The meal started abruptly, with a main course of stuffed eggs, prepared as plainly as possible by mashing five hard-cooked yolks with a teaspoon of vinegar and half a teaspoon of minced onion. A thin coat of tomato sauce covered the eggs, which were served hot, accompanied by mashed potatoes and whole-wheat bread. Dessert was a small portion of pudding made chiefly from prunes, flour, and water. Festive it wasn’t; nevertheless, this was luncheon for six at the White House on March 21, 1933, less than three weeks after Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s first Inauguration. The President, a sophisticated and enthusiastic food lover, was not at the table. He had asked for a tray in his office, and later said that the meal had been “good.” But for Eleanor Roosevelt, proudly presiding at the lunch, “good” didn’t begin to address it. She had been planning the White House meals since well before the Inauguration, commissioning nutritious, low-cost menus from the home-economics faculty at Cornell, in the hope of making the White House a demonstration project for conscientious cookery during the Depression. It was a personal triumph to see one of these humble, wholesome meals served on White House china—two courses for only seven and a half cents per person, including coffee. She told the press that she and the President would be eating this way regularly. View more But Eleanor was also testing a very different approach to the First Kitchen. An acquaintance had sent along an idea she found appealing: why not showcase the finest American ingredients and regional dishes? The nation had a distinguished culinary heritage, but gastronomes of the nineteen-thirties feared that traditional skills and flavors were disappearing as homemakers pounced on canned soup, cottony white bread, and American cheese. The best-known expert in American culinary history at the time was the cookbook writer and journalist Sheila Hibben (who not long afterward became The New Yorker’s first food critic). She agreed to visit the White House kitchen and advise the staff on such homey classics as stewed crabs, johnnycake, and chicory salad, as well as Presidential recipes going back to Washington and Jefferson. Honest fare like this, Hibben believed, could help people make their way through hard times. “Crisis or no crisis, the tension of the country is better for preoccupation with the art of cooking,” she counselled the First Lady.

Low-cost prune pudding or Thomas Jefferson’s favorite gooseberry fool? Eleanor wasn’t just choosing a cuisine; she was defining her role in the White House, and the food had to deliver the right message. These days, the term “home economics” doesn’t conjure very much, except among baby boomers who remember junior-high cooking classes mysteriously focussed on baking-powder biscuits. But in the early nineteen-twenties, as Eleanor was becoming active in feminist politics, she visited Cornell’s home-economics department and discovered a radical movement. Its founders envisaged training women in nutrition, chemistry, sanitary engineering, and other fields dominated by men—not to create female scientists but to create scientific homemakers. The key to American progress was going to be intelligent housekeeping. “The woman who boils potatoes year after year, with no thought of the how or why, is a drudge,” Ellen Richards, the first president of the American Home Economics Association, explained. “But the cook who can compute the calories of heat which a potato of given weight will yield, is no drudge.” Eleanor, who was guiltily aware that she had always relied on servants and governesses to perform her share of woman’s work, appreciated the unsentimental attitude toward domestic life that permeated home economics. “The mother of a family should look upon her housekeeping and the planning of meals as a scientific occupation,” she urged in her first book, “It’s Up to the Women,” which appeared soon after Roosevelt took office. Her section on food, in a chapter called “Family Health,” began with the stern advice “Do not eat too much.” The recipes, created at Cornell and used, she claimed, at the White House, took little notice of herbs or spices, and borrowed nothing from the many immigrant households where flavorful, low-cost cooking had been under way since well before the Depression. The stuffed-egg luncheon was included, and so was a stew of beans and tomatoes, a dish of fried liver in gravy brightened only by a slice of onion, and a carrot “relish” made from raw carrots and a bit of diluted vinegar. These recipes were planned with an eye toward dispatching two necessary jobs—cooking and eating—as efficiently as possible. Sheila Hibben had an entirely different concern—to remind Americans that food was supposed to taste good. A talented, well-travelled home cook who turned to writing when she had to support herself and her daughter after the death of her husband, Hibben had a culinary sensibility that was half a century ahead of its time. Americans had been “spoiled,” she wrote in 1932, by “peaches from South Africa and strawberries picked green and shipped too far.” She wanted gas stations to distribute food maps as well as road maps, and believed that the best American cooking could hold its own against the best in Paris. “Cold boiled crabs, with their shells cracked open and served with a sauce of fresh lime juice and olive oil, are . . . superlatively good with beer,” she suggested in a 1934 New Yorker article. It was a time when “the ultimate in flavor,” according to the Times, was a popular buffet dish known as Turkey Supreme: diced turkey mixed with nuts, whipped cream, crushed pineapple, and mayonnaise, spread on a tray and frozen. Hibben, who sometimes sublet her apartment on Twelfth Street and moved into a cheap hotel when she needed money, knew that food didn’t have to be extravagant to be appetizing. The White House could focus on “simpler things—jowl and greens, for instance,” she told Eleanor, and she assembled fourteen menus to prove it. Each was influenced by a particular region of the country, and she begged the First Lady not to pad them with salted nuts, olives, and other emblems of generic formal dining. Her New England menu remains a perfectly tuned classic: Cape Cod Clam Chowder, Pilot Biscuit. Boiled Corned Beef with new Cabbage (serve English Mustard with this). New Potatoes in butter. Corn Meal Muffins (made with yellow corn meal). Lettuce and Tomato Salad with French Dressing. Cheese Wafers. Baked Indian Pudding, with Vanilla Ice Cream. Coffee. To Eleanor, the disadvantages of this approach were clear. A campaign in favor of local ingredients, skilled home cooking, and the flavors of the past wasn’t political. Such a project didn’t carry any of the larger messages about agriculture, the food industry, proper diet, and sensible parenting that it would seventy-five years later, when Michelle Obama picked up a shovel and started planting cucumbers, beans, and carrots on the White House lawn. Nor did it occur to Eleanor that improving American eating habits might mean dispelling the long-held American assumption that healthful, inexpensive food had to be plain and tasteless. She wanted White House meals to set the right example for a struggling populace, but she didn’t see how “the art of cooking” was going to help. She was much more comfortable with reform measures that spoke a language she could understand: economy, nutrition, efficiency. So Hibben departed, and Eleanor launched the most notorious era in the culinary history of the Presidency. The menus from Cornell were a little too grim for daily use, but she encouraged her new housekeeper, Henrietta Nesbitt, to work up her own version of economical cookery, honoring the principles of the Cornell experiment if not its pure austerity. For the next twelve years, Mrs. Nesbitt turned out meals so gray, so drooping, and so spectacularly inept that they became a Washington legend. They also irritated an epicurean President three times a day—an outcome that may or may not have figured in Eleanor’s calculations. Numerous historians of the F.D.R. years have noted the abysmal meals at the White House, and anecdotes about Mrs. Nesbitt’s assaults on the Presidential palate have circulated in memoirs for decades. But the food itself—with its political and personal backstory—has received far less attention. Few biographers in any field take advantage of the culinary trail that runs through daily life. Today, after hundreds of scholars, journalists, friends, aides, admirers, and scandal-seekers have analyzed every traceable minute of the Roosevelts’ lives, it’s still difficult to explain the resilience of Eleanor’s inexorably dreary cuisine. The most powerful man in America couldn’t kill it.

Eleanor had grown up with little idea of what went on in a kitchen, but she was a quick study. By the time she became, as the Washington Post put it, “the first Housewife of the Nation,” she had developed a straightforward message about her culinary goals. “I am doing away with all the kickshaws—no hothouse grapes—nothing out of season,” she told a reporter who inquired about the “economy menus,” and added that she intended to provide “good and well-cooked food.” Few guests or family members felt that she succeeded. Ernest Hemingway, invited to dinner at the White House in 1937, said that the food was the worst he’d ever eaten. “We had a rainwater soup followed by rubber squab, a nice wilted salad and a cake some admirer had sent in. An enthusiastic but unskilled admirer,” he wrote to his mother-in-law. He added that he now understood why the journalist Martha Gellhorn, a friend of Eleanor’s who was also invited that night (and whom Hemingway married three years later), ate three sandwiches at the Newark airport while they were waiting for their flight. She dined with the Roosevelts frequently and told him that everybody in Washington knew the rule—when you’re invited to the White House, eat before you go. “Much has been said about the bad food at the Roosevelt White House, and all of it is true,” wrote Lillian Rogers Parks, a White House maid for thirty-two years, who in 1981 published a sharp-eyed memoir of life in the Roosevelt household. Parks was fond of the President and the First Lady, but she couldn’t bear the officious Mrs. Nesbitt; like most observers, she blamed the housekeeper for the terrible state of the White House cuisine. “Of course Henrietta did not personally do the cooking,” Parks acknowledged, “but she stood over the cooks, making sure that each dish was overcooked or undercooked or ruined one way or another.” This may explain why Harold Ickes, the Secretary of the Interior, identified the main course of a Cabinet dinner as “ordinary roast mutton,” when the official menu for the occasion specified leg of lamb. Presumably, it had been roasted beyond recognition. Senator Hiram Johnson, who came for dinner and a movie, was so charmed by F.D.R. and Eleanor that he insisted the food didn’t matter; but he recorded it anyway, or thought he did. “We had a very indifferent chowder first, then some mutton served in slices already cut and which had become almost cold, with peas that were none too palatable, a salad of little substance and worse dressing, lemon pie, and coffee,” he wrote to his son. In fact, he had been served several of Hibben’s recipes (clam chowder, barbecued lamb, and a Maryland chess-cake tart), but Mrs. Nesbitt had apparently ravaged them. The Washington Post poked fun at a state dinner so dowdy it featured sweet-potato casserole with marshmallows, and an anonymous reporter described the food at a press luncheon as “abominable” (shrimp Newburg in patty shells and a prune Bavarian cream). Mrs. Nesbitt’s notes and menus, which survive at the Library of Congress, show the same dishes plodding numbly across the calendar week after week, especially at lunchtime. Broiled kidneys on toast, chipped beef on toast, shrimp wiggle on toast, curried eggs on toast; creamed chicken, creamed beef, creamed celery, creamed finnan haddie; broiled sweetbreads, braised sweetbreads, creamed sweetbreads, creamed sweetbreads and mushrooms—“I have been getting sweetbreads about six times a week,” the President finally complained in a note to Eleanor. Once, according to Lillian Parks, Eleanor mentioned that they were getting hundreds of requests for White House recipes. Parks recalled, “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.” a15166 For dinner, Mrs. Nesbitt generally served chops, roasts, or fish, but she often added one of the salads that had long been a hallmark of American cooking at its most delirious. Her Bobotee Salad was a mixture of cold rice, bananas, almonds, chicory, and curry powder, in a French dressing laced with Worcestershire sauce. “Sometimes we used pineapple cut in lengthwise sticks and rolled lightly in crushed peppermint candy as an opener for the meal,” she wrote in “The Presidential Cookbook,” a collection of her White House recipes. “Pear salad was a great favorite. . . . For that we riced cream cheese, added a mite of heavy cream, chopped chives, candied ginger or nuts, and poured this over the pear halves on lettuce. We either used the green minted canned pears or colored the mayonnaise green.” To give Mrs. Nesbitt her due, she said that she was “scared half to death” when she first saw the White House, on Inauguration Day. She had been keeping house for her own family for years, but had no training in hotel management or formal cooking. Nonetheless, Eleanor had appeared at her door after the election and cheerfully offered her the job. Barbara Haber, in her essay “Home Cooking in the FDR White House,” pointed out that the First Lady-to-be wasn’t looking for a professional; she just wanted somebody with whom she felt comfortable. The two women had known each other for years in Hyde Park, where they went to the same church and worked for the League of Women Voters. When Mrs. Nesbitt’s husband lost his job during the Depression, Eleanor hired her to supply the Roosevelts with homemade bread and cakes. Eleanor didn’t mind that her housekeeper was inexperienced. Mrs. Nesbitt shared her politics and her work ethic, and served her with single-minded loyalty.

Roosevelt, who had been raised on a Hyde Park estate with its own farm and fine cooks, knew the taste of excellent food and missed it badly. He didn’t expect luxuries when the nation was in economic crisis, but he would have loved a decent fried egg and a cup of drinkable coffee. Mrs. Nesbitt finally gave him a coffeemaker so that he could brew his own, but this was a rare victory in a long series of skirmishes. He made it clear that he disliked broccoli; Mrs. Nesbitt served it anyway. He ordered hot coffee for himself and a few guests; Mrs. Nesbitt sent up iced tea. He asked for canned white asparagus one day when he was sick; Mrs. Nesbitt insisted it wasn’t available. (A secretary darted out and came back with ten cans.) Everyone, including the press, knew how he felt about Mrs. Nesbitt’s meals. “Same Menu Four Days Palls on Roosevelt,” the Times announced in 1937, after the President had objected to a long run of liver and string beans. Eleanor told Mrs. Nesbitt not to fret, and explained that the President was merely “in a tizzy” from working too hard. He didn’t really mind the food, the two women agreed; the pressures of his office were getting to him. “When he said ‘The vegetables are watery,’ and ‘I’m sick of liver and beans,’ these were figures of speech,” Mrs. Nesbitt insisted in a memoir. “But the newspapers didn’t understand that.” No matter how annoyed he became, F.D.R. never asked Eleanor to fire the housekeeper. He had given the First Lady full control over the domestic side of the White House, and kept his word. She approved the menus that Mrs. Nesbitt brought upstairs each morning, and ate with a gracious smile whatever was put in front of her even when guests were desperately fiddling with their Ham Hawaiian. In 1941, after Roosevelt’s mother died, he attempted a small insurrection and brought down her cook from Hyde Park, Mary Campbell, to prepare meals for him in a tiny top-floor kitchen. But Mrs. Nesbitt hated relinquishing control over the food, and complained that Campbell’s cooking was too rich for the President. One of Roosevelt’s last requests to the kitchen was that Mrs. Nesbitt put chicken à la king on the menu for the fourth inaugural luncheon. He probably knew it was hopeless. She substituted chicken salad.

Eleanor had never wanted to live in the White House. She may have been the only liberal Democrat who was sorry when Roosevelt won, though she would have been far sorrier—for his sake and for the country’s—if he had lost. But the most precious thing she owned in 1932 was the independent life she had been assembling for the previous fifteen years or so, and she didn’t want to give it up. In 1918, as a straitlaced, insecure thirty-three-year-old wife who didn’t fully trust her pleasure-loving husband, she had discovered that he was having an affair with her former social secretary, Lucy Mercer. The betrayal sent her into a swamp of grief and self-doubt. Joseph Lash, a confidant of Eleanor’s for many years, said that her despair was so profound she was unable to take Communion, a devastating symptom of personal breakdown for a deeply religious woman. Although they had five young children, Eleanor offered a divorce, but Roosevelt resisted, in part because the scandal would have ended his political career. He promised that he would never see Lucy Mercer again. He and Eleanor stayed together, both hoping the damage could be repaired, but she protected herself by keeping a staunch physical and emotional distance between them. She recoiled if Roosevelt so much as tried to give her a hug. What saved her from a dry and dutiful future was work—“the best way to pull oneself out of the depths,” she wrote to a friend years later. An array of progressive causes engaged her strong instinct for social justice, and the pace demanded by a heavy schedule was addictive. At the White House, dreading the idea of pouring tea for the next four or eight years, she transformed a largely ceremonial office into the most frenetic and influential career ever associated with the title of First Lady. It wasn’t the same as being a political force in her own right, but it got her through three-plus terms as a wife. Meanwhile, both she and F.D.R. appear to have channelled their deepest emotions away from the marriage. F.D.R. had made a pet of his adoring secretary, Missy LeHand; he also secretly continued to see Lucy Mercer Rutherford. Eleanor had her own intimate friendships—precisely how intimate is unknown—with a reporter, Lorena Hickok, and a bodyguard, Earl Miller. During those years, the Roosevelts had separate bedrooms and social lives, took separate vacations, ate most of their meals apart, and built their own Hyde Park cottages as getaways. “They had the most separate relationship I have ever seen between man and wife,” J. B. West, a White House usher, wrote. “And the most equal.” Blanche Wiesen Cook, who is currently at work on the third volume of her masterly biography of Eleanor, has called Mrs. Nesbitt “ER’s revenge.”