Former White House chef reveals US presidents' favourite comfort foods

Cristeta Comerford, a longtime White House executive chef who recently retired after nearly three decades of preparing meals for five presidents and their guests, says first families are "just regular people" when they're at home in the private living areas of the executive mansion.

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"It’s not what you see on the news," she told The Associated Press in an interview. Preparing the first families’ meals was among Comerford's many culinary responsibilities. Meals mostly would be prepared in the main kitchen, then finished off in the residence kitchen on the second floor. “At the end of the day, when you do the family meals upstairs, they're just regular people at home. They just want a good meal. They want to sit down with their family,” she said. “If they have children, they eat together. And just to see that on a daily basis, it's not what you see on the news.

“It’s the other side of them that we get to see,” she said.

Comerford, who hung up her apron and chef’s toque in July 2024 after nearly 20 years as top chef and nearly three decades on the kitchen staff, is the longest-serving chef in White House history. Her tenure spanned the presidencies of Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump and Joe Biden. Each of the five families she served approached food differently, Comerford said at a recent White House Historical Association symposium on food and drinks. She was asked whether she'd describe any of the presidents as “real foodies.”

The Clintons liked healthier meals, Comerford said. Then-first lady Hillary Clinton hired the first American executive chef, Walter Scheib, and had the kitchen avoid serving heavy sauces and creams. She said, “I learned so much” about Southwestern cuisine from Bush, the former Texas governor who liked Tex-Mex food. “We made thousands of tamales for Christmas," she said of the popular Mexican meal of stuffed corn dough wrapped in a corn husk and steamed until cooked. Comerford got ideas from the vegetable garden Michelle Obama started when she was promoting healthy eating, primarily for children. “We used the garden as kind of like our backbone for our menu development,” she said.