Reading “All The Presidents’ Pastries” is as much of a treat as the confections this former White House executive pastry chef regularly dreamed up for state dinners and family meals.
There’s an old-fashioned formality to the prose, which is frequently — and appropriately — punctuated by Gallic outbursts: Roland Mesnier was born to a large family in a tiny French village and apprenticed at 14 to a pastry chef in a larger one. From there, he moved quickly up the ranks, always looking to increase his experience and abilities. It’s a hard world with long hours, low pay, tricky politics and prejudice against the young and the new. He is especially fascinated with sugar sculpture, in which “the sugar is blown and shaped [using a] … tube held in the mouth, like a master glassblower.”
While happily employed at the Homestead in Virginia, Mesnier applies for a job he has no expectations of getting — at the White House. Rosalynn Carter hires him, and he is on the very fast track to American citizenship.
Too soon, Mesnier learns that one of the drawbacks of working for the first family is that they change every four or eight years, and each first lady has her own way of doing things. This means painful partings with people he has come to love and admire (or not) and starting all over again with new bosses.
This is not a book of political gossip, though Mesnier vividly describes what it is like to work for five first families. There is a lot of food gossip, though, from Amy Carter’s regular burning of sugar-cookie batches through Barbara Bush’s hands-on teaching methods to Bill Clinton’s food allergies. Perhaps the most revealing story Mesnier recounts is the current president’s refusal to believe Mesnier is really going to retire.
There is a section of recipes for desserts Mesnier gave each of the families he served. These are happily much less complicated than anything he created for formal occasions — those are so involved it’s hard to tell what is supposed to be eaten and what is purely decorative.
– Joanne Collings
