A Cookbook, Two Cooks and a President

Today, instead of Secret Service agents and Congressional bigwigs and polio victims seeking the soothing 88◦F water of the warm springs, you’ll mostly find history buffs like me detouring off highway 27 and driving the winding 8-mile ridge road from Pine Mountain to the Little White House.

On my way to Warm Springs, Georgia that morning, the fog hung cotton-candy thick in the air, enough to keep most souls snuggling under the bed covers. But I was a pilgrim of a sorts and so I got in the car and I went.

Now, before I tell you about the cookbook, it’s true that Warm Springs, Georgia is not a place that rings a lot of bells these days. Its most famous resident – Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) – passed away there in April of 1945, while sitting for a portrait painted by a Russian-born Republican artist named Elizabeth Shoumatoff. All in all, FDR spent about two years and a few months in his beloved Little White House, soaking up the warmth of nearby springs, balm to his paralyzed legs and his sometimes exhausted soul, allowing him a bit of respite from his fight against the Great Depression and Fascism in Europe. The poverty of the area’s inhabitants inspired FDR to create many of the New Deal Programs, including the Rural Electrification Program, inspired in part by his first electric bill for the Little White House, higher than that for his Hyde Park mansion!

Today, instead of Secret Service agents and Congressional bigwigs and polio victims seeking the soothing 88^◦F water of the warm springs, you’ll mostly find history buffs like me detouring off highway 27 and driving the winding 8-mile ridge road from Pine Mountain to the Little White House.

Incessant, cold rain forced me to forego a tour of the azalea-saturated gardens. Instead, I dashed into the side entrance of the whitewashed three-bedroom cottage, its front entryway flanked by columns similar to the White House in the nation’s capital city.

There I stood, in a small, stark kitchen, dark with wood paneling, lit by a single light bulb and a large window. A white Westinghouse stove with four “eyes’ straddled the yellowed linoleum floor. It shocked me a bit, I admit, to think that from this kitchen emerged food that fed one of the most powerful men in the world.

On the wall just above the stove, barely legible after all these years, were some penciled words: “Daisy Bonner cook the 1^st meal and the last one in this cottage for the President Roosevelt.” FDR’s cook, Daisy Bonner, scrawled that sentence there on the day he died in his narrow twin bed, only a few yards from where she stood, the cheese soufflé she’d prepared for his lunch collapsing on the counter and turning cold.

But there’s something else here, something that you don’t often find in most kitchens at historic sites. Just to the right of the wall sporting Daisy’s note, a rather large pantry looms behind a glass partition. Propped up on the long second shelf, sandwiched between various pieces of cooking equipment, sat a cookbook, Southern Cooking, a best-selling cookbook published in 1928 by Mrs. S. R. Dull, née Henrietta (“Hennie”) Celestia Stanley. Worn, its spine broken, pages stained, that cookbook furnished Daisy with over 1300-plus recipes to choose from as she cooked FDR’s favorite dishes, among them Brunswick Stew, Country Captain, and Black Nut Cake.

Henrietta’s cookbook sold over 250,000 copies all over the country. So popular was it that the University of Georgia Press reissued it in 2006 with a Forward by Southern-food expert Damon Lee Fowler.  Henrietta’s back story included a husband, Sam, who “dropped his basket” in the late 1890s after almost ten years of marriage. His mental illness forced Henrietta to find a way to support their six children. Cooking saved her. “Suddenly I found I had to be the breadwinner,'' she once told a women’s group. “I knew how to make good things to eat ... .”  Stints as a caterer – hiring black cooks to provide much-needed labor for large events – and demonstrating gas stoves for the Atlanta Gas Light Company brought her to journalism, when the Atlanta Journal commissioned her to write a column on cooking, which she did for 25 years. Those columns formed the basis of Southern Cooking.

The coming together, as it were, of FDR, Daisy Bonner, and Henrietta Dull into this one place at a trying time in history tells a deeper tale, I think, of how cooking accentuates our humanity. On the outside looking in, I see a great deal of symbolism bubbling in that Warm Springs kitchen. There’s FDR, crippled by polio, trying to lead a nation divided on economics and war. There’s Daisy Bonner, a skilled cook hobbled by her race, gender, and the land where she was born. And then there’s Henrietta Dull, a woman also confined by the social constraints of the time, who poured her considerable talents into the only avenue open to her: the kitchen.

I’d like to believe that Mrs. Dull’s Southern Cooking enabled the alchemy of food to work its magic in that Little White House in Warm Springs and, thus, make possible a better world.