"But I've been able to identify 150 African-American workers in the kitchen at the White House. And I know I'm just scratching the surface."Miller gave an overall history of the White House kitchen, and how it and the various dining rooms have changed over time. He talked about George Washington "definitely a foodie" and Thomas Jefferson, who had slave James Hemings, a brother of Jefferson's supposed mistress Sally Hemings, trained to cook in France.Many of the early cooks were slaves. And because the early presidents had to pay for their own entertaining, the White House cooks were ones they brought from home.Later, of course, they were government-paid workers. Quite a few were black women, and many were the head cooks in charge of the kitchen.
"The thing that's really striking is that every president has had an African-American in their kitchen as a head cook or an assistant cook," Miller said. "African-Americans pretty much dominated the White House kitchen until the 1960s."In what might be considered an ironic twist, the decade that brought the Civil Rights Act also started a decline in the black presence in the White House kitchen. This also was the era of Julia Child and an American fascination with gourmet and European food, particularly French food.
It was Jacqueline Kennedy who hired a white European to head the kitchen, and from then on the White House had an executive chef, instead of a head cook. Lyndon Baines Johnson did bring his own black cook to the White House. But ever since then, the executive head chef has been trained in European cooking. Until recently, all have been white males. But the current chef is Cristeta Comerford, a Filipino-American woman, the first White House chef of Asian descent. She was promoted from assistant chef to head chef by Laura Bush in 2005.Miller said that since the 1960s, the number of blacks in the White House kitchen has dwindled."At the assistant-chef level, you used to have a lot of African-American cooks, but over time as they retired, they were replaced by white or Asian-American chefs," Miller said.In the 1990s, President Clinton offered a black the job of executive chef, the late Patrick Clark, but Clark turned it down.