Cookery by the Book

InStyle Parties
The Complete Guide to Easy, Elegant Entertaining All Year Round

By The Editors of InStyle

Suzy Chase:                  Welcome to the Cookery By the Book Podcast with me, Suzy Chase.

April:                  I'm April Colburn and I'm the editor of InStyle Parties, the Complete Guide to Easy, Elegant Entertaining, All Year Round.

Suzy Chase:                  A completely revised and updated edition of the top selling book from InStyle and Time Inc. Books, this is the must have resource for anyone looking to host chic parties without stress or guesswork. So, the bar situation always boggles my mind especially in a small, New York City apartment where I don't have room for a proper bar. Let's kick things off with your tips for a fun, limited bar.

April:                  I actually also live in an apartment where my bar is limited to my bar cart, so I completely get the need to streamline the amount and type of alcohol I keep in stock. So for starters, you should always have wine on hand if you're hosting a dinner or cocktail party. A typical 750 ml bottle of wine, will pour about five glasses, so keep that in mind as you plan. I personally love red wine, so I normally keep a Merlot or a pinot noir handy, but white or rose wines are perfectly fine as well, especially in the summer. It's best to have white or rose available.

                                    Some guests, especially men will prefer beer to wine. So, it's great to have at least one type of beer kept ice cold on hand. And if you offer more than one type of beer, just be sure that they're very different in flavor, to make it really worth having the option. For instance a Maltese stout will pair nicely with say a light, crisp lager. A more bitter, or hoppy IPA will balance a tart and funky sour. So just think through the flavor profiles and how to vary them to cover all your bases. Using a local craft brew is always a great option.

                                    As for liquor, gin, vodka, tequila, whiskey and rum are really the tried and true staples. They really do form the foundation for dozens, if not hundreds of drinks. Of course if you have other favorite liquors, say scotch, or if you have a signature cocktail, like a Sidecar that calls for brandy, you can certainly include those liquors as well. And again, as a good rule of thumb as you're planning that your menu, a 750 ml bottle of spirits will make about 16 drinks.

                                    Finally, mixers and citrus are just as important as the liquor itself is. It's essential to keep fresh lemons and limes on hand. So many drinks call for them. And then for mixers, you should have club soda or tonic water, as well as regular soda such as Coke or ginger ale. You can also sub for a diet soda if you prefer. And then juice, such as orange juice or cranberry juice.

                                    So in general, just let the tone of the evening and the menu, dictate what you offer. It's better to offer wine and beer and just one or two really great cocktails then to try to accommodate all the cocktail preferences that your guests might have.

Suzy Chase:                  I love that you have a bar cart, so you can just kind of move it around.

April:                  Yes. It's ideal, because I can move to my living room, or to our dining room, wherever the party is happening.

Suzy Chase:                  So, food plays the starring role at the party. In the book, you suggest that we first figure out how our guests will eat. Can you talk a little bit about that?

April:                  Sure. Yeah. So, it's really important to think through if your guests will be sitting or standing when they eat. If you're having a group of maybe, six or eight people for dinner, they'll probably be sitting at a table. But, if you invite 20 people or more, some will be sitting at tables, some will be standing probably around a highboy or a bistro table. And then perhaps some will even be sitting on a couch without a table at all. It always matters, because depending on whether guests are sitting or standing, whether they're holding their plates, or can rest them on a surface, you'll really need to adapt what food you serve to best accommodate them.

                                    For example if your guests won't have access to tables, then don't serve them a pork tenderloin or something where they'll need to use a fork and a knife. It's really hard to hold a plate and also use a fork and a knife at the same time. So if guests will be standing and eating, serve them foods that only require one utensil, or even no utensils, just finger foods.

Suzy Chase:                  The next excellent tip is to buy frozen hors d'oeuvres, which I love. And also, don't serve fish. Why shouldn't we serve fish?

April:                  Don't serve fish because you have to serve it almost immediately after it finishes frying or roasting, and that kind of timing is stressful. You don't want to be standing over the hot oven cooking when guests are arriving. As we all know, sometimes guests are late, and you don't want to have to worry about reheating or adjusting the cook time for them.

Suzy Chase:                  What should our party-ready pantry look like?

April:                  Well, always keeping a few staple foods in your pantry will allow you to graciously pull together a snack with just a few minutes of warning. Say, if a neighbor drops in unexpectedly, or an old friend is passing through town and wants to stop by. So here are a few things that I like to keep stocked. Smoked or spiced nuts are great. Crackers, I love multigrain. Sliced baguette is a great thing to have on hand. You can actually freeze the slices in freezer bags, and then defrost and toast them when you're ready to serve them. Olives are great, especially the canned type. You can eat them just as they are. You can serve them on crackers or bread. Finally, dried fruits and figs. Figs or apricots are really great for keeping on hand. And then also, think about having some desserts on hand as well, like biscotti or cookies.

                                    I love gourmet dark chocolate. There's just something really delightful about being offered an exotic chocolate when you visit someone's home. I always try to keep that on hand. I love a great cheese board as well. I'll keep brie or goat cheese, as well as charcuterie in our refrigerator for that. So really with just a few staples like this. The only other thing you might need, is a pretty platter, or board. Presentation really makes such a difference when you're hosting people. So arrange whatever foods you have on hand, on a pretty piece and serve it to guests. They'll be totally amazed that you pulled together something so easily.

Suzy Chase:                  In this book there are 15 unique celebration ideas from a Fourth of July picnic to a woodland baby shower. What's included with every party idea in the book?

April:                  Each party has a ton of features that are in every single one. Each party has a customized menu of recipes including a signature cocktail, which is really fun. Each includes an inspirational invitation. Readers for the most part can purchase the exact invitation shown, but really they're most meant to just jog ideas so that readers can pick the concept and make it their own.

                                    Also, for each party there's information given for how to create the perfect party look. We touch on elements like what flowers to buy, how to decorate the table, how to create a centerpiece, what color palette to use, and we give notes about the menu. Also, for each party we offer either an activity that guests can participate in at the party, or we suggest a take home gift for hosts to offer their guests.

                                    For example, the activity that comes from the woodland baby shower, is that we suggest setting up some sort of table or station where guests can get together and create their own whimsical crowns made with items from the forest. Calling for ribbon, and cotton spun mushrooms and faux silk flowered. And then an example of a take home item comes from the spring dinner party in the book. We inspire readers to give their party guests these tiny potted succulents, which are such a cute little take home item for them.

                                    And then there's just a couple other features that are also included in every party. One of them is the countdown, which gives readers a timeline of what to do when as they get ready for the party. For instance, what to do three weeks out, a week out, the morning of, and then even as guests are starting to arrive. Then finally, the shortcut feature gives tips for simplifying party prep, or cutting down on prep time.

Suzy Chase:                  Let's focus on New Year's Eve, which is coming up. I find hosting a New Year's Eve party particularly stressful, because I want everything to be perfect for the last soiree of the year.

April:                  Yeah, I get that.

Suzy Chase:                  Over the weekend, I put together the New Year's Eve cocktail menu that you can see on my Cookery by the Book Instagram. Let's set the scene for New Year's Eve. What should we focus on first for the décor and the flowers?

April:                  You should really think about a gold and white palette. Metallics like gold and silver are classic colors for New Year's Eve celebrations. And in the New Year's Eve party in the book, we pair gold and white together to give the scene a real timeless and fresh quality, something that makes this party something that you can do every year.

                                    So, you should start by laying a crisp, white tablecloth, and then layer on top of it gold accents. In this way, the white tablecloth really acts as this great canvas backdrop from which your gold accents will pop. So the way that we bring in gold accents is mainly through the serving pieces we use. Gold platter here, a golden rimmed bowl there, different types of serving utensils that are flecked with gold, weave in a gold colored ice bucket to ice champagne. And then we have these really awesome champagne glasses that are flecked with gold. These aren't pieces that you have to go out and actually purchase yourself. Really anything that you find that you already have, or something that you can borrow from a friend is great as well. If it sounds like a lot of gold, it is a lot of gold, but that's why bringing in white is so helpful. It softens the look and it provides some visual rest.

                                    So, we also incorporate some white serving pieces as well, such as marble platters, or matte white pottery. Another thing that is really helpful when you're thinking about décor is bringing in interesting shapes and textures. So, we brought in geometric shapes into this New Year's Eve party, because geometric shapes really echo the same sort of modern, and art deco style that the metallic colors do. So, for our table we brought in a geometric gold candle holder, and also cocktail napkins that have a similar golden, geometric square. Use objects that bring in some interesting pattern to breakup all the solid gold and white is really helpful.

                                    As for flowers, we also did some gold. They're actually not true flowers. They're just large leaves that we spray painted with gold spray paint. Really any kind of large thick leaf will work, like a magnolia leaf or a sago palm frond. Anything that's just big and sturdy.

Suzy Chase:                  I found all of my gold utensils and plates at Party City.

April:                  That's a great solution, actually. You don't have to go out and purchase something that's expensive.

Suzy Chase:                  So for the punch, I made Mar tease Punch. Describe that.

April:                  Well that punch is very sweet and bubbly. It contains Icelandic beer, which is really just a fermented beer. It has a tart and funky taste. It also contains prosecco, and then some great fruit. It has orange and pear slices. It has crushed raspberries. And those raspberries give it this beautiful, brilliant red color.

Suzy Chase:                  An appetizer that always wows is are blinis with caviar. And I didn't have time to make the homemade blinis, so I used the store-bought. But you have a great shortcut suggestion of thick, rich potato chips.

April:                  It's great to have a list of every single thing that you could do if you had all the time in the world, but a lot of are crunched for time, so really wanted to include some handy shortcuts.

Suzy Chase:                  Next on the menu were the lamb meatballs with arugula pesto. This was an easy to pop in your mouth dish, when you have a drink in your hand.

April:                  It's great for a party like this New Year's Eve cocktail party where guests will be standing and mingling.

Suzy Chase:                  So the herb tartines were a different take on brushette and very, very light. Describe them.

April:                  So for the herb tartines we used a bunch of fresh herbs that we chopped. So we have basil, and chervil, which is a french parsley, and tarragon. So we chopped all that up and then we mixed it with arugula and some shaved pecorino cheese, which is this hard cheese with a salty, nutty flavor. And then spread all that on top of toasted, whole wheat baguette slices.

Suzy Chase:                  So mini food is perfect for a party. And the dessert is the mini cherry cheesecakes with Oreo crust.

April:                  I love those, and they're super cute, too. They're basically these mini cheesecakes that you make in a muffing pan. You start with a layer of crushed Oreos on the bottom, and then you top it with a simple cheesecake layer. And then you finish it with this beautiful cherry bourbon sauce. It's super amazing and tasty.

Suzy Chase:                  There's a handy countdown guide with each party idea. Walk us through the New Year's Eve party countdown. So, we start at six weeks out with the invitations. You said in the book, we can purchase the exact invitation?

April:                  So most of these invitations came from Paperless Post. You can actually go onto paperlesspost.com and search for just these different types of parties. We didn't include the label that they include on Paperless Post in the book, but you can type in keywords like, winter party, or New Year's Eve party, and you'll see some of these options pop up. Some of them might have gone out of print availability, but there's dozens of great options there as well.

Suzy Chase:                  Three weeks out, buy all the tabletop items and figure out your outfit. I find that the outfit part is usually the hardest thing. Do you have any outfit tips?

April:                  So right now, sequins and shimmery dresses are all the rage, which is actually perfect for this New Year's Eve party, because if you have gold theme. And New Year's Eve is also a party that typically pretty classy and formal. So don't be afraid to pull out your formal attire and ask guests to do the same. A nice suit or a tux for a man, and a long dress or a short cocktail dress for a woman is totally appropriate.

                                    But of course you don't have to make it this formal. The important thing is that you just clearly communicate to guests what they should wear. Terms like, festive attire, or creative attire really are just confusing. Just be sure that you are very clear in the invitation. If you want guests to wear tuxes and long dresses, say black tie. If you want them to wear suits or a cocktail dress, say cocktail attire. If it's okay if they show up in jeans, then just tell them it's casual attire. It really may be good to followup personally with this, and just give them more information so they feel more comfortable when they walk into the party.

Suzy Chase:                  Two weeks before get your sparkling wine and bar staples. Then two days before, bake the cheesecakes and refrigerate. Start to stage the buffet by blocking out space for each item. That's so smart.

April:                  Yeah. I know. I think that ... It's such a great idea because you don't want to get to the table and figure out that all your stuff doesn't fit on it.

Suzy Chase:                  The day before, make the lamb balls and pesto sauce. Does this mean that we should prepare the lamb balls raw? Or should we prepare and cook them and then heat them up the next day?

April:                  Well, either is fine, but since those meatballs only take about 10 minutes to bake, you can leave them to bake the day of the party. But of course if you're worried about adding that to your list of things to do that day, then it's perfectly fine to bake them the day before. Just store them in your refrigerator and pop them in the oven for 10 or 15 minutes, the day of the party.

Suzy Chase:                  Three hours, put out the snacks in their serving vessels. Two hours, set out the floral arrangements. So where would you suggest we put our floral arrangements? Like near the food, not near the food?

April:                  I always try to put a small arrangement near the food. If you have something that's too big, then it can be a little bit crowded or overwhelming. You definitely don't want petals or pollen or anything to fall into the food. But if it's something like a pie arrangement of small, it's great to have something on the food table. I always think it's a good idea to have a small arrangement near the front door where people will be walking in, because it's often times the first thing that they'll see. It's just such a warm, welcoming element to have something like that waiting for them. And then, maybe there's one other spot in the room that you're in that you want to add a little bit of flowers. Maybe it's the mantel, or it's a side table. But I found that having small arrangements in more than one place can really create more of a cohesive feel throughout your entire home.

Suzy Chase:                  So, we have one hour left. Top the cheesecakes with cherry sauce. Twenty minutes left, make the punch. Put out the blinis. And five minutes, set out the last refrigerated items. Light the candles and start the music. The best part is if you're at a loss for anything, there's a huge resource section in the back of the book. Talk about that.

April:                  Absolutely. I love this resource section. It's super helpful. I think we have over 100 different vendors and stores that we talk about. We give options for places to find invitations, desserts, bar items, coffee and tea, even cheese and prepared meats. Then we also have a section devoted to décor and specialty party items that you might need to buy. Really, if you don't have a great place around where you live and you're kind of at a loss where to look for some of these items, this resource section is just super handy. Most of these places if not all of them, will deliver food through the mail, or deliver the products that you might order for décor. It's something that can be used all over the country, no matter where you are.

Suzy Chase:                  Tell us a little bit about the chefs and taste makers that contributed recipes to this book.

April:                  We feature recipes from lots of chefs and taste makers all over the country. Some of them are Alex Guarnaschelli. She was on Chopped and Iron Chef America. Josh Habiger is featured in the book. He is a chef out of Nashville at the Pinewood Social. Sarabeth Levine of Sarabeth's Kitchen is in the book. She's a James Beard award winner for her outstanding pastries. Another Iron Chef America contestant, Marc Forgione, is in the book. We also feature Frank Falcinelli, and Frank Castronovo. He wrote the book, The Frankies Spuntino Kitchen.

                                    So really, we have a wide breadth of just talented chefs who have contributed recipes to make this book amazing. We also have just a couple of taste makers. Dona Kieren, he's a fashion designer, contributed a recipe. And Alexis Bittar, who makes jewelry who also contributed her recipe. A wide range of people and a wide range of chefs that they've included to make this book really have something for every one and every occasion.

Suzy Chase:                  Where can you find the InStyle Parties book on the web and social media?

April:                  So, the book can be found on Amazon.com, and then also whatever bookstore is around you. It's sold at Barnes and Noble, Book-a-Million, really wherever great books are sold, you can find our book. Then on social media, @tinybooks is our handle across all of our social media platforms.

Suzy Chase:                  Thanks April, for coming on Cookery by the Book Podcast. Here's to a Happy New Year.

April:                  Thank you Suzy. It was great to be on.

Suzy Chase:                  Follow me on Instagram @CookerybytheBook. Twitter is @IamSuzyChase, and download your Kitchen Mix Tapes, music to cook by on Spotify at Cookery by the Book. And as always, subscribe in Apple Podcasts.

Sauces: Classical and Contemporary Sauce Making, Fourth Edition

By James Peterson

Suzy Chase:                  Welcome to Cookery by the Book podcast with me, Suzy Chase.

James:                  My name is James Peterson. I'm the author of Sauces, Contemporary and Classical Sauce Making. It has just come out in its fourth edition.

Suzy Chase:                  Wow this is the fourth edition of Sauces. What have you added to this new addition?

James:                  Well Suzy I've added some of this molecular cuisine material. There are a lot of ingredients that have long been used in industrial applications that our now being used in kitchens and a lot of them sound scary like there's propylene glycol alginate. It sounds like you're putting poison in your phone. Everybody sees these things and freaks out. Well in fact, propylene glycol alginate is made from seaweed. It's a perfectly organic natural product as are many of these other things, I mean from fermented misos and different odd things, but not mined out of the earth. They're not minerals so to speak. So they can be very effective in the kitchen to help stabilize sauces, to create emulsions that one wouldn't be able to produce otherwise. So there are innumerable tricks that can be used and this takes it a step farther in the sense that I have now incorporated a new generation of sauce making techniques and ingredients so that the chef or the associate has access to all three levels.

Suzy Chase:                  So I've heard that you are obsessed with Mother Sauces. Tell us about that.

James:                  Mother Sauces are the classic sauces that were defined by Escoffier in the early part of the 20th century. And what I've done is said, "All right, in nouvelle cuisine you don't make bechamel sauces very often." So what you would typically do is substitute cream or lightly reduced cream or cream lightly thickened with egg yolks. Nouvelle cuisine, despite having a reputation for being light, had a heavy emphasis on butter and cream which is one of the reasons it's so delicious but it's also one of the reasons people are nervous about it. So moving to contemporary version of say a hollandaise, an example of a hollandaise would be a situation which is based on it but it's not stable. You're trying to keep it warm, unless you get it too hot. It's a little tricky. So if you add a stabilizer like xanthum gum to it, a minute amount, it won't break or at least it will have a much harder time breaking.

                                    So those are the sauces that are the base ingredients that I use to extrapolate this whole book.

Suzy Chase:                  Something new in this addition of Sauces are hydrocolloids. Please explain these.

James:                  They create a colloid which is essentially a mixture that includes water, hence hydro and the colloid. They bring things together just like I was describing earlier how they can function as thickeners or emulsifiers, primarily. Those are the main two functions. And then there's some glittery stuff like the seers. I don't know if you're familiar with that but they make these little spheres that they use to decorate plates. They're pretty and they're fun but I've always thought they were kind of gimmicky until I had this idea of deconstructing a sauce. An example would be a sauce financier, which is a brown port sauce with truffles. Well usually the truffle flavor's cooked off and you don't get much 'cause it's been simmering or whatever. So what I do is I put the truffle juice and the truffles in the spheres and then I add the spheres to the sauce at the very end. So as you're sipping this port sauce, these little spheres burst in your mouth and provide the truffle accent. Is that too weird?

Suzy Chase:                  It is a little weird. Explain the spheres in a little more detail.

James:                  Well the spheres, they look a little like caviar depending on size. They'll look like sevruga caviar all the way up to salmon eggs size, they're even olive size. And what you take, you make a solution and you add a certain I don't even remember right now. You add a certain compound to the solution and that's the bath in which you drop the spheres. Then you make another liquid which is the sphere liquid. You add another compound to that so that when you drip the second compound into the first, it immediately firms up into a little sphere. And they use these in molecular cuisine in a way that I've always thought was rather gimmicky until I thought of this use of them which would be for deconstructing sauce flavors and putting each component in the spheres.

Suzy Chase:                  When did sauce making begin?

James:                  There is recordings, records we have of sauce making that I have in a book by Epicius which is written in the first century AD. It's written in Latin but I have a translation of it. It's very interesting and what seems to be consistent in Roman cooking was the use of drams, they also liquidum, which is basically fish sauce. As far as I can deduce it's just like Thai fish sauce and they put it on everything. They just love the stuff and I guess it was an umami accent to their food much like salt would be.

Suzy Chase:                  In the Middle Ages you wrote that most meals were served on a thick slice of bread. Plates weren't a concept yet. What were sauces like in the Middle Ages?

James:                  Well it's interesting. If you read most books about the Middle Ages or the late Middle Ages, say the 14th century, most say that they use an excess of spices, they use too many spices and spices were of course a great status symbol then and we only have books written for the rich. We don't have the Every Man's Cookbook until the 18th century, so we don't know exactly what they used because the books that are in existence from then do not have the quantities. In my book, in the book you can see it where I gold plate a chicken. I had to do that just to be irreverent. But you see it in this one book I have by Tivong it's called Le Viandier it was written in 1390. It was the first edition and you see in there, these recipes with spices in them and there's one in which you gold plate the thing. They plate the bird and they cover it with gold leaf.

                                    So I was trying to sort of make a modern interpretation. This is when I had my restaurant. So we had the chicken parts, I gold plated them with gold foil. Well gold foil of course is so thin that you probably get less gold eating a sheet of that than you would breathing a piece of silver, the amount of silver that you get off of silverware. So you get very little. Gold is inert. Even if you had a big chunk of it, it wouldn't hurt you. It's totally inert so there's no issue there. And then what I did is I made little almonds. In fact, I colored them green with green food coloring and I made them out of marzipan. The sauce for the chicken was saffron and ginger and mint which were all used then. But I combined them gently and delicately and that was a delicious dish. And there's a picture of it in there, making it and how you put the gold foil on. Everyday kind of practical dish, you know.

Suzy Chase:                  Totally. Your Monday night dish.

James:                  Yeah.

Suzy Chase:                  Moving on to the 16th century, sugar appeared in greater quantities. How did that influence Renaissance sauces?

James:                  Well you started to get these dishes that where sweet and sour was an important element. This is with fruit. I don't have my book in front of me but LaVarenne's book has recipes for pigeon with raspberries, that kind of thing. Things that are still in the repertoire. Duck L'Orange is probably the most common example and that was when they started using the gastrique which is a mixture of caramelized sugar and vinegar, to give the sweet and sour components to the sauces. It was the whole addition to sauces and then in the 17th century that's when things started to coalesce, the spices were abandoned. They started using local ingredients like truffles and herbs, more delicate things and that's when French cuisine started to distinguish itself from European cooking as a whole.

Suzy Chase:                  And then in the 18th century we saw the first cookbook for the middle class. What types of new sauces were introduced in that cookbook?

James:                  Well in those days and for the home cook of the 18th century, they used a lot of integral sauces. An integral sauce is I kind of made up this distinction between integral and non-sauces and integral sauce is when you get the sauce as a result of the cooking process itself. You braise something, you have the braising liquid to make it. You might bind it up, you might leave it alone, whatever. But you have a sauce. You roast a chicken. You make a jus. That kind of thing. You have poaching fluid, you have the broth all that stuff. Whereas a non-integral sauce is when you try to emulate an integral sauce using stock, using reductions, etc. And everyone knows who cooks that reduced concentrated chicken stock is not gonna taste like a jus.

Suzy Chase:                  So in the 19th century Escoffier's La Guide Culinaire was released.

James:                  That was the very end of the 19th century. The earlier part of the 19th century was Caremen and he was the first one to organize sauces in a systematic way such as you had base sauces and derivative sauces. So he was a much more complicated predecessor to Escoffier. And then Escoffier took what Caremen had offered and whittled it down, simplified it even though Escoffier looks terribly complicated to us now.

Suzy Chase:                  Who do you think was the authority on classical French cooking?

James:                  Oh Caremen would have been.

Suzy Chase:                  Okay.

James:                  Caremen would be the star of the 19th century by far.

Suzy Chase:                  Now in the 21st century it's all about hydrocolloids and sous vide cooking technique. Talk a little bit about that.

James:                  Yes. Well sous vide interesting, the problem as a sauce maker I have with sous vide is that you don't get much in the way to make a sauce with. Now the inherent problem and this is germane to this, is you roast a piece of red meat rare or even a turkey if you roast it correctly, there are no juices 'cause the juices are still inside the roast. So what I do is make what's called a sonsage which you put under the bottom of the roast on the sheet pan and you take pieces of bone, meat, mirepoix of vegetables, carrot, onions, that stuff. And you roast that and you put your roast over that and that provides your juices. Well in sous vide, you can't really do that. You have to make it completely separately which is fine. If you're making a steak or you're making a piece of turkey breast and you want a little gravy or something, you take a few turkey wings and glaze caramelize them, and you glaze it and that's your jus. But you don't cook it like a stock 'cause that cooks out all that flavor.

Suzy Chase:                  You've addressed condiments in this book. What falls under the condiment category?

James:                  Well a lot of these words I had to define myself. They're not originally defined. There's really very little rigor in how chutneys are separated from jellies and all these things. But I find for example that a condiment is something that you apply yourself like you might take a mustard for example or a ketchup is a condiment because you have the option to apply it. So all these things that you see now, condiments are very popular now and what they do is they contrast with the food rather than underline it for example in the way mustard lightens a rich say a pork chop with sauerkraut, you might want mustard on it to lighten it, to balance it. And that is what a condiment is. Now in French, this digresses from the French classic approach because the French classic approach is that you underline the flavors and that's what distinguishes French cuisine from all others.

Suzy Chase:                  So sauces underline and condiments contrast?

James:                  Exactly.

Suzy Chase:                  Verjus if I am saying it correctly is an ingredient I've never seen before. Describe that.

James:                  It's traditionally verjus, I say in French, it's verjus I think. I think you said it right. It's just under ripe grape juice. It's grape juice that hasn't been fermented and it's sour. It's a sour element. It's used to make things sour like vinegar might. It gives you a different effect. I don't use it too often but I have use it. It was the cutting edge thing in France when I was working there. They were always coming up with new things like raspberry vinegar was a big thing. And verjus was one also.

Suzy Chase:                  Are there hard and fast rules about when you put sauce on the side and when it's drizzled over the dish?

James:                  Well roasting jus is always served on the side. Hollandaise sauces you always serve on the side. Veloutes, bechamels, those can be served over the dish. It really depends on the style of the dish, if it's a roast you always serve the jus on the side. Well mayonnaise you serve on the side too, except not always. Something like remoulade there's mayonnaise in that already in there. So I would say hollandaise sauces and roasts are the main ones.

Suzy Chase:                  Where can we find you on the web and tell us a little bit about your new perfume company?

James:                  Jimcooks.com, there's a picture of all my books and stuff. And I have a line of eight now, four perfumes, Oud, Amber, Sandalwood and Musk and then I have four what I call Eaux Fraiches which are light sprays, almost like [French 00:16:02] but they're lighter but they're completely dry. They don't have any sweeteners in them at all. They're very green and they're very odd because they're made with things people haven't consciously smelled before like vetiver, galbanum, violet leaf and neroli. Those are the four faux fraiches. So we're marketing those around town, we just started the one store here in Brooklyn. We're just starting, we have a website brooklynperfume.com and you'll see all the perfumes and stuff.

Suzy Chase:                  As Daniel Boulud said, "This book is a useful reference for any kitchen." Thank you James for coming on Cookery by the Book podcast.

James:                  Suzy thank you so much for having me.

Suzy Chase:                  Follow me on Instagram at Cookery by the Book. Twitter is I am Suzy Chase. And download your kitchen mix tapes, music to cook by, on Spotify at Cookery by the Book and as always subscribe at Apple Podcasts.

The President's Kitchen Cabinet
The Story of the African Americans Who Have Fed Our First Families
From The Washingtons To The Obamas

By Adrian Miller

Suzy Chase:                  Welcome to the Cookery By the Book podcast with me, Suzy Chase.

Adrian Miller:                  My name is Adrian Miller. My latest book is the President's Kitchen Cabinet. The Story Of The African Americans Who Have Fed Our First Families From The Washingtons To The Obamas.

Suzy Chase:                  You wrote when you want a personal connection to our Presidents and First Families and we believe that food, what Presidents like to eat or refuse to eat, what they serve their guests, and what they cook can be a leading indicator of Presidential character. Talk about how savvy Presidents use food to show that they're regular everyday people.

Adrian Miller:                  Yeah, so a lot of Presidents have realized that if they are likable by the American public, it helps advance their political agenda. So I think President Obama is a great example because when he would travel, he would often do impromptu stops at burger joints, rib shacks, he loved drinking beer. That's a very relatable thing for a lot of the American public.

                                                      You know if he was drinking a lot of wine, I think people would be a little suspicious and think that he was aristocratic. Another President who did this well I thought was Reagan by letting people know that he loved jelly beans.

                                                      And I think Lyndon Johnson was another good example, his love of Southern food and Southwestern food and he was unabashed about praising Texas chili to the whole world. And then FDR, FDR really loved to be with the people, and there are a lot of pictures of him just eating hotdogs or just other kind of very on the street level kind of foods with other people. It shows that they have the common touch.

Suzy Chase:                  The book kicks off with a list of African Americans by Administration who had a hand in Presidential food preparation. A couple of things that jumped out at me for example was John Adams had one African American staff member. Eisenhower had 15, and Lyndon Johnson had 31. Did the size of the staff say anything about that particular President?

Adrian Miller:                  That is really a function of what was available through my research. So it just so happens that the Eisenhower Administration and the Johnson Administration were very good at keeping records of who worked where in the White House.

                                                      So the staff is pretty much the same after, for the modern Presidencies in the White House kitchen itself anywhere from five to seven people and typically the staff would be the White House Executive Chef, the Pastry Chef and maybe the pastry chef would have an Assistant Pastry Chef. And then there would be anywhere from three to five additional people who are staff cooks, we call them Assistant Chefs now and they're a lot of cooks on loan from the U.S. Navy who cook in the White House kitchen.

                                                      And so obviously Presidents that had a long tenure would probably have more cooks working for them. But the early years it's, are a lot of a mystery because there were a couple of fires in the White House over time and a lot of records got destroyed. So it really just depended what I found in secondary sources, in primary sources from the Presidential Libraries.

Suzy Chase:                  Starting off with George Washington, his enslaved family cook was named Hercules. Tell us a little bit about him.

Adrian Miller:                  Yes, so Hercules gets purchased as a young man. He's a teenager. And he was actually a boat ferryman but then he, Washington decided to have him made into a cook.

                                                      So he starts cooking in the Mount Vernon kitchen and he  apprentices under a long time enslaved cook named Old Dog. So he learns to cook and then when Washington becomes President and the Executive Residence moves to Philadelphia, Washington at first hired a white woman named Mrs. Reed to do the cooking, but I guess her food was straight nasty because she didn't even last six months. So he has Hercules come up from Mount Vernon and installs him as the Executive Chef there in the Executive Residence.

                                                      The only problem was is that Philadelphia had, Pennsylvania, excuse me had something called The Gradual Abolition Act of 1780, which meant that if you were an enslaved person on Pennsylvania soil for six months or longer, you were automatically free. And so what Washington did to get around this is that just about the time the six month deadline would toll, he would pack up all of his enslaved people working for him in Philadelphia and send them back to Mount Vernon, leave them there for a couple weeks and then bring them back to start the clock over again.

Suzy Chase:                  Talk about when Hercules left.

Adrian Miller:                  Yes, so towards the end of Washington's second term. You know he was about to retire fully to Mount Vernon, he suspected that Hercules was trying to escape. And the reason he suspected Hercules is that, Hercules's son Richmond who was an assistant cook in the residence was caught with a bunch of money, and it was thought that would finance an escape attempt.

                                                      Now when confronted by this by Washington, Hercules was like, "Oh, no I would never do that. I can't even believe you would even accuse me of that."

                                                      But as punishment, Washington sends him back to Mount Vernon but not to the kitchen, but to the fields where he's doing hard labor. So this world renowned chef is suddenly making bricks, and clearing brush, and clearing crops and all that kind of stuff.

                                                      So on Washington's 65th birthday Hercules escapes and I think it was very shrewd on his part because he knew there would be a lot of birthday festivities being planned, and so people would be distracted.

                                                      So it's thought that he first goes to Philadelphia and then he maybe went overseas. And the only clues we have of a possible overseas trip is that there's a painting of Hercules, who is believed to be Hercules, sitting in a museum in Madrid Spain. And the painting is titled, A Cook for George Washington, painted by Gilbert Stuart. And the clothing of the African American in that portrait is the clothing of a European chef at that time, not what an American chef would have worn.

                                                      But we really just don't know what happens because Washington was a very vindictive person. And Hercules knew the great lengths that Washington would go to, to retrieve enslaved people who had escaped through trickery, force, and other things. So Hercules knew that if he was going to make the mad dash he would have to really just disappear.

Suzy Chase:                  I don't know why but I was surprised to read in your book that Washington had a really bad temper. He looks so mellow in all of his portraits. It's so funny.

Adrian Miller:                  Yes he does. He does. He looks like a serene presence. But yeah, I read that in the work of a noted scholar named Thomas Fleming who wrote a lot about Washington. When I saw those passages about Washington's temper and how he would just have these fits of anger, I was really surprised.

                                                      But then it made sense given what I've read about how he would go to great lengths to retrieve enslaved people if they had escaped, so it just kind of fit that theme.

Suzy Chase:                  Are there any known descendants of Hercules?

Adrian Miller:                  No. Only because, well let me just back up. I don't know if anybody has attempted to trace the descendants, because we do know that Hercules left behind some kids and a wife at Mount Vernon. But I don't think anybody's ever really tried to identify their descendants in the ways that people have tried to with Thomas Jefferson's enslaved community.

Suzy Chase:                  So moving on from Hercules, African American cooks had to know how to make the best French cuisine. Even Jefferson's enslaved chef James Hemings was trained in classic French cooking. There was no Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking cookbook back then. So who taught James Hemings?

Adrian Miller:                  So it's very interesting when Jefferson becomes Minister to France, this was well before his Presidency, he actually brings a teenaged James Hemings with him over to France and he has him apprentice for three years under several accomplished French cooks and that's how James Hemings gets that knowledge. And then once he's done with his training, which was quite extensive, and we have records of Jefferson kind of bemoaning that fact. He installs Hemings as his chef de cuisine at his Paris residence. Not far from I think, I can't remember if it was on the Champs-Elysées, but either very on there or not too far from it.

                                                      So but what you see through during the Antebellum Period of U.S. history is that a lot of wealthy white families would actually have their enslaved African American cooks apprentice under French chefs because French food was the food of entertaining. And they knew that if they were going to establish their mark as a great host or hostess they needed to have good cooking. Even though they weren't doing the cooking, they needed to have good cooking was there from their kitchen. And so they would often encumber that expense in order to have their enslaved cooks trained.

Suzy Chase:                  Then Hemings was freed and trained the chefs at Monticello and sadly he committed suicide. So only two of his recipes exist today, is that right?

Adrian Miller:                  Yes so far, and as far I know only two of those recipes exist. There maybe some other recipes in some other places and I know that there's some people trying to find all of his recipes. There's an organization called the James Hemings Foundation, which is trying to collect all of this, but as far as I know there's only a couple of recipes existing in his hand.

Suzy Chase:                  And one's for chocolate cream and the other is for snow eggs. What are snow eggs?

Adrian Miller:                  Yeah so snow eggs is kind of a lost dessert, kind of hard to explain because I'm not a trained chef. I've definitely had other people make it, when I'm hosting people.

                                                      But it's kind of a meringue type desert, I guess is the best way to describe it. It's very light. Very good. Very elegant. So it just shows the skill of this trained chef to pull off that kind of dessert without the modern equipment that we know of today.

Suzy Chase:                  As an aside, James Hemings was Sally Hemings older brother who had a longtime relationship with Thomas Jefferson and he had six kids with her.

Adrian Miller:                  Yeah, so many believe that the forced sexual relationship with Sally Hemings actually started in France because she came over there as a teenage girl with one of Jefferson's daughters. So many believe that, that started happening then and James Hemings would have been very aware of this while he was there because he was apprenticing and cooking at that time. So just a very troubled time for both of them. The interesting thing is people have wondered why they didn't pursue their freedom because similar to that gradual Abolition Act, that Pennsylvania had passed, when the Hemings were in France. France had something a little similar, although a third party had to intercede on their behalf. And some believe they may have used that fact as leverage from Jefferson to get a salary, and to get certain concessions about keeping the family together and other things. Other historians have written about this, but yeah so all of that is in the mix while Hemings is working for Jefferson.

Suzy Chase:                  Do you think Jefferson was the first President who influenced American cuisine especially with the wealthy households?

Adrian Miller:                  I'm not sure about that. I think Jefferson maybe gets more credit than he deserves for some of these things. I mean, he certainly was a foodie, but George Washington was a foodie as well. And people would try to emulate what they served on their tables, but you don't see a lot of records of what Washington served necessarily and you see more about Jefferson. And I think part of it is because some of Jefferson's enemies wanted to highlight the fact that he loved French food. And again it goes back to what we were talking about earlier about trying to cast the President as being maybe aristocratic and not having the common touch. But he certainly loved mac and cheese. He served it in the White House. He was an avid gardener and many would say that towards the end of his life he was really primarily on a vegetarian diet. And had meat more sparingly than anything. So don't have a great answer for that question, but I know that people were paying attention to his table.

Suzy Chase:                  Last Friday as you saw in my Instagram, I made the Baked Macaroni with Cheese recipe on page 90. Now was that James Heming's recipe?

Adrian Miller:                  It likely was something that James Hemings made because we see some elements of French cuisine in that recipe, so I, we don't prescribe it directly to him but I'm almost certain that, that's something he would have made. And I lean on the recipe from Damon Lee Fowler in his book, Dining at Monticello. That's where I got that recipe from.

Suzy Chase:                  It was really bland.

Adrian Miller:                  In fact, the first noted record we have of someone eating Thomas Jefferson's macaroni and cheese recipe, the guy wasn't feeling it either. His name was Representative Manasseh Cutler, he was a Congressman from Massachusetts. And he was a diarist and when he first tasted it he said it was ... He didn't say bland, but he said it was strong and disagreeable.

Suzy Chase:                  Yes, disagreeable.

Adrian Miller:                  I just had to play it straight history. I just had to give people a feel of what the food was like that these people were eating. It was-

Suzy Chase:                  No, I was-

Adrian Miller:                  ... not the goopy mess that we love today.

Suzy Chase:                  I was really excited to make it.

Adrian Miller:                  I understand. I understand.

Suzy Chase:                  So Lincoln's favorite dish was cabbage and potatoes made by Mary Dines. Tell us about her.

Adrian Miller:                  Yeah, she's a fascinating figure who I actually did not know much about before I dove into the research for this book. So she was a formerly enslaved person who was living in a contraband camp either on the board, in D.C., or quite near it. And so Lincoln went off and passed by this contraband camp as he was traveling to the Old Soldiers' Home where he would take a break from the White House. And while at that home, while in the camp, he heard Mary Dines singing spirituals, and was very moved by the music. And I guess somehow they got to talking or connection was made and he invited her to cook for him while he was staying at the Old Soldiers' Home. So she takes up residence there and she cooks for him, and then eventually she actually gets invited to cook in the White House for certain occasions. So her story was very interesting how she emerged from slavery and was trying to make her own stake in the world and she makes this connection to Lincoln.

Suzy Chase:                  One fascinating tidbit in this book is after the Emancipation Presidents were increasingly dependent on their black cooks for advice on things such as race relations. Tell us a little bit about that.

Adrian Miller:                  So once we emerge from Emancipation, it was a time when Republicans were pretty dominant on the political scene. And a lot of African Americans joined the Republican Party because they just felt they were more committed to their civil rights, and economic advancement, and social progress. So the African Americans become an important constituency. So we see Presidents actually taking the time to pay attention to that constituency. Now sometimes, I should say a lot of the times it was lip service, but we start to see Presidents do things that we may not have noticed before and so advisors start to emerge, and probably the most famous is Frederick Douglass. But there were people like James Wormley and others who whenever they could got the President's ear and tried to press for more advancement for African American people.

                                                      Now because of the code of silence that surrounds the Presidency especially with the people who work for them, we don't have a lot of accounts of these things, but every once in a while we'll get a memoir, or some newspaper reference, or something about an African American trying to make the case for advancing the status of African Americans in the country.

Suzy Chase:                  As a carryover employee from James Buchanan's Presidency Cornelia Mitchell was the first Presidential cook to run the White House kitchen in post-emancipation America.

Adrian Miller:                  Sometimes the status of the White house cook does not depend wholly on the political fortunes of who they're working for. We often see that the cooks may last for several administrations. And so Cornelia Mitchell was definitely somebody who was adept at making those homemade dishes that Lincoln liked. We don't have a lot of information about what President Buchanan particularly liked, but he, evidently she was good enough for him to recommend her to Lincoln. And so the interesting thing about President Lincoln is, if you look at accounts of meals during his Presidency a lot of the formal public meals were quite elaborate, but when you hear about his private dining Lincoln ate very sparingly. He often picked at his food. Often people surrounding him who loved him had to force him to eat something to sustain his strength. I think that's just the weight of what was going on in our country weighing on him.

                                                      But those times that he was happy with food it was often the food that invoked his childhood and those simple dishes like cabbage, and corn, and potatoes, and ham, and things like that. I guess he was a big fan of lemon pie as well.

Suzy Chase:                  That's interesting because he was from Illinois right?

Adrian Miller:                  Yes.

Suzy Chase:                  The most celebrated African American Presidential cook of the latter 19th century was Laura Dolly Johnson. Describe her.

Adrian Miller:                  Yeah, so she is what I would call a reluctant White House cook. So she comes on the scene because a young Theodore Roosevelt was traveling in Kentucky and he actually has dinner with a Kentucky Colonial, a guy named John Mason Brown. And Dolly Johnson was Brown's cook, and Roosevelt was so impressed with that meal that when Benjamin Harrison becomes President he actually recommends Dolly Johnson to Harrison. And Harrison reaches out or has some of his people reach out to Johnson and she just says look, "I don't want to cook in the White House. I just want to leave my private cooking job with the Colonial and start a catering business." But there was a lot of arm twisting and eventually she accepts the position.

                                                      The only problem was that there was a French woman already cooking at the White House as the Head Chef and her name was Madame Petronard. And when she saw the headlines of Dolly Johnson getting hired she actually had a very American response. First she starts bad mouthing the Harrison's food habits, chief among their sins was eating pie for breakfast. And then she filed a lawsuit, this is the first example we know of, of a White House employee actually suing the President.

Suzy Chase:                  Oh, wow.

Adrian Miller:                  Everything got ... Yeah. I haven't been able to find out how everything shook out, but obviously it was resolved because it never went to court.

                                                      But she leaves, Dolly Johnson gets installed as the cook but she only stays there for about six months because her daughter is sick, so she returns back to Lexington Kentucky to care for her daughter.

                                                      But then when Grover Cleveland becomes President, which was four years later, he actually begs her to come cook in the White house kitchen and she accepts and ends up cooking there. She's one of the few examples we have of an African American White House cook trading on their notoriety after they leave the White House. In my book I show a newspaper ad of the restaurant that she ran in Lexington. And the last we really hear of her in any major sense is that when Alice Roosevelt married Nicholas Longworth, and Alice Roosevelt was the daughter of Theodore Roosevelt, we have Dolly Johnson sending her a pecan pie. I'm sorry, a Pecan cake, which evidently Alice Longworth really loved and that's the last we hear of her.

Suzy Chase:                  In the book there's a photo of Dolly Johnson in the White House kitchen and it looked so dark, and I read that the critters were hard to keep out of the kitchen too.

Adrian Miller:                  Yeah, I don't know if you've heard the recent reports that the White House is overrun with mice and other things. But you know the White House was built on a reclaimed swamp. So having critters around and keeping them out is a full time job. But at that time it was just so bad that Caroline Harrison actually started a campaign to have the White House physically moved to another part of D.C. She just could not deal with it.

                                                      But yeah, it is a dark looking picture. That's the earliest picture we have of the White House kitchen and interestingly enough, the White House kitchen was moved to that spot by Mary Todd Lincoln in order to get more light into the kitchen.

Suzy Chase:                  Yeah I was happy to see there was a window or two.

Adrian Miller:                  Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah, when you look at the ... There must have been remodeling or something because when you look at the White House kitchen by the time of Theodore Roosevelt it seems very well lit, by that time. But even today, when you go to the White House kitchen it's pretty much, there's no widows around really in the current one, so thankfully there's electricity to light the way.

Suzy Chase:                  So Daisy Bonner and Lizzie McDuffie loved Franklin Delano Roosevelt and he loved them. What made them a special team?

Adrian Miller:                  I think part of it is that they really cared about the food they were serving to him and they took pride in it, which is not the case back at the White House, at least for some of the culinary team. So First Ladies were usually the ones that took charge of the food service for the President, planning menus just making sure everything was right. Making sure all the dietary restrictions were met and so on.

                                                      But Eleanor Roosevelt was fundamentally uninterested in food. She was a very cerebral person. She wanted to be in policy and out there advocating for things, so she delegated the food preparation and all of that to a woman named Henrietta Nesbitt who is somebody that she met while Roosevelt was Governor of New York.

                                                      And they were in the League of Women Voters together, and she just admired Nesbitt's pluck in running a bakery while her husband was unemployed. So she gets involved but evidently Nesbitt wasn't the greatest cook, and even though there was a team of African American cooks preparing the President's food, Nesbitt would come and stand behind them and correct what they did and essentially just messed up the food they were getting.

                                                      So Roosevelt was pretty miserable when it came to the cuisine he ate in the White House and he would often loudly complain about it. And I think rationing had an effect on what kind of food he got as well. So when he went to Warm Springs Georgia, Daisy Bonner and Lizzie McDuffie would make sure he would get the finest Southern food and really tasty stuff, so I think he really looked forward to it.

                                                      And so often he was on a diet and was prescribed certain things to eat, so Lizzie McDuffie and Daisy Bonner would make those prescribed dishes and they would look at the President and if they felt he looked peaked as they called it they would as they were serving him the prescribed dish, they would just whisper in his ear, "Don't eat that." And he would act like he wasn't hungry and would just pick at his food. And when everybody would cleared out they'd take him back to the kitchen to hook him up with what he really wanted.

Suzy Chase:                  Pigs feet?

Adrian Miller:                  He loved pig's feet. Yes, he loved pig's feet. And he loved the way that Daisy Bonner made them, which was she would broil, split them, broil them, butter them.

Suzy Chase:                  Oh, my God.

Adrian Miller:                  And he actually ... I know. He actually loved them so much that he served sweet and sour pig's feet to Winston Churchill in the White House. Churchill was not feeling the pig's feet.

Suzy Chase:                  How did he describe them?

Adrian Miller:                  When FDR asked him about it, he said, "They're kind of slimy, and they have an interesting texture."

                                                      And then FDR said," Oh, okay. Well next time we'll have them fried."

                                                      And then I guess Churchill's face just said it all. He just said, "I just don't think I'd want them fried."

Suzy Chase:                  Yeah, I'll bet.

Adrian Miller:                  And they started laughing. They started laughing.

Suzy Chase:                  Is it true that President Eisenhower liked to help make his beef stew?

Adrian Miller:                  Oh yeah, Eisenhower was probably the cook, the President who loved to cook the most. So he had this favorite beef stew that he made, it had a lot of vegetables in it. And he was quite famous for this stew. In fact, during the 1956 election the Republican National Committee released a bunch of recipe cards of this stew. And they encouraged housewives to have stew suppers across the country where they would essentially make the stew and invite their neighbors over and talk about Eisenhower, which I think is kind of brilliant. But he made this stew and he was also known for grilling. In fact, he had a grill installed on the roof top of the White House. So imagine you're walking down 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and you see smoke coming out of the White House? Well it's the President up there grilling.

Suzy Chase:                  Just an average day.

Adrian Miller:                  Yes.

Suzy Chase:                  Do you think Ike and Mamie advanced civil rights during their Administration?

Adrian Miller:                  To some extent because the Civil Rights Movement was really gaining momentum during the Presidency. We remember the Little Rock nine, the bus boycott in Montgomery Alabama. There was a lot of significant events happening. Now of course, it was never enough for a lot of people, but there were some things of progress made. And Eisenhower was really the first President to have an African American in his cabinet. A guy named Victor Morrow who worked there. So there was some slight gains, and I think it set the stage for the 60's. But I don't, of course I don't think there was enough because I wanted African Americans full participation in society and they didn't really see a major step for them until the 1960's, but there's been more and more debate about what Eisenhower did during those times to help advance civil rights. And there are quite a few scholars who say that Eisenhower should maybe get more credit for what he did in those times, again under those circumstances.

Suzy Chase:                  LBJ was the last President to bring a lifetime African American personal cook to serve on the White House kitchen staff, and her name was Zephyr Black Wright. What an interesting figure she was.

Adrian Miller:                  Yeah Zephyr Wright is probably the most fascinating person that I encountered during my research. And she's the one person, if I could just pick one person to have dinner with, I think it would be her because of her point in history, and her personality just comes through and I just think it would be fun to talk to her. I could just see us laughing and sharing a lot of Southern food.

                                                      But she was a longtime cook for the Johnson's, they hired her in the early 1940's and bring her to Washington. And many attribute her cooking to the reason why Johnson was able to rise rapidly in Congress. So I'm about to tell you something that's gonna sound like a fairy tale. But back in the '40's and '50's, members of Congress would have each over at their house for dinner.

Suzy Chase:                  No.

Adrian Miller:                  And they would be collegial, yeah they would be collegial.

Suzy Chase:                  And talk?

Adrian Miller:                  Yeah,

Suzy Chase:                  Wow, that's shocking.

Adrian Miller:                  I know. And so very few people turned down an invitation to the Johnson's because they knew they were going to get Zephyr Wright, Zephyr Wright's food.

                                                      But she's also in a way a civil right's advocate besides being a great cook. In addition to being a great cook, because during the drives back and forth from the ranch in Central Texas where the Johnsons lived to D.C. they would drive through this integrated South and Zephyr Wright suffered so many indignities that she eventually refused to make the trip.

                                                      And so she would just stay in D.C. year round. So when Johnson becomes President and he's advocating for the 1964 Civil Rights Act, he actually used Zephyr Wright's Jim Crow experiences to persuade members of Congress to support the legislation and when he signed it into law, he gave her one of the pens and said, "You deserve this as much as anyone else."

Suzy Chase:                  It was interesting to read that while the job was taking a toll on her health, she still had to make low fat meals.

Adrian Miller:                  So as a Senator, Lyndon Johnson had a pretty massive heart attack and so he was on a forced diet. He didn't stick with the diet all the time. But Zephyr Wright was really in charge of keeping him happy and healthy, but making delectable food. And there's one funny exchange where she wrote a note to the President basically saying that you're going to eat what I put in front of you and you're not going to complain. And Johnson happily carried that note around and would show it to people just to prove that he wasn't becoming too arrogant because his cook was talking to him like that.

                                                      But she says towards the end of her career in the White House she said that she was thinking about writing a low fat cook book, but it never comes to fruition and I just thought that would have been amazing. That time was in the late '50s to write a low fat cook book, that would have been awesome. But it just never happened.

Suzy Chase:                  Tell us how Jackie O changed the cuisine in the White House.

Adrian Miller:                  By the time Jacqueline Kennedy gets to the White House in 1961, she was not impressed with White House food. And she wanted it to become more elegant to take on a more French accent.

                                                      So she fired the Filipino cook who was working there during the Eisenhower Administration, a guy named Pedro Udo who was essentially a military cook, I believe. And she hires René Verdon a French chef, she christened the head cook position White House Executive Chef, because before that it was just head cook, first cook, White House cook, they didn't say Executive Chef. And so menus started being appearing in French and other things. So there was push back on the French menus, so they eventually were Fonglay a mix of French and English and then eventually all English.

                                                      But it takes a different turn, and so by emphasizing European cooking by European trained chefs, Jackie Kennedy I not, I wouldn't say intentionally, but undercuts the presence of African Americans in the White House kitchen because they don't have that training. And I don't think it was racism, I think it's just more about elitism than anything and just preferred tastes.

                                                      But we see the presence of African Americans wane from that point in the kitchen, to the point now where there are few African Americans in the White House kitchen as assistant chefs. But there has not been an Executive Chef except for a short time when Zephyr Wright runs the White House kitchen in between hiring a different Executive Chef. We just haven't had one since.

Suzy Chase:                  So in closing can you briefly describe the cuisines of the Bush's, Clinton's and Obama's?

Adrian Miller:                  So I would call the Clinton's, well also let's start with George W Bush. In the public sphere it was French cooking and it was kind of almost rote French cooking. There was actually articles saying, "Hey, can we have something different for these state dinners?" It was like the same old French dishes.

                                                      But the Bush's cooking, George H.W. Bush I would say was more of a New England feel. You know the Kennebunkport Maine, if I'm pronouncing that correctly.

Suzy Chase:                  Yeah.

Adrian Miller:                  Let's just say with George H.W. Bush, it was more the cooking of Maine and New England, with some maybe Texas accents here and there.

                                                      With the Clinton's you've got a mix of Southern food as maybe the foundational cuisine, but Hillary Clinton did a lot to celebrate American regional cooking. And I think the cooking that there's to this day is really a reflection of what she did to move White House cooking in the food persona from French to more American.

                                                      And then when we get to the George W. Bush definitely Texas was celebrated in the food served in the White House. But still just continuing the celebration of American regional cuisine.

                                                      And then we definitely see that with the Obama's, especially in the State Dinners. A lot of the approach was to celebrate American Regional foods, but to have a shout-out to the host, the visiting country, you know have a shout-out to the favorite profiles that they were used to in maybe the side dishes or other things.

                                                      And then in the current White House we don't get a lot of information about what's being served, but I would assume it's a fairly a continuation of what was in the Obama White House only because the White House Executive Chef Cristeta Comerford still works as the Executive Chef under the Trump Administration, and she's been cooking there since the George, the second term of George W. Bush.

Suzy Chase:                  One final thing I'm dying to know and I hope you know the answer. Okay, so you know when Presidents go out to dinner at a restaurant, is there really a guy who tastes everything before it is sent out to him?

Adrian Miller:                  There is a trained chef on the Secret Service who actually observes everything that is being prepared for the President, to make sure that it's not poisoned and that it's safe. So there's somebody watching the food being prepared. And so the chef is usually the last person to taste the food before it actually goes to the President.

Suzy Chase:                  That's scary.

Adrian Miller:                  Yeah, you know you hear about elimination challenges on TV, but to me that's an elimination challenge.

Suzy Chase:                  That's the ultimate elimination challenge.

Adrian Miller:                  Yeah, to have an armed Secret Service person watching everything you do.

Suzy Chase:                  Where can we find you on the web?

Adrian Miller:                  So my, I have a Facebook fanpage called The Soul Food Scholar and then conveniently my Twitter handle and Instagram handle are At Soul Food Scholar and then I have my own website SoulFoodScholar.com

                                                      So I try to make it easy for people. Now in terms of the President book I do have a separate website for that which is blackchefswhitehouse.com.

Suzy Chase:                  Everyone needs to give this book as a gift this holiday season and I hope, hope, hope, that you win the NAACP image award for this very important book. Thank you so much Adrian for coming on Cookery by the Book podcast.

Adrian Miller:                  Thank you.

Suzy Chase:                  Follow me on Instagram at Cookery by the Book, Twitter's I am Suzy Chase. And download your kitchen mix tapes music to cook by on Spotify at Cookery by the Book and as always subscribe in Apple Podcasts.

Kitchen Creativity
Unlocking Culinary Genius- with Wisdom, Inspiration, and Ideas from the World's Most Creative Chefs

By Karen Page w/ Photographs by Andrew Dornenburg

Suzy Chase:                  Welcome to the Cookery by the Book podcast, with me, Suzy Chase.

Karen:                  I'm Karen Page, and my new book is Kitchen Creativity: Unlocking Culinary Genius with Wisdom, Inspiration, and Ideas from the World's Most Creative Chefs, and photography by Andrew Dornenburg.

Suzy Chase:                  You and Andrew Dornenburg, two-time James Beard Award winners are back at it with Kitchen Creativity, where the thinking process starts in the kitchen. 427 pages of ideas, inspiration, and wisdom are in this book. How the heck is it organized?

Karen:                  I think it's actually a great question to kick off with because it is a whole lot, and plus, we've got some front matter of the book. It's actually over 450 pages, so it's good to get a handle on it. We've organized the book ... I say we even though Andrew is the photographer because we are Karen and Andrew. As our website suggest, it's karenandandrew.com. We're KarenAndAndrew on Twitter. We do work together to create the books that we've created. This is book number 11. We've co-authored the first nine, and for the last couple, Andrew's been really exploring his creativity through photography, but he is a great champion and a great person to bounce ideas off of. When I say we, I do refer to the Karen and Andrew team.

                                    We decided that, when we were going to organize the book, that it was really, we saw these stages through the various chefs that we've interviewed over the years, and in particular for this book, some of the world's most creative chefs. We saw that they didn't necessarily always proceed in a linear way, but sometimes, these stages kind of doubled back on one another, but we saw three distinct stages that laid themselves out, and so that's how we've laid out Kitchen Creativity.

                                    The first stage is mastery. The second is what we call alchemy, and number three is creativity. Before you jump into the creativity, there are those two preparatory stages that you can master, starting with mastery, which is really about mastering the basics, learning how to acquire the knowledge, skill, and control that you need in order to work your way through the kitchen. Then we get into alchemy, which is really about flavor affinities and a big portion of the work that we've done prior to Kitchen Creativity through books like The Flavor Bible and Culinary Artistry and What to Drink with What You Eat, so really, exploring the power of those flavor synergies. It kind of all comes together in Kitchen Creativity in those three stages.

                                    Then we go into part two, which is basically an A to Z guide of just almost any topic you could ever imagine. That's organized and laid out for people who are familiar with The Flavor Bible in that three-column format that many have come to know and love, only instead of seeing names of ingredients, what you'll find are different topics from art to architecture to Alice in Wonderland and moving through the alphabet, things like the X factor and yoga. All of these things come together to service spurs for the creative process in the kitchen, and that's really what Kitchen Creativity aims to be, is kind of the ultimate brainstorming guide for creativity. No matter what you're looking to do, coming up with a new dish, a new dessert, a new drink, a new menu, it is a starting place to have endless number of jumping-off points to spur your imagination.

Suzy Chase:                  Where did you and Andrew find the inspiration to do this book?

Karen:                  I think each of our books has started with the same inspiration, which is wishing a certain book existed and finding it didn't and thinking, "Well, somebody should write that," and kind of looking in the mirror and thinking, "Well, maybe it should be us." I think every one of our books has started that way, from the very first, we wrote a book called Becoming a Chef when Andrew was trying to decide how to get into the kitchen professionally and was looking for a book on the topic and couldn't find one. That was what led us to set out and interview over 60 of the country's top chefs and really write that process of becoming a chef.

                                    With Kitchen Creativity, it was really a matter of wanting inspiration for a book that we could turn to when the inspiration was lacking, when the muse was gone, and that seemed to be something that a lot of our readers shared. It was in that they were turning to Flavor Bible and Culinary Artistry for to get ideas for flavors that combine well together into a dish, but we realized that flavor is only a part of the equation when it comes to creativity in the kitchen, and so we wanted to create a book that would really emphasize so many of the other factors that go into the process of creativity and also to interview some of the world's most creative chefs and what their influences are when they set out to create, like I said, a new dish, a new drink, a new restaurant concept in some cases, and to really understand what their best practices are when it comes to creativity.

Suzy Chase:                  When I think about cooking in my kitchen, I think about solitude. Talk about the new trend of chefs collaborating.

Karen:                  It's interesting because I think that we grow up, we're dependent on our parents, and we see the evolution of becoming independent is really a huge accomplishment, which it certainly is, but I think the evolutionary process continues.

                                    A lot of people get stuck at that independent stage, and they think, "Well, I've gotta do it all myself, and I want the credit that I did X, Y, and Z," but in fact, the world, especially today, is so complex. There are such areas of specialization that it's really only through the process of interdependence that chefs can realize their creative potential, when they work with other people who have had different experiences, different influences, different perspectives and points of view and come together with them to really brainstorm and shake things up a little bit to find ways of moving forward collaboratively. That has, I think, resulted in not only better ideas, but truly grander ideas taking place.

                                    A very timely and wonderful example is that of José Andrés, who has fed over three million meals at this point to Puerto Rico in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria, and so you see chefs really taking on an important role globally in terms of addressing social problems, through food, solving problems through their line of work that is really at a level that we've not seen before.

                                    I think that has prompted the creation of prizes like The Basque World Culinary Prize, which is a new annual prize of more than $100,000 that is given by the Basque government to a chef around the world who uses creativity, culinary creativity to solve problems. They'll use it to teach chocolate-making skills down in Venezuela. They'll use it to teach culinary professional skills to inmates and to reduce recidivism, and they're using it improve the quality of school lunch problems. They're using it as José Andrés has used it, and he has been a finalist for this award in year's past, to be able to feed people in parts of the world who are in need.

                                    It's incredibly inspiring to see all of the ways, and if you Google The Basque World Culinary Prize, you'll see lots of the, there'd been 20 finalists from all over the world, and just reading their bios is incredibly inspiring to see how they are using food in a whole new way, but the Kitchen Creativity is being put to use in so many amazing ways in this day and age.

Suzy Chase:                  In an interview last year, Jacques Pépin told me to learn the recipe, then you can make it your own. In Kitchen Creativity, you write, "Master the craft before you can break the rules," which is kind of the same concept. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Karen:                  The reason we kick off with the mastery section of Kitchen Creativity is because you really do need to master the fundamentals by studying the past, and that will set you up to be the kind of cook who can walk into a kitchen and create a dish from scratch just by opening your refrigerator doors, your cupboards and seeing what's there and being able to put things together.

                                    I think so many people today think that they need to follow a recipe step by step by step, and if they don't have the 16th of a teaspoon of a particular ingredient, that they're not going not be able to make what they set out to make instead of learning the basics of mastery when it comes to the kitchen of understanding how to think like a chef and season like a chef and shop like a chef. These are the kinds of things that will allow you to, as Picasso said, break the rules.

                                    That process of mastery is really one of learning by copying, and once you copy enough, copy the way that great chefs think and the way that they approach what they do in the kitchen, then you can throw those rules out the window, and you can learn to create by not copying, by creating something completely original. That is something that's going to allow you to do what Jacques Pépin refers to as the X factor. Bring the X factor into your food by imposing your own will on the dish that you're making.

Suzy Chase:                  In the back of the book, you have a world of infinite culinary, or is it culinary possibilities, the lists A to Z. Under W, you have a section called winter. As a home cook, I love your winter flavor affinities list like acorn squash, Parmesan, and thyme.

Karen:                  We've always found seasonality is such an important inspiration in the kitchen, Andrew and myself, and so in Culinary Artistry, in The Flavor Bible, there are sections on seasonality, but the seasonality sections in Kitchen Creativity raised seasonality to a whole new level. I mean, these are much more detailed in terms of ingredients that are popular in the winter time, not only wines, but also beers, cocktails, and spirits that you can serve during the winter time. Just looking at the lists of affinities, what is beautiful about flavor chords and why we like to celebrate them, and flavor chords being flavor affinities that are so archetypal that they are used in many, many classic dishes around restaurant menus.

                                    I can lean on any one of them and use that as an inspiration. You could go up with a combination, say, banana, pineapple, and run. All winter ingredients. Bananas are plentiful in the winter time. Rum is a beautiful complement to both of those. It takes you immediately to the Caribbean. You can riff on it. You can come up with a cocktail looking at that with pineapple juice and rum, and maybe accenting it with a dried banana chip. You can play with it as a dessert. You can play with it as a breakfast, maybe minus the rum or save it for a weekend, but just through having those flavor affinities, the three or more ingredients that pair well together, it gives you a start place from a flavor perspective to just jump off and take it in different directions. I think the process of Kitchen Creativity is understanding the elements of being able to play with that.

Suzy Chase:                  Is it culinary or culinary?

Karen:                  Leonard Lopate of WNYC Radio, asking us the same question.

Suzy Chase:                  I know.

Karen:                  We ... I think, I've heard both. I've probably said both. I think it's a matter of personal preference at this point. Don't you?

Suzy Chase:                  Okay, good, so I'll just toggle between the both of them. There are over a hundred chefs in this book, and one is Mike Anthony from Gramercy Tavern and The modern, whom I adore. How did traveling to Japan inspire his cuisine?

Karen:                  Mike Anthony is one of my favorite chefs as well, and we did a wonderful event together at Rizzoli Bookstore a few weeks ago with Amanda Cohen from Dirt Candy and Damon Baehrel from his eponymous restaurant in Earlton, New York. Mike has spoken to us about his, the influences of Japan, and I think understanding them really helped me to understand what I love so much about his cuisine because I think Mike and his cuisine are not flashy, are not over-the-top.

                                    I think they're very grounded. I think they're very rooted. Through understanding the influence of Japan, which incorporates an amazing emphasis on the ideas of time and of place and of celebrating that particular moment of time and place, that, I think, defines beautifully what he's doing at Gramercy Tavern, that he really pulls together ingredients that are of the season and of the moment and doesn't try to serve them in ways that are, let's say, unbecoming to the setting of Gramercy Tavern, which, again, is elegant, but it's rustic, it's homey, it's very much a comforting kind of food as opposed to a show-offy kind of food. I think that it is his emphasis on really celebrating those basic principles that, I think, really defines his food as being what it is.

                                    On one of the things Mike shared with us is that when he has Japanese customers in his dining room, he'll ask his kitchen staff to actually season the food about 5% less, and what he's realizing that is in this day and age where Americans are always emphasizing bigger and better, that the Japanese culture as a whole has this appreciation for subtly that sometimes gets lost in other American restaurants. I love that Mike embraces that sense of subtly in his cuisine and the appreciation for having things being perfectly balanced. He does argue, it is a challenge, when the food is as simple as it is at Gramercy Tavern by just showcasing perfect ingredients prepared perfectly without bells and whistles, it's gotta be perfect or it's going to be boring. I find that the food that Mike produces at Gramercy Tavern is never boring.

Suzy Chase:                  It's so perfect, and I love sitting in the bar.

Karen:                  One of my favorite places to eat in New York City, I think, sitting in the bar-

Suzy Chase:                  I know.

Karen:                  ... at Gramercy Tavern. A class of wine-

Suzy Chase:                  Yup.

Karen:                  ... ordering some appetizers. It's a great experience.

Suzy Chase:                  He came to my kid's elementary school and taught the kids a cooking class, and it was the sweetest thing you've ever seen.

Karen:                  I love it.

Suzy Chase:                  We were so-

Karen:                  How old is your kid?

Suzy Chase:                  ... lucky. He's 11, but he was in fourth grade at the time.

Karen:                  Okay.

Suzy Chase:                  Yeah.

Karen:                  Yeah.

Suzy Chase:                  He's the best.

Karen:                  No, Mike has such a great way with kids. Of course, he's got kids of his own that he's very fond of, obviously. I can just picture him just sharing his passion and enthusiasm for ingredients for all things in the kitchen in just a beautiful way. I think it's so important for kids to be exposed at that young age to ideas about food and really a reverence for it that people like Mike bring to food. I'm thrilled to hear that your son got that experience.

Suzy Chase:                  What is one dish that you've eaten recently that boggled your mind, creatively?

Karen:                  I don't know that I get boggled so much anymore.

Suzy Chase:                  Really?

Karen:                  I think I've been kind of spoiled that I have been able to eat widely and really appreciate a lot of dishes. I think ... We went to The Inn at Little Washington in Virginia, and he knows that we've been eating vegetarian for the last five years, and so he created, an honor of our visit, this wonderful meatless morel mushroom meatloaf that was served in a copper pot with this really rich sauce that was packed with umami served with perfect mashed potatoes, and just incredibly perfect. It was, the texture was so meaty, and the flavor was so full of umami that I would've sworn there was something else going on, but he swore it was just mushrooms cooked to the zenith of perfection. I would have suggested that could serve that dish to any omnivore in the world, and I would've defied anyone not to have gone crazy about it as I did. I think Patrick O'Connell at The Inn at Little Washington is one of the great creative chefs in the United States today.

Suzy Chase:                  Where can we find you on the web?

Karen:                  Andrew's and my website is at karenandandrew.com, which is also our Twitter handle, and we're on Instagram at TheFlavorBible.

Suzy Chase:                  This book has inspired us to cook like the world's best chefs. Thank you, Karen, for coming on Cookery by the Book podcast.

Karen:                  Oh, such a pleasure to speak with today, Suzy. Thanks so much for having me.

Suzy Chase:                  Follow me on Instagram at CookerybytheBook. Twitter is IamSuzyChase, and download your Kitchen Mix Tapes, music to cook by, on Spotify at Cookery by the Book, and as always, subscribe in Apple podcasts.