing ways with a tangy dressing.” How the men reacted to “Jellied Bouillon Salad” is not recorded. Other salads that appeared on the White House table, and these must have made quite an impression on foreign visitors unfamiliar with the tradition, included “Stuffed Prune Salad,” “Ashville Salad” (canned tomato soup in a gelatin ring mold), and “Pear Salad,” a hot-weather specialty featuring canned pears covered in cream cheese, mayonnaise, chives, and candied ginger. Mrs. Nesbitt said she sometimes colored the mayonnaise green.

  Many of these dishes reflected the American eating habits of her time; others would have been extreme under any circumstances. Not many families began dinner with sticks of fresh pineapple that had been rolled in crushed peppermint candy. But on the whole, Mrs. Nesbitt was setting a familiar if dowdy table, a culinary standard that suited Eleanor very well. She was emphatic about promoting simple, mainstream cuisine as a Roosevelt administration virtue. “I am doing away with all the kickshaws—no hothouse grapes—nothing out of season,” she told The New York Times. “I plan for good and well-cooked food and see that it is properly served, and that must be enough.” And perhaps it would have been, if Mrs. Nesbitt had been able to bring the right instincts or training to her work. She had little of either to draw upon. The arrival of foreign visitors was especially challenging, though she liked to think of herself as rising to the occasion. “For Chinese people I’d always try for a bland menu,” she explained in White House Diary. “Then for the Mexican dinner I’d have something hot, like Spanish sauce with the chicken.” She was especially proud of the nondairy, vegetarian menu she was able to create for the ambassador from Abyssinia and his entourage, who were Coptic Christians, and she carefully kept it on file to reuse when she had to feed Hindus or Muslims. Those who couldn’t eat the clam cocktail or the bluefish presumably filled up on the Mexican corn.

  A few of the meals in Mrs. Nesbitt’s collection are marked “Mrs. Hibben’s menu,” a reference to a rare dalliance with gourmandise that took place early in the first administration. After the election, Eleanor received a memo from Ernestine Evans, a former journalist and peripatetic literary agent who took an interest in food and thought it could play a useful role in the new White House. Why not showcase American cooking? Menus could include fine regional dishes—“cornbreads and gumbos and chowders”—authentically prepared with local ingredients. Just as the White House regularly supplied the press with the names of the guests at official dinners, it could also supply the menus; and a commitment to focus on America’s culinary traditions would assure positive news coverage. Evans said she had the right person in mind to help make this happen: Sheila Hibben, author of The National Cookbook and “the best practical cook I know.” Perhaps Hibben could work quietly behind the scenes in the White House kitchen for a few months, developing appropriate menus and recipes. “She should be used like a good architect,” Evans mused. “She should go back and find out what Jefferson served, and be ready always with a great deal of lore, so that every dish has history as well as savor.”

  Sheila Hibben was a witty, cosmopolitan food writer who contributed regularly to The New Yorker and other chic magazines. In the introduction to The National Cookbook, she wrote that she had been inspired to start collecting regional American recipes the day she came across a picture in the Sunday paper of a bowl of soup topped with whipped cream—whipped cream, that is, in the shape of a Sealyham terrier. Off she went on a mission to rescue what was still excellent in American cooking, hoping the best recipes would act as a kind of seawall to protect fine regional cookery against crashing waves of the idiotic, the reductionist, and the dreary. A project that began with indignation, she added, ended in patriotism—“a special sort of patriotism, a real enthusiasm for the riches and traditions of America.” Eleanor liked the idea of food that could teach history, and she invited Hibben to visit the White House kitchen and share her ideas and recipes with Mrs. Nesbitt. Alas, there seems to be no record of precisely what happened when Mrs. Nesbitt met this particular challenge to her authority, but in the end, victory went to the housekeeper.

  Mrs. Nesbitt’s most important adversary, however, wasn’t in the kitchen; he was in the Oval Office. She and FDR were at odds from the start. “Father, who would have been an epicure if he had been given the opportunity, began grumbling about the meals served under Mrs. Nesbitt’s supervision within a week of her reporting for duty,” wrote his son Elliott in a memoir. “Restricted in his wheelchair from dining out except on ceremonial occasions, he was at the mercy of Mrs. Nesbitt’s kitchen.” FDR liked a decent fried egg in the morning; Mrs. Nesbitt’s were invariably overcooked. He longed for a good cup of coffee; Mrs. Nesbitt’s was bitter. (Finally she agreed to put a percolator on his tray in the morning, so he could brew his own.) His friends used to send the president gifts of quail, pheasant, and other game birds, which he loved; Mrs. Nesbitt served them dried out and ruined. Reminded that the president didn’t like broccoli, she ordered the cook to make it anyway. When FDR asked that coffee be served to the guests he was entertaining in his office—they happened to be royalty—Mrs. Nesbitt sent up iced tea instead. She had no ill will; she was merely incompetent and inflexible, and she was always certain she knew best. Grace Tully, the president’s longtime secretary, reported that when he was sick one day, she had asked him if there was anything he particularly wanted. He had a yen for “some of that big white asparagus that comes in cans,” he said mournfully, but Mrs. Nesbitt had assured him they could not be found in Washington. (Tully located ten cans and had them delivered that afternoon.) Once, according to Lillian Parks, Eleanor remarked that she was constantly getting requests for White House recipes. “Laughing, FDR said she ought to send some of Henrietta Nesbitt’s recipes for brains and sweetbreads—that would certainly dry up requests for recipes in a hurry.”

  When the president became truly irritated—for instance, after several days in a row of salt fish for breakfast and a similarly unrelieved stretch of liver and beans for lunch—Eleanor treated it blithely. “I had to do a little real housekeeping this morning because I discovered that my husband did not like the breakfasts and lunches that he had been getting!” she noted in “My Day.” “It therefore behooves Mrs. Nesbitt and myself to scurry around and get some new ideas.” They didn’t scurry too hard, however, because Eleanor decided FDR was merely on edge—“in a tizzy,” as she put it—owing to the pressures of office. That made sense to Mrs. Nesbitt. “When he said ‘The vegetables are watery,’ and ‘I’m sick of liver and beans,’ these were figures of speech,” she explained in White House Diary.

  FDR could have had Mrs. Nesbitt sent right back to Hyde Park the moment he tasted her coffee for the first time, but for all his exasperation, he neve
r insisted that Eleanor change housekeepers. And Eleanor, famous though she was for her thoughtful hospitality, appears to have switched off that gene when it came to serving meals in the White House. The sight of guests toying miserably with their “Eggs Mexican”—rice topped with bananas and fried eggs—had no effect. Mrs. Nesbitt was still working at the White House when FDR died and Truman took over. Bess Truman finally fired her, in frustration, after asking Mrs. Nesbitt numerous times to stop serving brussels sprouts because the family hated them.

  Why didn’t Eleanor do the same? In part, she found it easy to sidestep FDR’s misery because they spent so little time with each other. She ate lunch, dinner, and often breakfast with her own guests, while FDR had meals in his study with his secretary Missy LeHand and often a few friends and advisers. His most sociable time of day was the cocktail hour, when he took charge of mixing the drinks and encouraged plenty of gossip, laughter, and flirtation. Eleanor couldn’t bear this ritual, or indeed any manifestation of FDR’s irrepressible appetite for all the good things in life, including women. It charmed his friends, and perhaps it had charmed his bride, but now it was only a source of pain. Often she skipped the cocktail hour, or came in late, or even tried to use it for work, which FDR considered unforgivable. “I remember one day when we were having cocktails,” their daughter, Anna, told the biographer Bernard Asbell. “Mother . . . came in and sat down across the desk from Father. And she had a sheaf of papers this high and she said, ‘Now, Franklin, I want to talk to you about this.’ . . . I just remember, like lightning, that I thought, Oh, God, he’s going to blow. And sure enough, he blew his top.” FDR gave the papers a violent shove across the desk; and Eleanor stood up, expressionless, and walked to another part of the room, where she began talking to a guest. Anna told Asbell that she always suspected her father had encouraged Eleanor to travel so widely in part because he simply didn’t want her around all the time.

  She and FDR dined together on formal occasions, of course, and when their children and grandchildren showed up for a birthday or a holiday. And they made a point of honoring their longtime custom of Sunday-night suppers, with Eleanor at the chafing dish. Otherwise, as Lillian Parks wrote, “Eleanor and the President were like ships that passed in the night—exchanging signals but seldom stopping to visit.” J. B. West said the staff had never seen Eleanor and FDR in a room without others present. “They had the most separate relationship I have ever seen between man and wife,” he wrote. She never accompanied FDR to Shangri-La, the presidential retreat later named Camp David, which he cherished as a “secret paradise” far from the Oval Office. Nor did she share his fondness for Warm Springs, Georgia, the rehabilitation center he had established for polio patients, where he loved to swim in the therapeutic springwaters. Eleanor preferred Greenwich Village, where she kept an apartment all her life. They even built separate dream houses. Back in the 1920s Eleanor had established a private domain on the grounds at Hyde Park—a house called Val-Kill, two miles from the main house, which she owned with two of her closest women friends until she bought them out in 1938. Later FDR built his own private getaway on the estate, a cottage he treasured and hoped to retire to, about a mile and a half from Eleanor’s.

  So they were apart, as usual—Eleanor in Washington and FDR in Warm Springs—when he died of a cerebral hemorrhage on April 12, 1945. His aunt Laura Delano was in Georgia with him; so was his cousin Daisy Suckley, and so was Lucy Mercer, who hastily packed her bags and fled. Despite his long-ago promise, FDR had never given her up. When Eleanor arrived in Warm Springs that night, Laura Delano, long jealous of the president’s famous and popular wife, spitefully told her that Lucy had been with FDR when he collapsed, that Lucy had been at Warm Springs for the last three days, and that Lucy had been visiting the White House for years during Eleanor’s frequent absences. Listening to this, Eleanor was impassive; and she remained impassive during the long train ride back to Washington. Then, just before the funeral in the East Room of the White House, she said she wanted a few minutes with her husband and asked to have the casket opened. She took off her wedding ring and left it with him.

  • • •

  Most scholars of the Roosevelts have written only perfunctorily on the question of their culinary cold war, with the notable exceptions of Blanche Wiesen Cook and the culinary historian Barbara Haber. For Haber, whose essay “Home Cooking in the FDR White House” was the first extended analysis to take a close look at both the food and Mrs. Nesbitt, much can be explained by Eleanor’s strong personal bond with the housekeeper. The fact that people raised a fuss about what they were having for lunch didn’t strike Eleanor as any reason to fire a hardworking woman who was one of her most fervent allies, especially since Eleanor herself, in Haber’s view, barely tasted what she ate. Cook, by contrast, zeroes in on the marriage. Eleanor had never gotten over the shock and grief of discovering FDR’s infidelity. What’s more, it was clear to her, as it was clear to everyone in their circle, that he had acquired something of a second wife in the person of Missy LeHand, his most important assistant. Missy was pretty, stylish, and indispensable. She lived in the White House, went in and out of FDR’s bedroom in her nightgown, traveled with FDR, acted as hostess for the cocktail-hour gatherings, and understood him better than anyone else did. This was the sort of marriage that appealed to FDR. Eleanor pursued him with pleas for presidential action on her various causes; she was always serious and always on the job. Missy adored him and could make him laugh. Eleanor never tried to dislodge Missy from FDR’s life, but three times a day the First Lady made sure that her husband received a large helping of pent-up anger. Cook calls Mrs. Nesbitt “ER’s Revenge.”

  Both these readings move us closer to the heart of the issue, but we can get closer yet—indeed, we can solve this decades-long mystery—if we stop taking for granted Eleanor’s legendary indifference to food. Yes, asceticism was a strong aspect of her personality, but what’s striking about her culinary asceticism is that she practiced it chiefly in the context of being wife to FDR. Inside the White House, she was apathetic about what was on her plate. Outside, we get glimpses of a very different Eleanor.

  Visiting Works Progress Administration projects in Seattle in 1938, for instance, she had lunch with her daughter and son-in-law and singled out the delicious crabs’ legs for special mention in “My Day.” “After all, when one travels, one should find out the food specialties,” she wrote. In San Francisco on a speaking tour: “We went to a marvellous Chinese place for dinner & I think I ate too much!” she told her daughter. After FDR’s death, Eleanor launched a fresh career as a writer, speaker, activist, political mentor, and international public conscience; and as she kept up an extraordinary public and private schedule of activities, she dropped appreciative notes on food into “My Day.” On a trip to Beirut in 1952 she had a “delicious Arab dinner” and tried her best to convey a sense of the food—“The lamb had a wonderful kind of rice and almonds as a base. The salad was leaves of lettuce with a chopped-up arrangement the base of which was wholewheat”—before giving up, as helpless as any neophyte food writer. In Paris after the war she was never immune to what she was eating, especially at her favorite Left Bank restaurant, Les Porquerolles. “The French don’t like you to hurry over a meal, but I had to consult Madame as to what we could order because we had less than an hour in which to enjoy her excellent cooking,” she wrote after one visit. “She gave us a wonderful fish soup and then broiled langouste, which is about like our broiled lobster.” In fact, she reacted to Paris just the way all the other Americans who turned up in France were reacting in those years—why is everything so delicious here? Why can’t we do this at home? “There is one art practiced in this city that we do not treat with quite the same respect. That is the art of cooking and eating,” she mused in her column on November 5, 1948. “I am quite sure that if we knew how to cook as well as the French do, we could serve an even more superlative variety of dishes than we do now. We certainly have th
e necessary ingredients.” Two days earlier, Julia Child had arrived in France to begin her own adventure. Writing home, she would express her delight in the food far more eloquently, but the sentiment was the same.

  It’s not that Eleanor suddenly became obsessed with food or even knowledgeable about it. “She had no idea of cooking, none at all,” declared Marguerite Entrup, who worked as Eleanor’s cook from 1956 until Eleanor’s death in 1962. And yet, as Entrup indicated about these post–White House years, whenever Eleanor ordered a menu for company she always wanted dishes that appealed to her own appetite—hearty, flavorful dishes she hoped everyone would like as much as she did. Any good hostess would do the same, of course—but Eleanor has gone down in history as a woman entirely aloof to the pleasures of food. Now, living on her own and greeted with rapture and respect by crowds around the world, she was eager to give everyone her own favorite dessert. “A pancake dessert,” reported Entrup. “You make it large like a layer cake, and she had maple syrup which she used to bring from Vermont and maple sugar. What you had to do was put the maple sugar between, and then you poured the maple syrup over, and you served it warm.” It never occurred to Eleanor, Entrup added, that many women were on diets and might not touch such a confection. “She wouldn’t think,” said Entrup. But Eleanor did think—she thought, for once, about what tasted good.