ABOUT POTUSPLATE

Presidents had to eat, too.

They had guests to feed, favorite dishes, cooks with opinions and occasionally rather complicated dinners. We wanted to know what was on the table. Then we wanted to eat it.

That is PotusPlate. Choose a president. Cook his dinner. With groceries from Costco.

The White House connection. Your grocery cart.

This is the whole idea: find a presidential meal you want to eat, pick up ordinary groceries and make it in your own kitchen. Chicken, potatoes, cheese, eggs, a bag of frozen peas. The interesting part is what you do with them and the story behind the meal.

Costco is our shorthand for that ordinary shopping trip. Your local supermarket works just as well. The recipes name ingredients and quantities, so you can choose the brand, buy what you need and use what is already in the fridge. No particular product or membership is required.

You can spend an evening reading about the people who lived in the White House. You can also spend part of it making their macaroni, stew or picnic lunch. Food gives you a useful way into history: ingredients, habits, money, hospitality and the work of the people in the kitchen all end up on the same plate.

The interesting bits are in the details.

Take Roosevelt’s royal picnic. The surviving 1939 menu really does list hot dogs. Beside them, somebody crossed out a condition about the weather. It also lists green salad and strawberry shortcake. There is a perfectly good meal there, and you don’t need a visiting king to justify making it.

Or look at Lincoln’s second inaugural ball. The menu gives us turkey, salads, ice cream and an extraordinary amount of choice. We reduce it to a supper that fits a home kitchen. The original document stays linked on the page, so you can see what we kept and what we left to the nineteenth-century caterers.

These small details are why we bother with the research. A vague “presidential favorite” gives you very little to work with. A dated menu, a recipe sent from the White House or a visitor’s account gives you something worth cooking and talking about.

We follow the food through the records.

For the dinner collection, we worked through material from presidential libraries, the National Archives, the Library of Congress, historic houses and institutions connected with the events. That includes scanned menus, published diary excerpts, recipe correspondence and accounts that explain the occasion.

The evidence varies. A menu tells us what was offered; it does not tell us that the president loved every course. A family recipe tells us something about the household. An account of a garden or a regional food tradition helps us reconstruct a plausible table when a complete dinner was never written down.

We make those distinctions beside the food. Each full dinner has a short explanation of what the record supports and links to the relevant sources. You can follow the paperwork as far as you like, or go straight to the shopping list.

Then there is the small matter of cooking it.

An old menu is not much help when your potatoes are boiling over. We turn the historical connection into quantities, temperatures, steps and a cooking order. The dinner plans tell you what to prepare ahead, when to start the main course and how to get the sides ready at the same time.

Sometimes the sensible change is obvious. A supermarket chicken makes Washington’s recorded goose dinner much easier to attempt. Ford’s state dinner becomes a smaller roast with straightforward vegetables and a peach-and-raspberry dessert. We explain those changes. You should know what you are making before you buy the ingredients.

Our recipes are written for modern home kitchens. These edited versions have not yet been kitchen-tested; we don’t put a “tested” badge on something nobody has cooked. Use the stated temperature and texture checks, and allow for the size of your ingredients and the behavior of your oven.

There is more here than the White House.

PotusPlate also brings back recipes from our older FDR Recipes site. We have edited the English, clarified the methods and added practical notes. That collection includes everyday dishes, microwave and steamer recipes, and food from other traditions under Recipes from America’s Friends. The cuisine is identified on each recipe. Good food can travel without losing its name.

The dinner builder lets you compare portions and calorie estimates for familiar American dishes. Its numbers use USDA reference foods; they are not a nutrient analysis of every recipe on this site. If you want to know how the estimates work, the calorie guide explains them.

Who is this for?

Home cooks who want an idea for Saturday dinner. History readers who wonder what daily life actually tasted like. People putting together a themed supper. Anyone who has looked at a presidential banquet and thought: fine, but what did they eat?

You don’t need to admire every president to be interested in his table. And you certainly don’t need his budget. Start with something you would enjoy eating, read its story and put the ingredients on your next Costco list. That is a Saturday dinner sorted.

PotusPlate is an independent cooking project, unaffiliated with Costco, the White House or presidential libraries. Advertising may help pay for the site. Privacy and cookies.