15 Weird Facts About Jackie Kennedy’s Most Private Food Habits – HT
She transformed what America served at the official table. What she did at her own table is almost entirely unknown. That gap between the exquisite public food and the private eating is one of the most characteristic facts about Jacqueline Kennedy and it has been almost entirely overlooked in the decades of documentation about who she was and how she lived.
The state dinner menus are preserved in the Kennedy Library. The chef’s techniques were written about in the press. The diplomatic significance of serving properly prepared French cuisine to heads of state was analyzed by everyone from food writers to foreign policy scholars. What she ate for breakfast on the morning of a state dinner she had spent a week organizing.
What she asked for on the evenings when the official calendar was finally empty and the meal was for nobody but herself. what she ate when she was grieving and what she craved when she was happy and what the small number of people who were ever inside her genuine private life said about the relationship with food that existed beneath the sophisticated public performance.
These things are almost entirely absent from the record. Not because they are not interesting, but because she kept them so thoroughly private that the people who could have described them either did not or chose not to. The accounts that exist are fragmentaryary. The fragments are consistent. Together they describe a person whose relationship with food was more complicated, more specific, and more revealing of the private self than the public record of the state dinners and the chef and the diplomatic menus has ever
suggested. Here are 15 weird facts about the most private food habits of Jaclyn Kennedy, what she ate when nobody was watching, and what the eating reveals about who she was when the cameras were gone. Fact one, she ate the same breakfast with the consistency of someone who had made a decision once and kept it.
There was no mystery about Jackie Kennedy’s breakfast. People who worked in her household across three different decades, the White House years, the New York years, the Martha’s Vineyard years described the same meal with the consistency of independent witnesses confirming the same fact.
A single cup of black coffee taken first before anything else. A softboiled egg, toast done lightly, orange juice. Nothing added, nothing subtracted, nothing changed. This was not the breakfast of a food person. It was the breakfast of a person who had decided that the morning meal served a specific function fueled the body efficiently before the day’s demands began and who had found the minimum effective means of accomplishing that function and saw no reason to revisit the decision.
She had removed the daily question of what to have for breakfast from the list of things she was allocating attention to. The decision had been made. The breakfast arrived. She moved on. The household staff understood quickly that the first lady’s breakfast was not a culinary opportunity. Renee Verdon, who ran one of the finest kitchens in official America, did not apply his skills to Jackie Kennedy’s Morning Egg.
The egg was softboiled. The toast was light. The coffee was black. These were not specifications. They were simply how it was, so consistent across years that they had become simply the way things were rather than instructions that needed repeating. She had arrived at the breakfast.
Through the same process, she arrived at everything she maintained long term. The elimination of alternatives until what remained was what worked. The breakfast worked. She kept it for 40 years. Fact two, she had a private relationship with French farmhouse food that almost nobody knew about. The public food identity of Jacqueline Kennedy was sophisticated in the specific and particular way of someone educated in French classical cuisine, the Escafier tradition, the formal restaurant and state dinner
preparation, the precise and technically demanding food of the Grandmasons. This was the food of the White House dining room, and it was real. She knew it. She had built the kitchen around it. She had opinions about it. What almost nobody knew was her equally genuine relationship with the other French food tradition, the farmhouse cooking of the French countryside, the simple ingredient-driven preparations of the provincial French table that had nothing to do with classical technique, and everything to do with the quality of
what grew in the garden and what the market offered that morning. She had encountered this tradition during her Paris year. Not in the grand restaurants where the classical technique was on display, but in the smaller places, the neighborhood beastro, the meals in private homes, the food of ordinary French life that treated simplicity as a form of sophistication rather than its absence.
She had loved it with the specific love of someone discovering that the most basic version of something can also be its best version. In private across her entire adult life, she returned to this food with a consistency that her professional obligations to the more elaborate tradition did not diminish. The roast chicken done properly with good bread and good butter and vegetables that were what they were without being transformed into something else.
The simple fish, the honest soup. She ate this food in the private evenings with the pleasure of someone coming home to something they had always loved and the contrast with the elaborate productions downstairs. was one of the most characteristic things about the gap between her public and private life. Fact three, she ate almost nothing for months after the assassination and it was never discussed publicly.
The accounts from people who were close to Jaclyn Kennedy in the weeks and months following November 22nd, 1963 describe a woman who had in the aftermath of the trauma largely stopped eating in any meaningful sense. Her mother Janet Aenclaus who was present in the immediate period. her sister Lee Radzoil, Robert Kennedy who checked on her daily, the household staff who prepared meals and watched them be removed largely untouched.
All of them described the same thing. She was functioning. She was managing the funeral, receiving the heads of state who came to pay their respects, conducting the Theodore White interview, organizing the move out of the White House, doing everything that needed to be done. She was not eating.
The meals that were brought to her were reasonable meals, the kind of food that the people around her thought might reach her, that were simple enough not to require engagement with the idea of appetite, that represented the best judgment of people who were trying to take care of someone who was not in a condition to take care of herself.
The plates went away largely as they had arrived. The food was beside the point in a way that nothing in her previous relationship with food had prepared anyone around her to manage. She came back. Over months, gradually the routine reasserted itself. The breakfast appeared and was eaten. The midday meal became a reality again. The evening dinner returned.
But the people who had watched the period of withdrawal described it with the specific weight of something they had not known how to address and had not forgotten. She had been fed by grief for months. The food had waited. Fact four. She had a secret weekly ritual of cooking for herself that almost always failed badly.
Among the fragments of private information about Jackie Kennedy’s food habits that reached the biographical record through the accounts of people close to her, one of the most unexpected was this. She attempted to cook for herself periodically and the attempts were consistently and sometimes dramatically unsuccessful.
She had the knowledge. She could describe the preparation of a proper casslet with the authority of someone who had eaten the correct version in the correct place and understood what had made it correct. She could discuss the timing and the temperature and the specific technique required for a properly executed booya base with the precision of a person who had been paying serious attention to serious food for 30 years.
She could distinguish between what had gone wrong and what had gone right in a professional kitchen with the confidence of genuine expertise. She could not translate any of this into the actual production of food in her own kitchen. The gap between the knowledge and the execution was total, and it was consistent, and it had been present since the first time she had attempted to apply what she knew to what she was standing over at a stove.
The people in her household who were responsible for the actual production of food, understood this, and responded to her occasional ventures into the kitchen with the specific patience of people managing a situation that was going to resolve itself through the application of competent help.
The meals she produced were edible in the sense that they were not actively dangerous. They were not what her knowledge suggested they should be. She found this genuinely funny. The precise and total gap between what she knew food should taste like and what she produced when she attempted to make it was one of the things she was willing to laugh at about herself in the dry and specific register that constituted her private humor.
She kept trying periodically and the periodic failure was consistent enough to have become among the small group of people who knew about it simply one of the true and characteristic things about her. Fact five, she had strong and specific views about bread that she maintained regardless of who was watching the French relationship with bread.
The understanding that bread is not an accompaniment to food, but a category of food that deserves the same quality and attention as anything else on the table was one of the things Jackie Kennedy had absorbed during her Paris year and never released. She had opinions about bread, specific, consistent, uncompromising opinions that she maintained in every context where bread was served and that she acted on in the way she acted on every other strong preference.
quietly, without explanation, without negotiation. She wanted bread that was actually bread, the specific quality of a properly made French baguette, the crust that cracked when bent, the interior with its irregular crumb structure that was the evidence of proper fermentation, the specific flavor that the slow rise produced in the grain was her standard, and the standard had been set in Paris, and it had not moved in the decades since.
American bread by this standard frequently failed. Not all of it. She had identified the specific bakeries in New York and on the vineyard that produced bread she considered worth eating. And she was loyal to them with the same loyalty she gave to the hairdresser who understood her hair and the dress makers who understood her body.
But the default bread of the American table, the soft and yielding white bread of the 1960s and 70s that the culture treated as normal was not something she ate with any pleasure. The state dinners had proper bread because she had ensured they had proper bread. The private table had proper bread because she had found the sources for it and maintained the relationships with those sources.
The American cultural context offered her a different standard and she declined it politely and permanently. Fact six, she kept specific foods in her desk at the White House that nobody on the official staff was supposed to know about the discipline that governed Jackie Kennedy’s official eating the minimal breakfast.
the compressed or skipped lunches. The state dinners where she ate almost nothing was the public version of her relationship with food. The private version included specific food she kept in the White House residence for the hours when the official schedule was done and the official feeding arrangements were not the right instrument for what she actually needed.
The household staff who worked in the residence rather than the official White House kitchen described in accounts preserved in the biographical record a first lady who maintained a separate and private supply of specific foods that were hers. Specifically, not household food, not food for events, but the particular things she wanted available when she wanted them, independent of the official kitchen schedule and the official staff’s knowledge.
These included, by different accounts, dark chocolate of the specific kind she preferred, high cocoa content, minimal sweetness, the French tradition rather than the American one. Fresh fruit that she ate between meals with the simplicity of someone for whom the fruit was a meal rather than a garnish. Specific cheeses that the official kitchen did not stock because they were personal rather than diplomatic.
She had organized a private larter within the public household. This was not a breach of any protocol or a misuse of any resource. The items were hers acquired privately and maintained privately. It was simply the expression of the same principle she applied to everything in the residence.
The private life required private provisions and the private provisions were her business and not the official kitchens. Fact seven, she ate differently. when she was working intensely and had a specific system for the long days, the long days of the White House years. The days that began with an official breakfast and moved through multiple events and ended with a state dinner after midnight required a specific approach to eating that bore almost no relationship to the ordinary daily routine.
She had developed a system for these days that the household staff who observed it described as unusual and consistent. On the long official days, she ate in advance. The morning of a state dinner, she organized a genuinely adequate breakfast larger than the usual softboiled egg routine substantial enough to provide the foundation for a day that was going to make normal eating impossible.
She ate this preparatory breakfast with the practical attitude of someone fueling for a specific and demanding task rather than eating because it was morning and morning meant breakfast. Through the day of the event, she ate very little, deliberately, not from deprivation, but from the understanding that heavy eating in the hours before a long evening would compromise the quality and the energy of the performance the evening required.
A piece of fruit, something light enough to maintain function without creating the sluggishness that heavier food produces in the hours after. And after the state dinner was over, when the guests had finally gone and the official obligation was completed, she ate something real. The kitchen knew to have it ready.
The specific content varied, but the character of it was consistent. The simple, restorative food of someone who had been performing all day and was now finally feeding herself. The preparation was professional, and the eating was private, and the combination was, by the accounts of people who observed it, one of the most entirely herself moments in the official day.
Fact eight, she had a specific and almost ritualistic relationship with tea in the late afternoon. The tea that Jacqueline Kennedy made a ritual of in the late afternoon, in the White House years, in the New York years, in the years on Martha’s Vineyard was one of the most consistent features of her private daily life, and one of the least documented.
It was not the English formal tea with its elaborate staging. It was something more personal than that, a specific pause in the day, taken alone or with one person she had chosen to be with. At the hour when the afternoon light changed and the day turned toward evening, she had developed the ritual.
by the accounts of people who observed it across different periods of her life as a genuine form of daily restoration rather than a social convention. The tea was a signal the working day had a break in it here at this hour and this break was for a specific quality of quiet that the rest of the day structure did not accommodate.
She was particular about the tea itself. Not ceremonially particular, not in the way the tea enthusiasts catalog types and origins, but in the practical way of a person who had found the specific thing she liked and wanted that thing rather than the generic version of it. She preferred a specific type of tea prepared in a specific way.
And the preparation mattered in the way that the preparation of anything she cared about mattered. Not because she was a perfectionist about tea for its own sake, but because the correct version was genuinely better than the incorrect one. and she had no interest in the incorrect version when the correct one was available.
The ritual held across every context she inhabited in the White House, in the New York apartment, on the vineyard, on the Christina during the Onasis years. The afternoon shifted, the light changed, the tea appeared. It was one of the small number of daily constants that survived every other change in her life.
Fact nine, she ate at her desk more often than she ate at a table during the working years. The editors and colleagues who worked with Jacqueline Kennedy Onasses at Double Day across the 1980s and early 90s described a consistent feature of her working day that distinguished her from most of the publishing professionals around her.
She ate at her desk, not occasionally, not when the schedule made it necessary, but as a matter of preference and practice that the schedule accommodated rather than imposed. The long editorial lunch the New York Publishing Institution, the hours at good restaurants, where deals were made and relationships were maintained and the social structure of the industry was reproduced across generations was something she participated in selectively when the specific purpose warranted it.
When the purpose did not specifically warrant it, she was at her desk with something brought from the cafe on the ground floor, eating while she read, treating the meal as a brief biological interruption to the work rather than a social event that interrupted it. Her colleagues noted this without fully understanding it.
She was not antisocial in the contexts where she was engaged in genuine conversation. The editorial discussions about manuscripts. She cared about the lunches with authors. She was genuinely curious about the small dinners with the close friends who were part of her actual private life. She was fully present and genuinely enjoyable to be with.
The desk lunch was not avoidance. It was priority management. She had always treated food as something that served a purpose. The purpose at the lunch hour on a working day at double day was to maintain the energy required to read manuscripts and develop authors and do the work she was there to do. The desk accomplished that purpose.
The long restaurant lunch accomplished other purposes that she valued less in that specific context. Fact 10. She had a strong private opinion about the difference between good olive oil and bad olive oil. And she did not keep the opinion to herself in private. The Onasses, years the time spent on the Greek islands, on the Christina, in the specific Mediterranean food culture that Aristotle Onases’s world inhabited, introduced Jackie Kennedy to aspects of the food tradition she had not fully encountered before. Greek food
at its best is simple in the specific way that the best food is simple. The quality of the primary ingredient is the whole of the dish and the preparation exists to let the ingredient be exactly what it is rather than to transform it into something else. Olive oil was the primary instance of this.
The quality differential between a genuinely good olive oil, fresh, properly stored, from the right olives at the right moment of harvest, and the generic product that the American food culture of the era treated as a single interchangeable category was to a pallet educated enough to detect it. Total she detected it. She had strong views about olive oil.
These views were not widely shared in the American food world of the 1960s and early ‘7s, which had not yet arrived at the understanding of olive oil quality that Italian and Greek producers had been working with for centuries. She was in this, as in the related domains of wine and cheese and bread, applying a European standard to an American context that had not yet developed the same understanding.
She found sources for the olive oil she considered acceptable. She used it in the private cooking and in the private salads and in the simple preparations of the vineyard summers with the emphasis of a person for whom the quality of the ingredient was the point of the food. She expressed the opinion in private to the small number of people she ate with regularly with the directness she brought to every opinion she had formed carefully and held firmly.
The opinion was accurate. It was simply ahead of its time in the American context. Fact 11. She had a ritual of eating alone that she considered one of her private pleasures among the private food habits that the fragments of available evidence describe. One of the most unexpected is the regularity with which Jaclyn Kennedy chose to eat alone.
Not from necessity, not because the schedule had produced an empty evening, but as a deliberate choice that she had arrived at as one of the genuine pleasures of a private life she had worked hard to build. She ate alone with a book, the specific combination, a genuinely good, simple meal. The book she was currently reading, the specific quality of solitary focus that the combination produced was described by people who knew her private habits as one of the clearest expressions of what she was actually
like when the performance requirements of public life were entirely absent. She was a person of deep intellectual appetite who had spent large portions of her adult life in social contexts that the role required. But that did not fully satisfy the part of her that needed the kind of engagement that only solitude and a good book provided.
The solitary meal was the recovery from the social demands. The return to the self that the social performance covered. The food she ate in these solitary meals was characteristically simple. Good food prepared correctly that did not require the attention that elaborate food requires. The attention was for the book.
The food was the sustenance that allowed the reading to continue. She had organized the meal to serve the reading rather than the other way around. And the combination of good, simple food and good demanding books, eaten and read alone in the quiet of her own space was one of the things she specifically valued about the private life she had built.
Fact 12. She taught her children to cook one dish each and made it a ceremony. The cooking that Jacqueline Kennedy did not do well for herself. She made a deliberate project for her children. She believed that Caroline and Jon should each know how to make one dish properly. Not the full range of culinary competence, not the professional standard she applied to everything in the official kitchen, but one single thing made correctly with the understanding of why each step mattered and what the correct result was
supposed to be. The dish she chose for each child was simple by design and French by inclination. The specific dishes varied by account, but the character of them was consistent. A simple French preparation that could be made from accessible ingredients that had a correct version which was genuinely better than the incorrect one and that would serve the child across their entire life as the one thing they could produce at home for other people and know it was right.
The teaching was conducted with the specific ceremony she brought to things she considered genuinely important to transmit. She was in the kitchen with them. She explained not just what to do but why the reason for each step. The connection between the technique and the result. The understanding that made the doing of it meaningful rather than mechanical.
She wanted them to understand what good food was and why it mattered. Not because she expected them to cook professionally but because she believed that understanding what good food was formed a relationship with the physical world that she wanted them to have. Both children grew up understanding what good food was. The ceremony of the single dish had accomplished what she intended.
She had given them a standard and the understanding of it, which was what she always gave the people she loved, not the thing itself, but the knowledge of what the thing should be. Fact 13. Her relationship with food changed significantly after Patrick died. The loss of Patrick Bouvier Kennedy, born on August 7th, 1963, 5 1/2 weeks premature.
live for 39 hours was the third pregnancy loss of Jackie Kennedy’s marriage and the one that the oral history suggests affected her most completely. The specific texture of how she processed the grief was not discussed publicly in any detail. The fragments that exist in the private record include, among other things, the observation from people close to her in the weeks following Patrick’s death that her relationship with food had shifted.
She had always been disciplined about eating. In the weeks after Patrick, the discipline became something else. A more deliberate, more conscious attention to the physical routine as a way of maintaining the structure that grief was threatening to dissolve. She ate more carefully, more intentionally, as though the simple acts of preparing food and consuming it were a form of holding on to the ordinary life that the loss was pulling away from.
The people who observed this described it differently from the withdrawal she had experienced after other losses. After the Bay of Pigs, after the early White House difficulties, after the various strains of the first years, she had withdrawn from food. After Patrick, she moved toward it toward the specific domestic acts of the table, the preparation, and the eating as a form of the same comfort that the Greeks and the Irish and every other culture that has thought carefully about grief have understood food to provide. The White
House years had a specific quality in the months between Patrick’s death in August and the Dallas trip in November that the people in the household described as changed. She was more present in the domestic life. She was more present at the table. The loss had pulled something toward the center that the official life had kept at the periphery. Fact 14.
She had one rule about dinner parties that she never broke. Among the specific practices that governed the private dinner parties Jaclyn Kennedy hosted in her New York years, the small, carefully chosen gatherings of genuinely interesting people that were one of the things she valued most about the private life she had built.
One rule was absolute and never varied. The food had to be good, not elaborate, not impressive in the demonstrative sense of food designed to communicate the host’s resources or sophistication. Good. actually genuinely carefully prepared food that was worth eating and that the people eating it would notice and appreciate and remember.
She had understood from the French education and from decades of giving and attending social events across the full spectrum from state dinners to kitchen table meals that the quality of the food at a dinner party was a form of respect for the guests. Not respect in the showy expensive way of a host displaying resources.
respect in the genuine way of a person who has paid attention to what good food is and has made the effort to produce it as a specific expression of the value they place on the presence of the people who are coming. She would not serve bad food to people she had invited to her table. This was not about the cost of the food or the elaborateness of the preparation.
A properly made simple dish served at the right temperature at the right moment was better than an elaborate dish executed carelessly. She knew the difference and she applied the knowledge. The dinners she gave in the New York years were by the accounts of the people who attended them memorable for exactly this reason.
The food was consistently and genuinely good. Not impressive, not showy, but good in the way that careful attention and good judgment produce. She had cooked none of it or very little of it. She had applied her standard to the production of it, which was the same thing she applied to everything she cared about. Fact 15.
The private food life was the most honest record of who she was when nobody was watching. The public food identity of Jacqueline Kennedy, the state dinners, the sophisticated menus, the French trained chef, the diplomatic meals that changed what official America understood about food and hospitality was real and it was significant.
And it produced effects that are still visible in the American food culture five decades later. She built something. It mattered. But the private food life was where she actually lived. The softboiled egg every morning. The desk lunch with the manuscript. The French onion soup on the Tuesday evenings when the schedule finally left her alone.
The dark chocolate kept privately in the apartment. The proper bread sought out from the bakeries that could produce it. The tea at the turning of the afternoon. The simple farmhouse food she had loved since Paris eaten in private with the unguarded pleasure that the public performance never permitted.
The private food life had none of the architecture of the official one. It was not organized around diplomatic function or political image or the sophisticated statement about American culture that the state dinners were organized around. It was organized around what she actually wanted, what she had actually loved since Paris and since childhood, what the body actually needed, and what the spirit actually responded to.
She was in private a simpler eater than the public record suggests and a more specific one. She had strong preferences and she maintained them. She had pleasures that were her own and she protected them. She ate the food that connected her to the things she had loved the Paris year, the French countryside, the specific pleasures she had carried across a life that had been in so many other ways organized around other people’s requirements.
The food was the private self. The private self ate simply and well and alone with a good book and with the specific foods she had loved since she was 20 years old in Paris. And that at the end of 40 years of the most public life in America was the most honest thing left to say about her. She had fed the world. She had also quietly and privately and entirely on her own terms fed herself.
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