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.”

“I’ll trade you one note of loving maternal encouragement for a bag of corn chips.” Facebook

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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.