Mr. Anton is also a prolific essayist who flavors his writing with references to Gibbon and Montesquieu. He is most famous for a polemical article he published in September 2016 in the Claremont Review of Books, “The Flight 93 Election,” which became an unlikely, highbrow manifesto for Mr. Trump’s election.

“Charge the cockpit or you die,” he wrote, this time under the pseudonym Publius Decius Mus. “A Hillary Clinton presidency is Russian roulette with a semi-auto. With Trump, at least you can spin the cylinders and take your chances.”

His argument for a Trumpian assault on the nation’s elites, conservative and liberal alike, was a sensation on the right. When Mr. Trump’s aides recruited him to be director of strategic communications for the National Security Council, Vanity Fair and The Weekly Standard portrayed him as an enigmatic figure — a thinking man’s Beau Brummell among the philistines of Trump world. “The most interesting man in the White House,” Yahoo News said.

And that was without the cooking.

Mr. Anton dates his interest in French cuisine to graduate school at St. John’s College in Annapolis, Md., where, he says, he cooked the recipes in Julia Child’s “Mastering the Art of French Cooking,” years before Julie in the Nora Ephron film “Julie & Julia.” He worked as a vegetable cutter at a local restaurant, Treaty of Paris, and told his parents he wanted to drop out and go to culinary school (they vetoed that plan).

He honed his cooking while working in the Bush White House, once losing a half-finished demi-glace sauce — a three-day project — when the national security adviser called him from the Situation Room and told him to get to the office immediately. “Down the drain it all had to go,” he wrote in a 2014 essay, “the wages of divided loyalty.”

Living in New York during the Obama years, Mr. Anton decided to get serious about cooking. He took classes at the French Culinary Institute (now known as the International Culinary Center) in Lower Manhattan, and worked, unpaid, as a line cook at L’Ecole, a French restaurant that was affiliated with the institute.

“You got yelled at for screwing up,” he recalled. “But I liked the fact that they didn’t let you get away with things.”