She ran the most sophisticated official kitchen in American history. Her favorite food was a hamburger. That gap between the exquisite public table and the genuinely private palate is the beginning of the most honest account of what Jacqueline Kennedy actually loved to eat.
The world knew the diplomatic menu. The pressed duck, the soufflés, the precisely calibrated wine pairings that she had developed with René Verdon for the state dinners that changed what official American hospitality looked like. These were genuinely hers. She had built them from knowledge and she maintained them from standards.
But the hamburger was also genuinely hers and the plain boiled potato and the cold chicken on a Sunday afternoon and the chocolate she kept in a specific drawer in every residence she ever occupied. And the French onion soup that connected her to a Paris bistro from the winter of 1949 and that she had never stopped wanting.
The private palate told a completely different story from the public one and it was in its way the more honest story. Here are 15 foods Jackie Kennedy loved that nobody expected. Fact one, the hamburger. Her most consistent private craving, she wanted a hamburger. Not a sophisticated interpretation, not a gourmet version with artisan components, a plain American hamburger cooked simply.
Served without elaboration, eaten at home in the private hours after the official schedule had finally ended. The household staff across different periods of her life, the White House years, the New York apartment, the Martha’s Vineyard house, described the same recurring request in the evenings when the kitchen was finally hers.
She had grown up eating this food in the summers at Hyannis Port and in the casual domestic life of the American upper class and she had loved it then with the uncomplicated pleasure of childhood eating. And she had never stopped loving it regardless of what the three years of diplomatic dining and the decades of sophisticated public food culture suggested she was supposed to be eating instead. She did not advertise this.
The The image was French and European and sophisticated and she had no interest in correcting the image. The image served its purposes but at home in the kitchen that was hers on the evenings when there was no image to maintain and no audience to perform for she ate what she actually wanted. The hamburger was a specific form of honestly.
It was the private self’s answer to the question of what she actually liked when the public self was not required to like the appropriate thing. Fact two, plain boiled potatoes. The simpler the better. Among the specific and unexpected preferences in Jackie Kennedy’s private eating life was a genuine and recurring affection for the plainest possible version of a food that French cooking tradition typically elaborate into some more complex.
She wanted the potato boiled correctly and served as itself. No butter, no cream, no sauce, nothing between the eater and the actual flavor of the thing. She’d encountered this food in its best version in France not in the grand restaurants where the potato was transformed but in the farmhouse kitchens and the simple bistros where a well-grown potato prepared honestly was served with the confidence of a cook who knew the ingredient was good enough to be the point rather than the vehicle for something else. The French farmhouse
understanding of the plain potato was that simplicity required the best ingredient. A properly grown potato boiled in salted water to the correct moment of doneness was genuinely delicious in a way that the American default variety prepared without attention was not. She had absorbed this distinction and applied it.
The right potato prepared correctly needed nothing added. She asked for it in private not at the state dinners those potatoes served entirely different functions in entirely different preparations in the private kitchen on the private evenings. She wanted the honest potato. The household staff who received the request treated it with the same seriousness they would have given to a more complex preparation because she expected the plain thing to be done well and the expectation was always correct.
Fact three, French onion soup. The food that went back to Paris. In 1949, the French onion soup that Jacqueline Kennedy loved throughout her adult life was not a casual food preference. It was a connection to a specific place and time, the Paris bistros of her student year, the winter of 1949 and 1950, when she had discovered what food could be when it was made from honest ingredients by people who took it seriously.
She had eaten French onion soup in those Paris bistros the way you eat something when you are young and discovering a city and everything in it feels like a revelation. And the revelation had stayed with her. The food carried the memory of who she had been at 20, the student, the person before the Kennedy marriage had organized everything around its requirements.
The woman who was learning what she actually was. She had the soup made in the White House when the schedule permitted a genuinely private dinner. She had it in the New York apartment. She had it on the vineyard. Wherever she was and wherever the kitchen could produce the correct version, the long caramelized onions, the good broth, the crouton, the Gruyère browned under the broiler, she wanted it.
The version that was not correct, she did not want. She knew what the correct version was and she had no interest in accepting the approximation. The soup had to be made properly or it was not the soup she was asking for. Fact four, cold roast chicken. She preferred it cold to hot. She liked cold chicken.
Not the dressed up preparations of the official kitchen, but the specific quality of a well-roasted chicken allowed to cool, eaten cold with good bread and perhaps a simple salad. The specific pleasure of cold roast chicken, which the French picnic tradition understood as one of the great simple pleasures of eating, was something she had absorbed in Paris and maintained as a private preference for the rest of her life.
The counterintuitive quality of the preference surprised people who encountered it because the logic of the formal table said that food should be served hot and that cold food was a compromise made necessary by circumstances rather than a preference worth pursuing. She had encountered the French understanding that certain foods were genuinely better cold, that the flavor of good chicken clarified and deepened as it cooled, that the texture of the meat was preferable at room temperature to the temperature of the
oven. That the whole experience of eating it cold was qualitatively different from the hot version in ways she valued. She ate it on the vineyard in the summer, the cold chicken from the previous evening’s roasting, taken out of the refrigerator and allowed to come to the right temperature, eaten with the bread she had sourced from the specific bakery she had found produced bread worth eating.
It was one of the most characteristic private meals of her vineyard summers, eaten outside when the weather permitted, with nobody to serve and nothing to manage. Fact five. Dark chocolate. Not the American kind. The chocolate that Jacqueline Kennedy kept in her apartment was not the American confectionery chocolate that the culture offered in abundance.
It was the dark chocolate of the French tradition, the high cocoa content, minimally sweetened version that the French had understood for generations as the form in which chocolate was actually good rather than the form in which it was merely sweet. She had a specific quality standard. The percentage mattered.
The sourcing mattered. The relationship between the intensity of the chocolate flavor and the residual sweetness mattered. She had arrived at this standard through the years of paying attention to what she liked. And what she liked turned out to be the version that was closest to the thing itself, the least processed, the least sweetened, the most honest version of what chocolate was.
She kept it in a specific drawer in the kitchen or pantry of every significant residence she occupied. Not displayed, not featured, simply present as one of the unremarkable facts of the domestic inventory, the specific thing she had decided she liked, maintained at the correct quality standard, available when she wanted it. She ate it in specific amounts at specific times, not the casual eating of someone grazing through a bag without attention, but the deliberate consumption of the specific thing she had decided was worth having
in the amount that the having required. The pleasure was specific to the quality, and she had no interest in the alternative. Fact six, ice cream. She ate it directly from the container. The ice cream that appeared in Jackie Kennedy’s domestic life was eaten in the specific and unremarkable way that people eat ice cream when nobody is watching.
Directly from the container, standing at the kitchen counter or the freezer, without the ceremony of a bowl and a spoon arranged for the purpose. The household staff at various properties described this with the warmth of people describing something that had made them genuinely fond of her, the first lady, the widow of the president, the woman the world considered the embodiment of elegance, eating ice cream from the container in her own kitchen in the way that ordinary people eat ice cream when they are in their own
kitchen, and the elegance is not required. She had a preference for vanilla, not the elaborate flavors or the sophisticated combinations, but the honest vanilla, the version that was what it said it was, made from ingredients that were the point rather than the disguise.
Good vanilla ice cream made correctly was one of her consistent private pleasures. The pleasure was in the informality as much as the ice cream itself. She had maintained an extraordinary level of public formality for most of her adult life. The ice cream directly from the container was the private life expressing itself in the specific way that small and unremarkable domestic informalities expressed the private self as the evidence that underneath the public person there was a human being with a freezer and a spoon
and the entirely normal desire to eat ice cream standing up. Fact seven, scrambled eggs. She made them herself and had strong views on the correct method. Among the small number of foods that Jackie Kennedy both genuinely loved and occasionally prepared herself, scrambled eggs occupied a specific position.
She had strong and specific views about how scrambled eggs should be made, rooted in the French method she had learned in Paris, rather than the American approach, and she was willing to make them herself when the alternative was having them made incorrectly. The French method she applied produced eggs that were nothing like the American scrambled egg of the conventional American breakfast.
The French version cooked slowly over very low heat, stirred continuously, removed from the heat well before they looked done, and allowed to finish cooking in the residual heat, produced a specific texture and richness that the high heat American approach did not produce. She had learned the method in Paris, and she had never been interested in the American version, which she found overcooked and dry by comparison.
When she made them herself, which was not often, the result was what she understood scrambled eggs to be. When the household kitchen was asked to produce them, she communicated the method with the specificity of someone who knew the difference between the method that was correct and the method that would produce the inferior version. The scrambled eggs were one of the small number of foods she considered worth the trouble of the correct preparation even in the most informal circumstances.
The trouble was a few minutes of continuous attention. The result was worth the attention. Fact eight. Caviar, she served miles of it and was largely indifferent to eating it. This fact belongs on the list not because she loved caviar, but because the indifference itself was unexpected. She had organized and hosted more caviar service than perhaps any other American host of the 20th century.
The state dinners of the Kennedy White House featured caviar with the frequency and quality that the diplomatic tradition required. She understood the food, knew how it should be served, directed its service with complete professional competence. She was not particularly interested in eating it. The friends who attended the formal events she organized and the private dinners where she was entirely herself described the same observation.
She would move past the caviar with the ease of someone who understood what was on the plate and had decided it was not what they were interested in eating. Not a refusal, not a performance of restraint, simply the honest expression of a preference that was different from what the social context most valorized. The luxury food that carried the most prestige on the official table was not the luxury food she loved privately.
She loved the plain potato. She loved the honest hamburger. She loved the French onion soup from the Paris bistro. The caviar was a professional tool, applied with professional precision in service of a professional purpose. The food she loved was something else entirely.
The indifference was itself informative. She had an eye that evaluated independently of prestige, and the evaluation sometimes produced the most unexpected results. Fact nine, melon with prosciutto. She ate it more consistently than any other starter. The combination of perfectly ripe melon and thinly sliced prosciutto was one of Jackie Kennedy’s most consistently chosen private appetizers across the decades of the New York years and the vineyard summers.
It appeared in her private meals with a regularity that the people who ate with her regularly described as characteristic. The specific Italian combination she had encountered during the travels of the Kennedy years, and had incorporated into the private eating life as one of the reliable pleasures of the table.
The requirement was quality in both elements. The melon had to be properly ripe, not the hard under-ripe melon of the supermarket supply, but the soft intensely flavored melon of the correct season at the correct moment of ripeness. The prosciutto had to be the genuine article, sliced thin enough to drape properly with the specific salty complexity that distinguished the real product from its approximations.
When both elements were correct, the combination was one of the simplest and most satisfying things available at the summer table. When either was wrong, she declined. The preference was always for nothing rather than the inferior version, a principle she applied to food as consistently as she applied it to everything else she cared about.
Fact 10, lobster bisque. She had strong views on who made it correctly. The lobster bisque that appeared in Jackie Kennedy’s private dining across the New York and Vineyard years was a food she had strong opinions about, held with the authority of someone who had eaten the correct version often enough to know immediately when the version in front of her was not it.
The correct version was rich, deeply flavored, produced from a stock that had been made from the shells with the patience the process required, finished with the cream and the brandy that the French tradition prescribed, served at the right temperature with the specific density that distinguish the bisque from the soup.
The incorrect version, thin, under-flavored, finished without the care the finishing required was not what she wanted. She had identified the restaurants in New York that made it correctly, and she returned to them specifically for it. She had the correct version made in the Vineyard house kitchen when the local lobster supply was at its best, and when the occasion warranted the preparation.
She did not accept the approximation when the correct version was within reach. The bisque was a food she associated with the best of the New England table, the specific combination of the French technique applied to the American ingredient that produced something genuinely both. She had found it in the cooking of the region she had spent summers in since childhood, and she had maintained the association for decades.
Fact 11, strawberries with crème fraîche, not whipped cream, never whipped cream. The strawberries she wanted were French strawberries when she was in France, the specific small, intensely flavored wild strawberries of the early French summer that bore a more concentrated relationship to the idea of strawberry than the commercial varieties that American agriculture had optimized for size and shelf life, rather than flavor.
In America, she wanted the best available approximation. The small, vine-ripened local strawberries of the Vineyard summer, picked when they were actually ripe. The accompaniment was crème fraîche, always, without exception, not the heavy American whipped cream that the conventional serving of strawberries in the American context suggested.
The crème fraîche, the French cultured cream, with its specific tang and its specific richness, was the correct accompaniment, and she had been specific about this since the Paris year had established for her what the correct accompaniment was. The distinction was meaningful. Whipped cream was sweet and bland and added nothing to the flavor of good strawberries, except sugar and volume.
The crème fraîche complemented Its slight acidity played against the sweetness of the fruit in a way that was genuinely more interesting than the whipped cream alternative. She had understood this from the first time she had eaten the combination correctly in France. And she had maintained the preference for the rest of her life.
Fact 12. Grilled sole. She ate it more than any other fish. The fish that appeared most consistently in Jackie Kennedy’s private eating across the decades of the New York and Vineyard years was sole, specifically the grilled version, prepared simply with lemon and perhaps a small amount of butter.
Nothing else competing with the specific delicate flavor of the fish itself. She had loved sole since France, where the preparation of fish, with the simple respect for the ingredient that the French tradition brought to the best ingredients had produced in her, the understanding that simplicity in fish cookery was not the absence of technique, but the highest expression of it.
The sole prepared correctly needed nothing added. The flavor was the point. The technique existed to bring the flavor to the table intact. She ate it frequently in the private domestic life, the simple dinner alone at the desk with whatever she was reading, the quiet family dinner on the Vineyard, and the informal meal with close friends when the meal was for the conversation rather than for the performance of sophistication.
The sole was simple enough to serve both purposes and good enough that simplicity was the correct choice. She had strong views about the fishmongers who supplied the Vineyard kitchen, as she had strong views about every supplier in every category she cared about. The fish had to be genuinely fresh. The freshness was the condition on which everything else depended.
Fact 13, champagne, the only alcohol she genuinely loved. She liked champagne, not in the performative way of someone whose public position required the appearance of enjoying the celebratory beverage. She liked it with the genuine pleasure of someone who had been educated in it in France at the right age and who had arrived at specific preferences within the category that reflected actual knowledge and actual taste.
She knew champagne. She had opinions about houses and vintages and the specific qualities that distinguish the excellent from the merely adequate. She drank it with the ease of someone for whom the pleasure was real rather than social. What she did not drink with any genuine interest was almost everything else.
The hard liquor that dominated the political and social world she inhabited. The wine that she was often seated beside at the official dinners she organized. The various cocktails that the 1960s party culture had made standard. She tasted what the occasion required and left most of it.
The champagne she actually drank. The specificity of the preference was itself revealing. She had not adopted champagne as the status beverage. She had arrived at it as the specific drink she liked within the broader category of available alcohol and she had stayed with it because it was the right thing rather than because it was the expected thing.
Fact 14, peanut butter. She ate it with the same private pleasure she ate the hamburger. Among the private food preferences of Jacqueline Kennedy that would have surprised the people who knew only the public version of her palate, peanut butter occupied a specific position. She ate it in the domestic private life with the ease and pleasure of someone for whom it had been a childhood comfort food and had remained a private pleasure throughout the adult years during which the public food identity
had moved in entirely different direction. She ate it in the simple ways on toast or occasionally directly from the jar in the private kitchen in the unhurried way that private eating permits, when nobody is watching and the pleasure requires no apology or justification. The pleasure was real, and it was entirely in contradiction with the image of the woman who had produced the most sophisticated official dining in American history.
Both things were true simultaneously. She had genuinely loved and genuinely understood the finest version of French cuisine, and she had genuinely loved peanut butter eaten at home in the private hours. The contradiction was not a contradiction. It was the honest portrait of a person who had a sophisticated public taste and an authentic private one, and who had never pretended that the private one was the same as the public.
She ate what she liked. What she liked was more varied and more human than the public image had ever suggested. Fact 15: A simple green salad done correctly. It was one of her greatest pleasures. The food that appeared most consistently across every period and context of Jackie Kennedy’s private eating was the simplest.
A green salad made correctly with the specific quality of dressing that the correct making required. She ate salads constantly in the private meals and at the desk lunches and in the domestic dinners with the children and with close friends. The salad she wanted was not complicated.
The leaves had to be fresh and correctly dried before dressing. The French technique of drying the washed leaves thoroughly before they met the oil was something she had learned in Paris and maintained because the dressing slid off wet leaves rather than coating them. The dressing had to be made correctly. Good olive oil of the specific quality she sourced specifically.
Good vinegar. The right proportions. The specific balance of acid and fat that the French vinaigrette produced when it was done with attention. Nothing else was required. A correctly made green salad with the correct dressing was, she had understood since Paris. Genuinely delicious, not as accompaniment, but as thing.
The French took salad seriously because the French took every food seriously when it was made from good ingredients by people who understood that making things correctly was the difference between food that was worth eating and food that was not worth eating. She had been eating correctly made green salads since she was 20 years old.
She had been eating them at almost every private meal since. The pleasure had not diminished across 40 years of eating them. This was the most honest food on the list. The simplest possible thing done correctly providing one of the most consistent pleasures of the private life. She had a sophisticated palate.
She had built it in France at 20 and exercised it at state dinners and at the private tables of the most interesting people of her era. And at the end of an ordinary Tuesday, what she wanted was the salad made correctly with the dressing done right. That was always who she was. If this video gave you something to think about, leave a like and subscribe.
There’s always more to the story. There’s always more to the story. There’s always more to the story.
