John Podesta tastes as he cooks. | MICHAEL SCHWARTZ/POLITICO John Podesta, a seasoned hand

John Podesta may be best known as one of Washington’s consummate inside players. But he is also his family’s chief cook, grocery shopper and, apparently, bottle washer — and can put on a five-course meal for six in the space of three hours without assistance, and with a bare minimum of advance preparation.

The adjectives used to describe Podesta’s political skills — methodical and disciplined — apply equally to his well-honed cooking techniques, learned from his mother long before he became one of the capital’s most influential Democratic power brokers.


No recipes, no timing notes. “I consult cookbooks for ideas,” he said. “I don’t use recipes. I don’t tend to cook like a chemist.”

What he does do is cook and talk at the same time, a skill generally found only among professionals. And he talks the game of a seasoned cook while he chops, using the proper knife technique. Interspersed are funny, self-deprecating stories, including tales of his tour of duty as a guide wearing an 18th-century costume that involved slaughtering and roasting pigs.

But more on that later.

Hard-driving is the adjective often applied to Podesta’s style in all of the various incarnations of his Washington career — as a lobbyist with his brother Tony, as a staffer for Sen. Pat Leahy (D-Vt.), as chief of staff in the Clinton White House, as co-chairman of the Obama transition team and as chief executive of the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank he helped found. When he relaxes, if that is a word that can be applied to the tightly wound Podesta, it’s through two favorite pursuits: jogging and cooking.

He also collects contemporary art, is a UFO aficionado and loves nothing more than to sit in the front car of a roller coaster with his wife, Mary, as they hurtle along, holding hands above their heads. A feat, he notes proudly, achieved with the purchase of senior citizen tickets. He runs marathons, completing his latest in Rome in 4:06. In fact, he plans his menus while he runs. “I kept going back and forth between pork and fish,” he said about dinner on a recent evening.

“Cooking is what I do to relax,” he said. “It’s much easier to see the fruits of your labor. It’s fun.”

Even better is cooking for crowds. “Cooking for 50 needs organization, preparation and thought,” Podesta said. “One part is creative; one part you have to get your mind focused. That’s challenging.”

It’s no different from his remarkable ability to impose discipline on a bunch of unruly Democrats — or the fractious factions of the Clinton West Wing.

For this informal Sunday dinner for six, the 60-year-old Podesta was dressed in a polo shirt, shorts, sports socks and sneakers. He led his guests directly to the modest kitchen in his Northwest D.C. home, where most surfaces were covered with what was soon to be dinner. There were tomato halves soon to be topped with pesto (the one recipe he had made in advance); arborio rice simmering on the stove, on its way to being risotto; a pan of sautéed leeks and radicchio to be added to the risotto; Brussels sprouts to be roasted with thyme; bok choy and a baking dish, which would soon hold tilapia sprinkled with olives and capers and cooked in parchment.

Cocktails, or the kibitzing hour, took place in the kitchen, where simple snacks to go with the Jacob’s Creek sparkling wine included dried apricots stuffed with goat cheese.

Podesta likened dinner preparations to training for “Iron Chef,” though there was no secret ingredient and his only competition was with himself, to pull off the dinner without a hitch.

He has been, however, prevailed upon to participate in celebrity cook-offs that Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.) holds to raise campaign cash. He had only this to say about the results: “When the lobbyists judge, usually a member of Congress wins. When Nora Pouillon (the chef and owner of Restaurant Nora) judged it, I won.” His winning dish was grilled tuna in the style of vitello tonnato.

Running 30 miles a week explains, in part, why he is reed-thin, despite his love of food. But then, he has never liked breakfast and hardly ever goes out to business lunches, considering them “an occupational hazard.”

As Podesta talked, he went back and forth between the dishes, his timing impeccable. He doesn’t rattle easily.

A few things were bought the day before, the rest that morning. His choice of grocery stores reflects his frugal nature as much as his cooking skills. Before Balducci’s bit the dust, he avoided it. “Too expensive,” he said. While he goes to Magruder’s and Whole Foods, he also goes to Costco and Rodman’s, a drugstore better known for its discounted gourmet products than for filling prescriptions.

His stove also makes a statement about his frugality. “I’m not into the whole Vulcan thing and all that,” he said. “I do very well with a Sears stove. I’m always bargain hunting; I could totally live on Social Security.” Not counting his fine wine collection or his contemporary art, perhaps — though continuing the frugal theme, he insists the art is “mostly picked up at bargain-basement prices.”

The hunt for bargains is a testament to his mother’s influence. “My parents were completely Depression people, but we always ate well, even during the war,” he said. “My mother scrounged around for bargains till the day she died.”

As a young boy, he was expected to finish the dinners his mother, who worked at night, left on the stove. Mary Podesta was Greek-American, his father Italian-American, so he learned to cook dishes from both cultures. “I make a pretty mean moussaka, pastitsio, baklava and spanakopita,” he said, reeling off Greek dishes that are complicated, the latter two made with the paper-thin phyllo dough, requiring great manual dexterity.

“My mother had an intuitive sense of cooking and chemistry,” he said. “She was a fixture in Washington. When my brother was hosting a fundraiser, she would cook and sit in the kitchen. She was very liberal and very opinionated, and this was the age of Republican control of Congress.

“A reporter was talking to her, and she was going off on Trent Lott, [Newt] Gingrich and [Tom] DeLay. It was the most embarrassing moment for us, but the reporter took pity on her and didn’t write about it.”

As Podesta explains it, with a Greek mother and Italian father, speaking your mind was a core value of his childhood. “We were a blue-collar Chicago family,” he said. “The kitchen table was not a model of decorum. It was all right to yell.”

His heritage, he once told an interviewer, also explains his hot temper and accounts for the occasional appearance of Skippy, his sarcastic and ill-humored alter ego.

Flashing a touch of his well-known wit, he said it also explains “why I can’t understand why Obama doesn’t hold grudges.”

The meal began with the risotto, topped with chopped fresh radicchio and basil and served with a 2004 Fonterutoli Chianti Classico. Podesta put the tilapia on to cook while the guests finished the risotto. It was served with all of the vegetable dishes and a 2006 Kistler Carneros chardonnay.

He wondered aloud if he should serve the salad and then disappeared into the basement for the mandoline to slice the fennel and red peppers, which he dressed with olive oil and lemon juice.

His wife, Mary, arrived home from her book club just in time for the dessert of berries in prosecco, which was served with Perrier Jouet rosé. She confirmed that he did most of the cooking and the dishes.

“Having a husband who does all the cooking is pretty great,” said Mary Podesta, who is also a lawyer. Asked if she had a say in what is served, there was a pause: “We negotiate.”

Podesta cooks dinner every night he is in town, as he did when his three children lived at home, and thought nothing of introducing them to exotic foods like frogs’ legs, sweetbreads and squid. He and his wife seldom eat out and entertain about once a week. They even cooked their own wedding supper for 80 ­— with the help of a few relatives.

Talk of pig roasting and slaughter kept popping up during dinner and was the last tale Podesta told before the guests left. To earn money while attending law school at Georgetown, he spent two years working at Turkey Run Farm in McLean, now called the Claude Moore Colonial Farm, an 18th-century re-creation.

He dressed in britches, a blousy linen shirt, floppy hat and homemade shoes and learned how to butcher and roast a pig.

Standing in the kitchen and acting out his role, Podesta explained: “It’s best to do the butchering at 4 a.m., “because pigs should be slaughtered when it is cool, and it takes a long time to roast them. The pig is hauled on a front-end loader in order to split and gut it. It’s most important to slow the pig down by shooting it between the eyes so you can cut its throat. It makes the pig less ornery and a whole lot more cooperative than if you just stick a knife in its throat.”

In homage to these skills, Podesta used to have a picture of a pig on a spit as his screen saver, but his staffers made him get rid of it, because he said: “They couldn’t stand looking into the pig’s eyes during meetings.”

The powerful John Podesta does not always get his way.

Marian Burros is a POLITICO contributor.