The Unique Dinner Eleanor Roosevelt Served Every Sunday At The White House

Both Eleanor Roosevelt and her husband Franklin (POTUS #32, if anyone's counting), grew up very wealthy, so you'd think they'd have developed a taste for living high on the hog. While it seems FDR did, in fact, hanker after champagne and caviar, his spouse really wasn't all that interested in food. She was more of an eat-to-live rather than live-to-eat person, you might say, which makes it kind of ironic that she was First Lady under the administration that enshrined gluttony's big holiday, Thanksgiving, as a fixture on the fourth Thursday of November. Despite her preference for simple food, most of what Eleanor ate was likely prepared by others, but she did have one party piece she was able to cook: scrambled eggs.

By cook, we don't mean that she did much of the prep work. In fact, the necessary ingredients — eggs, cream, salt, and pepper — were brought to the dining room by a butler. She'd stir them together in a chafing dish, thus impressing the guests with her cooking skills. She's said to have performed this domestic gesture throughout her husband's tenure in the Oval Office. Needless to say, the rest of the meal, which may have included dishes such as chicken à la king, sausages, salad, and dessert, was prepared in the White House kitchens.

Fun fact about Eleanor Roosevelt's scrambled egg suppers: They were referred to by the unappetizing sobriquet of "scrambled eggs with brains." While this ingredient wasn't included in the mix, calves' brains do have a similar texture, so this would have been a good way to disguise them. The name, however, referred to the intelligentsia invited to sit at the table.

Whether or not Franklin Roosevelt would have liked a more luxurious standard of living once he was elected president, he unfortunately took office when the Great Depression was well underway. For some reason (perhaps he'd lost a bet?), he'd told Eleanor that she could select the White House staff herself and he'd abide by her decision, but he soon came to regret the impact it had on his meals. Her pick for White House housekeeper, a woman named Henrietta Nesbitt, didn't actually do the cooking. Still, she had sufficient say over the menus to make sure they included foods that made the president miserable.

To give Nesbitt her due, she was acting in concert with Eleanor Roosevelt's ambition to have the White House kitchen set the tone for the nation, and it was the First Lady's belief that meals should be healthy, plain, easy to make, and cheap (no more than seven and a half cents per serving). Flavor was not a concern of hers, so the menu in those days consisted of such dubious dishes as fried liver, boiled calf's head soup, shrimp wiggle, and sweetbreads, with prune pudding to end the meal. (Needless to say, this didn't make our list of favorite presidential desserts, since FDR preferred a nice cheese plate.) Come to think of it, those scrambled egg Sundays were probably the bright spot in an otherwise unpleasant week. Nonetheless, the president kept his promise. No matter how dismal his dinners, Mrs. Nesbitt stayed in her position until Bess Truman gave her the boot.