Fare of Bill: How to Feed a Future President

Whenever all those TV news crews showed Bill Clinton dropping by McDonald’s during his well-publicized jogs, Liza Ashley would shake her head. After all, she points out, the only thing the President-elect consumed there was water and coffee.

Ashley knows Clinton’s eating habits better than most. She was the cook at the governor’s mansion in Little Rock, Ark., for 36 years, including the first decade of Clinton’s 12-year tenure. She readily acknowledges that the governor eats hamburgers but insists that doesn’t mean burgers are all he eats.

He is, for instance, fond of Southern-style barbecue pork ribs (with a mild sauce). He likes watermelon-rind pickles. And he loves Mexican food--as long as it’s not too spicy. Ashley used to make him chicken enchiladas with canned chiles and tomatoes and two cups of shredded Cheddar cheese, accompanied by guacamole and nachos and chips.

According to Ashley, Clinton has been known to enjoy a lunch of crab quiche and fruit salad with poppy-seed dressing. This favorite dressing has already raised the eyebrows of at least one health writer, because Ashley’s recipe calls for 1 cup of sugar to less than 3 cups of oil and vinegar.

The Clintons’ tastes run to the informal. “He never failed to open the refrigerator and see what was in there,” the 75-year-old Ashley says with a chuckle. And he was not above grabbing a piece of chicken out of the refrigerator for a breakfast on the run, or leaving the kitchen with a slice of cold beef, a carrot or a piece of bacon in hand. Or he might just spread some peanut butter on a banana for a snack.

Family meals were unpretentious too. Sometimes the Clintons sat around on wooden stools in the kitchen while they ate a quick breakfast of oatmeal and orange juice. When they actually sat around a table, it was a wooden one in a breakfast nook off the mansion’s kitchen.

But no matter where he ate, Clinton ate plenty. “Whatever was there on the table,” Ashley says, “he would be nibbling on it.”

This reaffirms the reputation Clinton established early in his run for the White House, when his junk-food forays were legend. In New Hampshire, Dunkin Donuts was a favorite haunt. In Illinois, there was an epic cheesecake episode. And in Texas, he indulged a 20-year fondness for mango ice cream that dated back to his stint there during George McGovern’s 1972 presidential campaign.

In any case, Ashley confirms, this is a president-to-be who is unlikely to ignore his kitchen cabinets. Ashley, whose cookbook “Thirty Years at the Mansion” is suddenly much in demand, recalls that one of Clinton’s trademarks was his predilection for midnight snacks. These often accompanied his now-famed marathon late-night work sessions.

“He was a great apple-cobbler eater,” Ashley says, warming to the subject. “We would just leave it out on the counter after dinner at night. And it might be there when we came back in the morning and it might not.

“He’d get up in the middle of the night. He’d stay up half the night on the phone. He’d move into the kitchen and do his work in there. Some days we got to work and all his papers were all over the counter. We’d just leave them there until he got up and came in to move them. We were scared to move them because we didn’t know what we were moving.”

Hillary Clinton probably didn’t approve of these late-night snacks. Ashley describes the future First Lady (whom she refers to as Miss Hillary) as “a great salad eater” who grazes on raw carrots, celery, olives, pickles and other vegetables. Several years ago, she instructed the cooks to begin stir-frying chicken, squash, carrots and other vegetables.

Carolyn Huber, who was mansion administrator for two years and assisted Ashley with her book, confirms the family’s increased health-consciousness. “They have been on low-fat and all that for the last years so I’m sure they’ll continue on a healthy diet,” she says.

Miss Hillary certainly did not approve of those cherished chicken enchiladas. “She would say, ‘That stuff is fattening,’ ” Ashley recalls. “That’s the reason we went back to stir-frying things.” Hillary prefers baked chicken seasoned with salt and pepper. The family also eats fish, though not catfish, that Arkansas specialty.

Huber describes Hillary’s tastes as more northern and Bill’s as more southern. Ashley says that Hillary enjoys spicy foods, including zesty chili and jalapeno corn bread, more than her husband does. Hillary and daughter Chelsea love chocolate; Bill’s allergic to it. Ashley also says that the staff made his and hers potato salads: She liked green olives in hers; he did not.

Chelsea, the Clintons’ 12-year-old daughter, is big on macaroni and cheese. Ashley recalls Chelsea was also fond of chicken pot pie, grilled-cheese sandwiches and that well-publicized bugaboo of the Bush kitchen, broccoli. For her birthday, carrot cake was the annual dessert of choice.

Dinner was the one meal that the family made a point of eating together. When guests joined them, they moved out of the breakfast nook and into the formal dining room. This was the only time that wine would be served; otherwise the Clintons rarely drank any alcohol. In fact, their beverage of choice was generally tap water (light on the ice for Arkansas’ First Lady).

In the summer, the Clintons occasionally had iced tea (no lemon for Hillary), and in the winter Chelsea liked hot chocolate. The president-elect and Hillary are also both decaffeinated coffee drinkers (black for both).

A typical menu at a Clinton dinner party might include mushroom or cheese soup, a salad of mixed greens, onions and cucumbers with vinegar and oil, beef tenders on rice pilaf, boiled green beans or broccoli and fresh hot rolls, Ashley says. Dessert might be lemon chess pie, or strawberry shortcake in summer. Ashley’s beef tenders--Clinton’s favorite meat--is a cut of tenderloin marinated with Wishbone Italian salad dressing.

The salad was sometimes served before the entree; other times it accompanied the main course. As Ashley explained to an anxious White House chef who called prior to the Clintons’ first trip to Washington, it was never served after the entree.

Ashley, who was born on an Arkansas plantation and left school after the fifth grade, started working at the mansion as a maid in 1954. She began her career in the kitchen filling in for the cook on his days off. In 1955, when Orval Faubus became governor, his wife, Alta, wanted a female cook and Ashley was given the job.

She had no formal training. “You just have to be a cook to be a cook,” Ashley says. “You just have to have it in you.”

She served seven governors before retiring in 1990. Does she have a favorite? “Nobody knows but me and the Lord,” she says, ever the diplomat.

Later this month, Ashley will make her first trip ever to the nation’s capital for the inaugural festivities. She is slated to be interviewed on various network and Washington television and radio shows and to do several book signings. A new “Clinton White House Edition” of the book, which is heavy on recipes and photos, was just released.

Ashley will also be honored at a tea at Washington’s Ritz-Carlton Hotel, which will feature some of her recipes during inauguration week. And she has been promised a tour of the White House kitchen.

“I feel wonderful about it,” says Ashley, who nonetheless sounds a little overwhelmed by all the national attention. “I hope I can hold up. I have to right my nerves.”

In addition to her cooking, Ashley was prized for her loyalty and discretion. “I’ll tell about food but nothing else,” she admonished a recent interviewer.

Huber, however, may have given away one small family secret. Socks, the Clintons’ suddenly media-genic cat, dines on cat food, as one would suspect. But Zeke, Bill Clinton’s beloved cocker spaniel who was felled by a car several years ago, became accustomed to sharing whatever the man-who-would-be-president was eating.

“He’d sit under the table and the governor would feed him,” Huber recalls. “He’d give him food from his plate. . . . Zeke was so fat.”