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Gingerbread was a favorite snack of President Lincoln's . Photo courtesy of Flickr user Rick Waller.

This week an IBM computer system named Watson proved it could handily win a game of Jeopardy! against the toughest human competitors, causing one of them to joke, “I, for one, welcome our new computer overlords.” But how would Watson fare in the nastier game of presidential campaign politics? On the one hand, he probably wouldn’t make the gaffes that recent candidates have made, like blanking on simple questions during a TV interview or forgetting how many states there are. On the other hand, would you want to drink a beer with him/it?

Speaking of which, do you know which past president drank beer or hard cider for breakfast? I bet Watson does. It was John Adams. And here, in honor of Presidents’ Day weekend, are a few other tasty nuggets of presidential trivia:

Washington Ate Here (No, Really): You can still grab a pint and a bite in the same tavern where George Washington bid his officers farewell after the Revolution, the Fraunces Tavern and museum in lower Manhattan. (In case you missed it yesterday, see Jesse Rhodes’ look at the first president’s eating habits—and dental woes.)

The First Locavore President?: Thomas Jefferson, influenced by the abolitionist Benjamin Rush, was an early proponent of cultivating maple sugar as a domestic alternative to cane sugar from the West Indies. In a 1790 letter, during his tenure as Secretary of State, Jefferson wrote of the sugar maple, “What a blessing to substitute a sugar which requires only the labour of children, for that which it is said renders the slavery of the blacks necessary.”

What, No French Fries?: If Bill Clinton was the president most famous for his deep appreciation of junk food, the most ascetic eater to occupy the White House may have been John Quincy Adams. The sixth president was often too absorbed in his work to think about food. Early in his career, he wrote in his diary, “Five or six small crackers and a glass of water give me a sumptuous dinner.”

I Didn’t Ingest: Speaking of Clinton, his recent health problems have convinced him to change his eating habits, giving him a new distinction: he is now the first (almost) vegan ex-president.

The Hard Cider Candidate: I wrote a few months ago about the practice of “swilling the planters with bumbo,” or bribing the electorate with booze. Opponents of William Henry Harrison, by contrast, suggested that the candidate himself be given “a barrel of hard cider” and a pension to retire to his log cabin rather than run for president. He was promptly dubbed the Log Cabin and Hard Cider candidate.

All Gingerbread Men Are Created Equal: The folksy childhood anecdote has been a mainstay of presidential campaigning since at least Abraham Lincoln. During a debate, Lincoln told a story about sharing a gingerbread man with a poor neighbor friend, who then remarked, “I don’t s’pose anybody on earth likes gingerbread better’n I do—and gets less’n I do.”

A Royal Weenie: Seventy years before Michelle Obama’s royal blunder—touching Queen Elizabeth II without invitation—another first lady was criticized for not showing proper deference to royalty. During the King and Queen of Britain’s 1939 visit to the United States, Eleanor and Franklin D. Roosevelt served them hot dogs at a picnic on the porch of the first couple’s Hyde Park home.

George Washington (c. 1876) by Augustus Weidenbach, after a painting by Gilbert Stuart. Image courtesy of the Library of Congress.

We associate lots of things with George Washington. He’s a face on our currency, he looms large on Mt. Rushmore, and to use that oh-so-familiar sobriquet, he’s the Father of Our Country. Edibles, however, don’t readily spring to mind. Popular mythology does place him in striking distance of a cherry tree, but that’s more or less the extent to which we talk about food and this founding father. However, in his new biography on Washington, author Ron Chernow sheds light on some of our first president’s eating habits, from a Christmas dinner savored in the bitter cold of Valley Forge to how he and wife Martha entertained guests at their Mt. Vernon estate. For example, he offers this account of a dinner given soon after Washington reluctantly accepted the presidential office:

Every other Thursday the Washingtons held an official dinner at four P.M. The president, seeking geographic diversity, often tried to balance northern and southern legislators on his guest list. If guests were even five minutes late by the hall clock, they found the president and his company already seated. Washington would then explain curtly that the cook was governed by the clock and not by the company. In his diary, [senator William] Maclay described a dinner on August 27, 1789 in which George and Martha Washington sat in the middle of the table, facing each other, while [Washington's personal secretary] Tobias Lear and [nephew] Robert Lewis sat on either end. John Adams, John Jay and George Clinton were among the assembled guests. Maclay described a table bursting with a rich assortment of dishes—roasted fish, boiled meat, bacon and poultry for the main course, followed by ice cream, jellies, pies, puddings and melons for dessert. Washington usually downed a pint of beer and two or three glasses of wine, and his demeanor grew livelier once he had consumed them.

However, the mechanics of eating were a constant sore spot for the president. By the time he was elected, Washington only had one tooth remaining and had to rely on dentures, which not only restricted his diet to soft foods, but made public speaking extremely difficult. And the network of pins, wires and springs that kept the prosthetics in place were quite painful, sometimes to the point where toothaches would confine him to bed. Indeed, looking at a pair from Mount Vernon’s collections, Washington’s dentures are so ungainly by modern standards that they look more like something you’d wind up and expect to hop across a tabletop. Nevertheless, the perpetually self-aware Washington was indebted to dentist John Greenwood, who did his best to alleviate the president’s dental woes. Chernow writes:

During his two terms Washington chomped his way through several pairs of dentures, and his letters to Greenwood explain why they so often wore out. Bars holding the teeth together were either too wide on the side or too long in the front, leading Washington to complain that they “bulge my lips out in such a manner as to make them appear considerably swelled.” To relieve this discomfort, he often filed down the dentures but ended up loosening the teeth in the process. So embarrassed was he by the way the dentures distorted his facial appearance that he pleaded with Greenwood to refrain from anything that “will in the least degree force the lips out more than [they] now do, as it does this too much already.” In the portrait of Washington done by Christian Güllager in 1789, Washington’s lower lip juts out rather grotesquely. Apparently the president undertook some amateur dentistry of his own, telling Greenwood to send a foot of spiral spring and two feet of gold wire that he could shape himself.

And to add insult to injury, the ivory and animal teeth—not wood, as some stories might have you believe—used in the dentures were prone to staining and the president’s penchant for port wine turned his pearly whites pitch black.

Perhaps to get an even clearer vision of what dishes were placed before the first President of the United States, we should turn our attentions to The Martha Washington Cookbook. Though the book doesn’t point out specific dishes that were served during Washington’s administration, it does provide a wonderful look at early American cookery. And if anyone has ever wondered how to boil a pigeon or make a pigeon pie—especially you urban dwellers out there—this is your one-stop resource.

Nigella seeds. Image courtesy of Flickr user joana hard.

Welcome to a new recurring feature at Food & Think called “What the Heck Do I Do with That?” Every so often we’ll highlight an obscure ingredient (obscure in this country, anyway), including its history, where it comes from and other interesting information—most importantly, what the heck you can do with it. It was inspired by my recent trip to Australia, where I went a little crazy in a cooking shop, buying all sorts of spices I knew were unavailable in my hometown supermarket. When I brought them home I realized I had no idea what to do with some of them—for instance, our first ingredient: nigella seeds.

What are they?

I’ve heard of Nigella Lawson, the British cooking show goddess who preaches the importance of a well-stocked pantry, and it appears from a few of her recipes that her pantry includes nigella seeds. But they are not a branded food à la Rachael Ray’s EVOO—the seeds had the name first. In fact, they have a whole bunch of names, some of them misleading: onion seeds, black cumin, charnushka and kalonji, to name a few. Although they resemble onion seeds or black sesame seeds, they are actually the seeds of Nigella sativa, an annual flowering plant of the Ranunculacae family.

Where do they come from?

According to Domestication of Plants in the Old World, by Daniel Zohary and Maria Hopf, nigella seeds were found in Tutankhamen’s tomb. They also got a mention in the Old Testament, and the prophet Mohammed reportedly declared that they could cure “anything but death.” Since wild versions of the plant grow in southern Turkey, Syria and northern Iraq, that is probably where the seeds were first used for culinary purposes. They are still used in those countries, as well as in Indian and other South Asian and Middle Eastern cuisines.

Well, what do they taste like?

The seeds have a slightly bitter flavor and resemble cumin or oregano, depending on whom you ask. To me they taste like the bits of burned onion, poppy and sesame seeds that fall off of a toasted everything bagel.

So, what the heck do I do with them?

For starters, toast them lightly to release the essential oils. Then grind them or throw them whole in an Indian dish. I added them to my favorite curried red lentil soup, but they would work in all kinds of South Asian dishes, from simple vegetable curries (like a Bengali potato stir-fry or a spiced butternut squash) to naan bread. They’re also part of the spice mixture called panch phoran, along with fenugreek, mustard, fennel and cumin seeds, common in Bengali dishes.

Bread seems to be a cross-cultural use for nigella seeds—aside from naan, it’s also used to top flatbreads in Turkey and elsewhere in the Middle East, and in Eastern Europe is sprinkled on Jewish rye bread in place of caraway seeds. So my bagel reference might not be much of a leap.

I could try the recipe on the back of my packet of nigella seeds for “seeded savoury biscuits,” but it also calls for another ingredient I’ve never heard of—ajowan seeds. Maybe next time.

City person moves to the country, takes up farming, can’t believe how much work it is, writes a book: a healthy stack of titles along these lines has come out in the last decade or so, as a new wave of back-to-the-landers and locavores has discovered the joys and perils of small-scale agriculture. The Dirty Life: On Farming, Food, and Love, by Kristin Kimball, falls into that category, although the author stumbled into farming in one of the most old-fashioned ways imaginable—she became a farmer’s wife.

Kimball was a freelance writer living in New York City and beginning to long for the idea of “home” when she went to interview Mark, a young, charismatic organic farmer in Pennsylvania who turned her life upside down. They fell in love, moved to the Adirondacks and started a horse-powered organic farm on a whole-diet Community Supported Agriculture model. Seven years later, they have about 150 subscribers who pay $2,900 each for a year-round, all-they-can-eat share of produce, meat, dairy and grains. The memoir follows their first year on the farm, from those painful early days of getting used to physical labor through their wedding in the midst of the first harvest, and Kimball’s continuing doubts about settling into farm life. The book, Kimball says, “is the story of the two love affairs that interrupted the trajectory of my life: one with farming—that dirty concupiscent art—and the other with a complicated and exasperating farmer I found in State College, Pennsylvania.”

I spoke to Kimball recently as she took a break from putting together the weekly share for CSA subscribers.

Food & Think: I’m curious—what’s in a share at the end of January in the North Country?

Kimball: It’s pretty good, actually. We’re still bringing in kale, green cabbage, purple cabbage, carrots, potatoes. Radishes. Meat and milk. Beef and pork. And loads of eggs. Plus flour and grains.

F & T: There are a number of cooking scenes in your book. One of my favorites is the one in the prologue, where you describe in sensual detail a mid-winter meal that Mark is preparing using ingredients from your farm—plus one exotic fruit, a pomegranate, a friend brought you from New York City:

But the unlikely star is the radish… Tonight, Mark braised them in stock, which hardly dimmed their brilliant color but mellowed out their flavor. He added a dash of maple syrup and balsamic vinegar, and at the end tossed in a handful of the tangy pomegranate seeds, the heat bursting some and leaving others whole to amuse the tongue.

Why did you choose this particular meal to represent what your life had become?

Kimball: I think at that time I was pretty deeply into my farm life and I was really loving the food that we were growing, but there was still this part of me that was “New York” and that still was interested in something exotic. I loved that these could coexist harmoniously on the same plate. And I also love the way [Mark] cooks and that he’s so creative, and doesn’t shy away from such a combination.

And it’s also that you can eat a pomegranate and not be so didactic about it.

F & T: You mean about eating local food?

Kimball: Yes. I think it’s only in an age of abundance of food, and I don’t think we’re really wired to handle this abundance so people make up rules about how to eat…. I personally think food, before anything, should be enjoyment. It should be a pleasure. For most people, “ethical” eating doesn’t really stick unless you enjoy it.

F & T: There’s a funny scene where Mark meets your family for the first time and cooks Thanksgiving dinner, including a turkey he had helped slaughter, and your mother is sort of horrified by this “drippy white shopping bag, its headless neck sticking out obscenely.” I take it this was not the kind of food you grew up eating?

Kimball: My mom and her generation of cooks really took advantage of convenience, and I totally get it—it was a cultural moment. It was a tenet of feminism that you weren’t going to be a slave of the kitchen. My mom just didn’t enjoy cooking…. For me I feel like it’s one of my great creative outlets.

F & T: You have two daughters now, a 3-year-old and a 4-month-old. Does the 3-year-old like vegetables and meats that non-farm kids might be squeamish about?

Kimball: She’s never been picky. In fact, one of her very first words was “testicle.” Every year when we kill the bull it’s like a festival, and we fry up the testicles—it’s like the farmer’s answer to chicken nuggets. So one of her earliest words was, “more testicle.”

F & T: You wrote about feeling like you were playing a role as a farmer during that first year. Was there a moment when you realized this was who you really were now and you were no longer trying something on?

Kimball: I think if you pretend to be something for long enough—I forget who said that—it becomes true. Probably that moment in the book in Hawaii, when I thought I was there to get away from it [farming and her recent marriage] and all I wanted to do was farm. Now I’m seven years into it and every day I feel like I have so much more to learn—especially on a farm as diverse as ours.

F & T: Why did you decide to go the whole-diet CSA route instead of a simpler, more specialized operation?

Kimball: I feel more and more sure that farms are a pretty accurate reflection of the farmer. I don’t think either of us would be interested if we were just growing microgreens. It is frustrating, though, because it’s so complex.

F & T: What part of yourself from your old life would you say still survives?

Kimball: I really like going back to the city when I go back there. I love when I go back to see my friends and we go to bars. Most of my dearest, oldest friends are people who knew me as a city person, so that part of me lives on through them.

F & T: Do you still write?

Kimball: I’m working on another book. It’s a continuation of The Dirty Life, filling where we are now—turning 40, seven years in, and how that is for a person like me who loves novelty. It’s taken me three years to write, but I had two babies during that time.

Sushi, the all-too-common first date meal. Image courtesy of Flickr user gse

It appears from the lack of responses to our last Inviting Writing theme that none of our readers has had a food-related break-up—or at least was willing to write about it. I’m very happy for you. Well, surely you have all been on dates that involved food, right? So, let’s try this again. This month’s theme, in honor of Valentine’s Day: dating.

First dates, last dates, romantic dates, funny dates, dates that resulted in marriage proposals, dates that were only memorable for what you ate—as long as it’s a true, original personal essay somehow inspired by this invitation, let’s hear it. Send your submissions to FoodandThink@gmail.com with “Inviting Writing: Dating” in the subject line by this Friday morning, February 18. We’ll read them all and post our favorites on subsequent Mondays (or Tuesday, in the case of a holiday). Remember to include your full name and a biographical detail or two (your city and/or profession; a link to your own blog if you’d like that included).

Now dim the lights, put on a little soft jazz, and I’ll get things started.

If It’s a First Date, It Must Be Sushi
by Lisa Bramen

Between graduating from college, when I broke up with my boyfriend of about 14 months to spend a year in Europe, and meeting my husband almost 10 years later, I went on a lot of dates. A lot. Most of them were first dates. And, for reasons I’ve never understood, a disproportionate number of them took place at sushi restaurants. I had no idea when I returned from that dreamy year abroad—where I fell in love with, and in, nearly every country I visited—that finding love of a more lasting sort would be so difficult back in Los Angeles. At least I got to eat a lot of nice meals.

The first time I tried sushi was on a first date with the younger brother of my older brother’s friend, not long after returning stateside. I had only recently started to eat fish again; my eight-year vegetarianism, having survived the meatropolises of Munich, Prague and Dublin, crumbled somewhere in France. I walked for what seemed like hours in search of a meal sans viande before I finally broke down and ordered a plate of scallops. They were delicious and I didn’t die, so I started slowly reintroducing seafood into my diet.

Sushi, on the other hand, was a little daunting—not because it was raw fish, which I got over quickly, or that it was different, because I have always been an adventurous eater. The problem was mechanical: how to eat this stuff. I was clumsy but marginally competent with chopsticks (I later learned that in Japan it is acceptable to eat sushi with your fingers anyway), but the restaurant where my date took me was the type of Americanized joint that served sushi rolls in slices the size of a hockey puck. If you took a bite out of one it would fall apart and the rest would tumble back onto your plate—or, if you weren’t careful, onto your nice first-date blouse—in a most ungraceful way. If you tried to cram the whole thing into your mouth, you would be doubly sorry: you would look like a chipmunk and, because there wasn’t enough room to chew properly before swallowing, were in real danger of choking on a sticky mass of rice and fish. Either way, not an attractive look.

A few years into my relationship dry spell I decided to try online dating, and the pace of first dates—and occasionally second, but rarely third—quickened substantially. The dating site required an alias, and I chose the name of my favorite hot sauce, Cholula. None of my dates picked up on this hint that I love Mexican food, apparently, because sushi bars continued to be the go-to first date venue. This was fine—by then I had grown to love sushi and figured out how to eat it more gracefully—but it got a little ridiculous when three different men took me to the same trendy sushi bar in Venice within a few months. I wouldn’t have been surprised to run into a previous first date with another woman, but it never happened.

For a variety of reasons, these dates never turned into relationships. Either I wasn’t interested in them or, in the rare case that I was, they decided they were more into the lesbian who wanted to give dating men a try (OK, this only happened once). Being in first-date mode all the time was exhausting.

Finally, I realized that I was dissatisfied with more than just my love life—I was also unhappy with my career (advertising) and sick of living in L.A. I signed off from online dating, quit my job and moved to New York to study journalism, then took an internship at a small newspaper in rural upstate New York. I assumed my stay there would be brief, and I would return to the city and resume my search for Mr. Right once my career was on track.

Then one of my co-workers at the newspaper invited me to a poker game. Across the table from me was a man whose smile set my heart aglow like E.T.’s. It turned out his favorite hot sauce was Cholula, too (and, you know, we had a couple of other things in common). Five years later we got married, and I still haven’t moved back to the city.