Dinner with the President with Alex Prud'homme

The Preamble

Sharon McMahon

Government, History, Storytelling, Education

4.9 • 15.1K Ratings

🗓️ 12 April 2023

⏱️ 42 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Today on Here’s Where It Gets Interesting, Sharon sits down with author Alex Prud'homme about his book, Dinner with the President, all about White House food. He is the coauthor of his aunt Julia Child's memoir, My Life in France, and merges Presidential history with dishes that were the height of sophistication at one point. An on ramp to this book and conversation can be summarized in this passage:

“Presidential meals often had personal meaning, and sometimes con\xadtained coded political messages. James Garfield and Dwight Eisenhower liked bowls of squirrel soup. William Howard Taft had a taste for possum. Zachary Taylor died after eating cherries and drinking cold milk. Wood\xadrow Wilson had chronic indigestion and consumed dubious elixirs, yet he and Herbert Hoover saved millions of lives with innovative food poli\xadcies. The gourmand Theodore Roosevelt and his gourmet cousin Frank\xadlin D. Roosevelt led the nation over bison steaks and terrapin soups. (A gourmand is someone who eats and drinks to wretched excess. A gour\xadmet is a connoisseur of fine dining.) JFK liked clam chowder, LBJ favored chili, Richard Nixon ate cottage cheese almost every day, and George W. Bush liked ballpark hot dogs. The presidents’ food choices reflected the state of the nation.”

Hosted by: Sharon McMahon

Guest: Alex Prud'homme

Executive Producer: Heather Jackson

Audio Producer: Jenny Snyder

Researcher: Valerie Hoback

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey friends, welcome. So happy that you're here because I have a treat for you today.
0:10.8	I'm speaking with author Alex Proudome about his new book, Dinner with the President.
0:15.8	And let me tell you, I loved every single page of this book, which is about White House
0:23.5	food. First of all, people love to talk about food. People love presidential history.
0:28.8	They love White House history. And the subtitle of this book is Food, Politics, and a history
0:34.9	of breaking bread at the White House. And I think this conversation is going to be fascinating.
0:41.9	So let's start. I'm Sharon McMahon. And here's where it gets interesting.
0:50.5	I am very excited to be chatting with Alex Proudome today. I told you this before we started
0:57.2	recording, but I loved this book. Tell us why you wrote it.
1:02.6	Well, there were sort of three things that led me to write the book, Mike Reddant, Julia Child,
1:07.1	who I knew very well and worked with and I helped her write her memoir. And we used to sit
1:12.1	around the dinner table talking about history and politics. When I was working with Julia on her
1:16.2	memoir, my life in France, I discovered that she had spent quite a bit of time at the White House.
1:21.7	I knew she had been there, but I didn't know quite how much. And in particular, she did two
1:28.2	televised state dinners. She was the first person to bring TV cameras into the White House kitchen.
1:34.2	She and her husband, Paul, who was the twin brother of my grandfather, were diplomats before
1:39.2	she got on television. And so they understood the political, social, and gastronomic value of
1:45.9	state dinner in a way that few Americans did. And their notion was to show a side of the people's
1:51.5	house that people hadn't seen before. And so in researching that, I got really interested in the
1:58.1	phenomenon of the state dinner and also the fact that there's something food-wise going on at the
2:03.9	White House virtually every day, which I'd never stopped to think about. And then in 2016, I gave a
2:09.3	talk at the White House for mid-level staff about fresh water, which I think will be the defining
	...

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