OP: The Presidents' Cookbook

Funk & Wagnalls, 1968. Hardcover. Very Good.

Poppy Cannon (1905–1975) was an enthusiastic adapter of convenience cooking, not so much latching onto a trend but embracing and balancing the realities of being a financially independent working woman, as well as a dutiful homemaker. Her particular empowering outlook on shortcut cooking helped make her first book, The Can-Opener Cookbook (1952), a tremendous success.

The South Africa-born American made her career writing, other than cookbooks, for publications like Mademoiselle, House Beautiful, Town and Country, and Ladies Home Journal, where she served as food editor. It is from this journalistic angle that Cannon produced The Presidents' Cookbook (1968).

Hardly a gimmick to sell books to aspiring politicos, the volume offers a substantial essay on each president, from George Washington to Lyndon B. Johnson, detailing the food they ate and enjoyed, followed by, of course, recipes.

You’ll read about “the opulence and ostentation of” modern woman Julia Tyler, leading into “the severity and austerity of the Polks,” a cultural shift in presidencies in which “the pendulum didn’t merely swing—it leaped.” The Polks’ simple, ascetic recipes for bear steak, fried country ham with red gravy, and corn pone are indeed much less compelling than the Tylers’ turtle soup, caviar, pudding pie, and Champagne punch. 

Well-written with as much good humor as genuine insight, The Presidents' Cookbook is a good addition for the historian or the historical cook. Our copy’s book block is Near Fine, totally clean and unmarked. The jacket bears some chipping and wear with a small red sticker to the spine, but the handsome illustration by Wallace Tripp is happily unaffected.