The Favorite Foods of the U.S. Presidents.
President’s Day invites the usual tributes, portraits, speeches, a few furniture discounts, but the most revealing museum might be the dinner table. Follow the menus and you can trace a country finding its palate, from hearth-cooked cornmeal to stadium-food swagger. Consider this a guided tasting, part history, part kitchen tour, ending with our pick for the single best all-American comfort food.
Start where the republic starts, with griddle and grain. George Washington favored hoecakes, cornmeal pancakes slicked with butter and honey. Abraham Lincoln swore he could put away corn cakes faster than two cooks could flip them. Practical, unpretentious, built to feed a frontier family, early America tasted like cast iron and corn.
Then Thomas Jefferson opened the windows. After years in France he brought back a taste for fine things, pasta machines, “potatoes fried in the French manner,” and the custardy elegance we now call French vanilla ice cream. Give him a long enough dinner and he would likely argue mac and cheese into the canon too. In a nation learning to entertain, Jefferson made the case that comfort could be cosmopolitan.
Not every craving aged well. Martin Van Buren toasted Christmas with boar’s head. William Henry Harrison stumped with squirrel stew. Chester Arthur reportedly dined on turtle steak. We’ll pass. But the middle of the 19th century is not all curiosities. Zachary Taylor’s New Orleans rice fritters, puffy powdered-sugar calas you eat warm, feel downright modern. So does Andrew Jackson’s tenderloin with Jezebel sauce, a sweet hot Southern glaze of fruit preserves, mustard, and horseradish made for pork.
Industrial America eats heartier. Ulysses S. Grant liked rice pudding. Rutherford B. Hayes loved corn. James K. Polk kept returning to ham and cornbread. Grover Cleveland leaned Irish with corned beef and cabbage. Theodore Roosevelt charged straight at fried chicken, a choice that needs no explanation. William Howard Taft opened most days with steak before a doctor begged him to halve the portion.
By the 20th century the country turns into itself and discovers the diner. Woodrow Wilson had a thing for Virginia country ham. Warren Harding for sausage with sauerkraut. Calvin Coolidge for jelly roll. Franklin Roosevelt for grilled cheese, and a famous hot dog summit with the British royal family. Dwight Eisenhower cooked beef stew that tasted like a weekend cabin, while Harry Truman poured sorghum over cornbread, sweetness with a twang.
Television and highways turned us into snackers. Ronald Reagan rarely traveled without Jelly Bellys. George H. W. Bush reached for pork rinds with hot sauce. Bill Clinton’s one dish for the time capsule was chicken enchiladas, Tex-Mex comfort wrapped in cheese. George W. Bush was linked to cheeseburger pizza, although Tex-Mex is the truer shorthand. Barack Obama’s signature bowl was chili, Midwestern and communal, equally at home at a cookoff or a kitchen table.
And the recent presidents? Donald Trump is documented McDonald’s, all speed and sameness. Joe Biden is unabashedly ice cream, cone in hand, kid at heart.
So what are the top presidential favorites that still sing today? Jefferson’s French vanilla ice cream, Jackson’s pork with Jezebel sauce, Taylor’s calas, FDR’s grilled cheese, Eisenhower’s beef stew, Truman’s cornbread with sorghum, LBJ’s Texas barbecue, Obama’s chili, and TR’s fried chicken. Each one is a postcard from a different America. Together they read like a family album.
Now for the single best. Chili is a warm handshake. Fried chicken is fireworks. Both are easy to love and hard to beat. But if you ask what food most reliably gathers a crowd, travels well, pleases toddlers and governors, and tastes like a Saturday night from Little League to late night, our pick… FRIED CHICKEN.
Call it the State of the Plate. From hoecakes to hot dogs, from jelly beans to jelly roll, the presidential menu is less about elitism than appetite, what feeds a people at a given moment. This year, raise a slice, or a drumstick, to the past and the palate it built. America, it turns out, tastes like a party.