Adrian Miller. The President's Kitchen Cabinet: The Story of the African Americans Who Have Fed Our First Families, from the Washingtons to the Obamas. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017. 296 pp. $30.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-4696-3253-7.
Reviewed by Julia C. Ehrhardt (University of Oklahoma)
Published on H-FedHist (November, 2018)
Commissioned by Caryn E. Neumann (Miami University of Ohio Regionals)
In 2014, African American culinary historian Adrian Miller won a James Beard award for his first book, Soul Food: The Surprising Story of an American Cuisine, One Plate at a Time. As Miller recounts in the preface to The President’s Kitchen Cabinet, while doing the research for that project, he kept encountering stories about African American presidential chefs. Those stories, as well as his own experiences working in the White House during the Clinton administration, prompted him to embark on a comprehensive study of the ways African Americans have served this country by providing food, drink, nutritional advice, and other forms of nourishment to presidents and First Families. After indefatigably investigating presidential memoirs, newspaper articles, magazine stories, personal papers, and White House lore, among other sources, Miller identified 150 African Americans who “have been involved in various aspects of presidential food service” (p. xii), working as butlers, purveyors, cooks, caterers, pantry workers, train servers, and flight attendants. This book celebrates those whose heretofore invisible hands—and unheard voices—ingeniously devised recipes for picky presidents, surreptitiously helped them cheat on their diets, creatively stretched limited food budgets, reflexively adapted to political emergencies, and tirelessly performed the emotional labor as well as the culinary duties their positions mandated—all the while “maintaining their professionalism and asserting their humanity” (p. xii).
The President’s Kitchen Table starts with a detailed list of the African American “presidential culinary professionals” Miller has identified. They appear underneath the name of the president whom they served, but this is the only time these figures occupy a subordinate position in the book. Miller celebrates the accomplishments of chefs, porters, and pantry workers while emphasizing the indignities they endured in the executive mansion: vermin-infested living quarters, pathetically small food preparation areas and inadequate cooking appliances, and the omnipresent realities of racism that flavored every dish.
Miller’s decision to organize the book thematically rather than chronologically results in a complicated narrative of racial progress and setbacks in the White House kitchen. Elections separated enslaved chefs from their families during the antebellum era. The lack of housing for free blacks forced African American kitchen workers to live in the dank, drafty White House basement during the postbellum period. Some presidents refused to hire African Americans in any culinary capacity. Though black cooks could at times leverage their power to “demand fair treatment” and “negotiate for pay equity and better treatment,” Miller soberly states that White House culinary staff in many cases still occupy a “professional career ghetto” (p. 87), especially when presidents invite classically trained French cooks and celebrity chefs to prepare state dinners and cater inaugural receptions, unseating the culinary authority and expertise of African Americans who work for them on a daily basis. Yet, Miller consistently emphasizes the professionalism and the pride that has sustained African American culinary laborers, most especially Hercules (George Washington’s enslaved chef), James Hemings (Thomas Jefferson’s enslaved chef), Daisy Bonner (who served pig’s feet to Winston Churchill when FDR was president), Zephyr Wright (whose popovers and chili Lyndon Johnson craved), and Adam Collick (the Obama’s kitchen steward).
Miller writes in a prose style that is engrossing and acutely self-aware—all the better to engage readers. He incorporates pointed irony in his analyses of the humorous episodes he recounts (the subterfuge railroad chef John Smeades enacted to satisfy William Taft’s insatiable appetite) and the horrific ones (Washington’s despicable practice of sending Hercules from Philadelphia to Mount Vernon every six months so he could not claim his freedom under Pennsylvania law). As in Soul Food, Miller also invites readers to participate in the narrative by appending historic and contemporary recipes relevant to each chapter at the end of each one. It is in the penultimate chapter, on presidential drinkways, though, that the message Miller wants the reader to imbibe is most ingeniously imparted. After recounting the highly publicized White House “Beer Summit” Obama convened after a white policeman arrested Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. for breaking into his own house, Miller introduces the reader to African American sous-chef Tafari Campbell, who helped brew small-batch ales and porters for Obama, a craft beer aficionado, to enjoy. Miller writes, “I immediately thought of the African Americans who brewed beer for Washington and Jefferson and was pleased to see the historical arc played out through the suds” (p. 184). That the contributions of African Americans to presidential foodways have and will always continue to sustain the struggle to establish a more perfect union, makes The President’s Kitchen Table an invaluable text for our time.
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Citation:
Julia C. Ehrhardt. Review of Miller, Adrian, The President's Kitchen Cabinet: The Story of the African Americans Who Have Fed Our First Families, from the Washingtons to the Obamas.
H-FedHist, H-Net Reviews.
November, 2018.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=49261
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