> Coconut balls, and other things the presidents ate

From Everything Changes, the Awl’s newsletter. Subscribe here.

There is a cookbook on our cookbook shelf at home called Arrow Rock Cookbook.

It’s from a historic preservation organization based in Missouri, and in a little mission statement in the opening pages they say they wanted to record recipes from some of the country’s foremost “hostesses.” Our copy is from the (early) Reagan administration.

It contains the usual mid-century and ‘70s-era recipes, and women’s names are followed in parentheses by “(Mrs. James Thurgood Jr.)” or whatever because no one could apparently recognize who they were without the context of their husbands’ names.

But the most interesting part of the cookbook, for me, is that it has tons of recipes submitted by wives of presidents.

So what do presidents eat, other than noche specials which sound kind of delicious to be honest?

French or French-adjacent dishes for JFK and Mrs. JFK.

Their sister-in-law makes something called a Chocolate Roll that I think I will try making this weekend:

Mrs. Richard Nixon lives in dreams:

Lady Bird and Lyndon B. Johnson like cheese and meat and chess:

Coconut balls and eggplant for the S Trumans:

Barry Goldwater and Peggy are “bean-eaters”:

And finally, Margaret Chase Smith doesn’t need a parenthetical — or a crust, thank you very much.

From Everything Changes, the Awl’s newsletter. Subscribe here.