Home » Presidential Palates: A Hidden History – Part 1

January 5, 2026Uncategorized

Presidential Palates: A Hidden History – Part 1

Before presidential meals became photo ops, they were shaped by survival, region, and habit. In Part One, we trace the favorite foods of America’s earliest presidents and discover how corn, salt fish, macaroni, and cherries reveal a young country still figuring out how to feed itself. These aren’t cute trivia facts. They’re clues to how power looked before anyone was watching. Then we chat with Speaker and Author Marissa Cohen!

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If you Google “U.S. presidents’ favorite foods,” you get lists. Clean ones. Bullet points. A portrait, a plate, and a punchline. George Washington liked hoecakes. Thomas Jefferson liked macaroni. Abraham Lincoln liked apples. And that’s usually where it ends, as if these facts exist in a vacuum, disconnected from time, place, labor, or consequence.

But food history doesn’t work like that. Food is never just preference. It’s geography. It’s economics. It’s technology. It’s who had access to ingredients, who cooked the meals, who preserved the food, and who never got credit for any of it. And when you talk about presidents, food becomes even more revealing, because for most of American history, the presidency was not surrounded by handlers, chefs, nutritionists, or media strategists. Presidents ate what they grew up eating. And what they grew up eating tells you exactly what kind of country America was at that moment.

Before there was a White House kitchen staff worth mentioning, before state dinners became diplomatic theater, there were presidents living in a nation that barely functioned. Roads were unreliable. Refrigeration did not exist. Ingredients were seasonal. Preservation meant salt, smoke, vinegar, or nothing. And the people doing most of the cooking were often enslaved, undocumented in official records, and essential to what we now label presidential taste.

George Washington’s favorite food is commonly cited as hoecakes. That’s not folklore. It shows up in multiple contemporaneous accounts and household records from Mount Vernon. Hoecakes were simple cornmeal flatbreads, sometimes cooked on a griddle, sometimes literally on the blade of a hoe over an open fire. Corn was cheap, plentiful, and resilient. Wheat flour was expensive and harder to store. Hoecakes weren’t rustic nostalgia. They were practical nutrition.

Washington also enjoyed fish, venison, and simple roasted meats, but corn-based foods appear again and again because corn defined early American survival. His enslaved cooks prepared these meals, drawing on African, Indigenous, and European techniques. Washington’s “favorite food” is inseparable from the labor and knowledge of people whose names rarely appear in history books.

John Adams’ tastes take us north. Adams loved salt cod, especially when served with potatoes and onions. This preference is well documented in letters between John and Abigail Adams, particularly during his long diplomatic postings in Europe. Salt cod was not fancy. It was preserved fish, dried and salted to survive months without spoiling. It was the backbone of New England’s maritime economy. Eating salt cod wasn’t just habit. It was regional identity.

When Adams ate salt cod in Europe, he wasn’t just eating dinner. He was eating home.

Thomas Jefferson is where food stops being invisible. Jefferson did not merely eat. He observed, collected, and documented. While serving as minister to France, Jefferson became enamored with European cuisine, especially Italian pasta dishes. His favorite was macaroni. He wrote about it. He sketched a macaroni-making machine. He imported pasta and molds back to Virginia. One of the earliest written recipes for macaroni and cheese in the United States appears in his papers.

Jefferson served macaroni at White House dinners deliberately. He believed food could educate taste, and taste could refine society. Serving macaroni was a way of signaling that the United States was cultured, enlightened, and capable of sophistication equal to Europe. His favorite food doubled as a political statement.

James Madison’s tastes were quieter but still revealing. Madison reportedly loved ice cream, especially strawberry. Ice cream in the early 19th century required ice houses, careful storage, and significant labor. Dolley Madison famously served ice cream at White House functions, helping popularize it among political elites. Madison’s enjoyment of ice cream wasn’t indulgence. It was a marker of technological and social change.

Up to this point, presidential food has been mostly invisible. It’s shaped by region, habit, and whatever could realistically be grown, preserved, or afforded. No one is curating an image. No one is trying to send a message. Presidents eat the way they were raised to eat.

But starting with the next generation, those differences begin to matter.

Because now you can compare presidents to each other. You can see who treats food as discipline, who treats it as comfort, and who treats it as proof that they are one of the people. These aren’t performances yet, but they are signals. And once you start noticing them, you can’t stop.

John Quincy Adams treated food as fuel. His diaries frequently mention simple meals, fresh fruit, and plain fare. Apples come up repeatedly. Adams believed excess dulled the mind. He swam in the Potomac daily and ate accordingly. His favorite foods reflected discipline, not pleasure.

Andrew Jackson’s favorite food is generally cited as boiled cabbage with bacon. It sounds bleak. It was not. It was filling, affordable, and familiar to Scots-Irish settlers. Jackson grew up poor on the frontier. He distrusted luxury and elite refinement. Boiled cabbage and bacon wasn’t just dinner. It was worldview.

Martin Van Buren represents a shift. Van Buren loved oysters, particularly raw oysters. In the 19th century, oysters were abundant and cheap, especially in New York City. They were street food. Sold from carts. Accessible to almost everyone. Van Buren’s favorite food reflects an America becoming urban and commercial, where cities mattered as much as farms.

William Henry Harrison’s presidency was too short to establish strong culinary lore, but his known tastes leaned toward corn-based dishes like hominy. John Tyler shared similar preferences. Corn, again, was survival.

James K. Polk preferred cornbread and buttermilk. This wasn’t performance. It was habit. Polk worked himself relentlessly as president and ate the way he always had. Simple. Familiar. Efficient.

And this is where something important happens. Up to this point, presidential food choices are almost entirely private. They are shaped by upbringing, region, access, and necessity. No one is crafting an image through food. No one is posing with plates. No one is trying to look relatable or tough or refined through what they eat.

But that is about to change.

Zachary Taylor’s favorite food is usually listed as fresh fruit, particularly cherries. That detail survives not because Taylor talked about it often, but because of how abruptly his presidency ended and how badly Americans wanted a reason.

Taylor was a career military officer who had spent decades eating whatever circumstances allowed. Hard bread, salted meat, rations eaten quickly and often without ceremony. By the time he became president in 1849, he was known for plain habits and little patience for indulgence. Fresh fruit was not a culinary statement. It was a rare pleasure. Something seasonal. Something you enjoyed when it was available because it would not be for long.

On July 4, 1850, Washington, D.C. was brutally hot. Taylor attended Independence Day celebrations that included a long ceremony at the Washington Monument grounds. According to multiple contemporary accounts, he consumed quantities of cherries and iced milk afterward. Within days, he became violently ill. Five days later, he was dead.

The timing was too neat. The story wrote itself.

Newspapers reported on the cherries. Friends and political enemies speculated. Some blamed spoiled fruit. Others blamed the milk, which would have been difficult to keep cold and safe in the July heat. Doctors at the time diagnosed “cholera morbus,” a catch-all term used for severe gastrointestinal distress that could be caused by food poisoning, contaminated water, or bacterial infection. Modern historians and physicians reviewing the case generally conclude that Taylor likely died from acute gastroenteritis, possibly worsened by dehydration and medical treatments of the era.

But that explanation has never fully satisfied people.

Taylor’s death was shocking. He had been in office just sixteen months. He was not known to be frail. He had survived wars, campaigns, and decades of hardship. And suddenly, he was gone. Americans were still learning how to process presidential mortality. There had only been one death in office before him, and that was William Henry Harrison, whose death had already become wrapped in myth and symbolism.

So food became the story.

The cherries were simple. Familiar. Visual. You could picture them. You could imagine the heat. You could imagine the indulgence. And most importantly, you could imagine control slipping. If a president could die from something as ordinary as fruit and milk, then the office itself felt more fragile than people wanted to admit.

Over time, the story hardened. It stopped being “Taylor fell ill after eating cherries and milk” and became “Taylor died because he ate cherries and milk.” That shift matters. One is chronology. The other is causation. And once causation enters the story, food stops being background detail and becomes narrative.

John Tyler, who succeeded Taylor, inherited more than the presidency. He inherited a public uneasy with the idea that something as small as a meal could end a presidency. Tyler himself had unremarkable tastes by historical standards, favoring traditional Virginia fare like corn-based dishes and preserved meats. But he now presided over a country primed to scrutinize the personal habits of its leader more closely than before.

Taylor’s cherries weren’t the first presidential food story, but they were the first one that lingered. Not because they were scandalous or theatrical, but because they sat at the intersection of mortality, mystery, and the limits of control. Food became the last thing a president touched. And that made it meaningful in a way it had not been before.

This is still not the age of food as messaging. No one staged this. No one curated it. But Americans were beginning to tell stories about presidents through what they ate, even when the facts were incomplete and the conclusions unfair.

What all of these stories have in common isn’t the food itself. It’s the absence of intention.

George Washington wasn’t trying to signal authenticity by eating hoecakes. John Adams wasn’t branding himself with salt cod. Thomas Jefferson wasn’t chasing relatability when he served macaroni. These were not performances. They were habits formed by geography, availability, and upbringing, carried all the way into the highest office in the country.

In early America, food didn’t explain who you were. It simply revealed it.

Corn shows up again and again not because it was symbolic, but because it worked. Salted fish mattered because it lasted. Fresh fruit felt luxurious because it was rare. Even Jefferson’s refined tastes were shaped less by showmanship than by genuine belief in improvement and education. These presidents ate the way the country ate. There was no distance yet between the office and the table.

And when something went wrong, like it did with Zachary Taylor, food didn’t become scandal or spectacle. It became story. A way for people to make sense of loss, vulnerability, and the unsettling truth that even the most powerful person in the country was still subject to heat, bacteria, and bad luck.

That’s the thread running through this first half of the presidency. Food as necessity. Food as habit. Food as quiet character evidence. Nothing curated. Nothing calculated. Nothing designed to be seen.

But that silence doesn’t last.

Because the country is about to change. Transportation improves. Newspapers expand. Photography spreads. Immigration reshapes taste. And presidents are no longer just people who eat. They become people who are watched while they eat.

The moment food becomes visible, it becomes usable.

And in the next episode, that shift accelerates. Favorite foods turn into symbols. Meals turn into messages. And the line between appetite and identity gets harder to see.

All of it sounds like trivia. All of it sounds harmless.

And all of it is real.

The Internet Says It’s True.