Page 36 - Sharp Spring 2021

GUIDE : FOOD
A Taste of History
A new cookbook, Legendary Dinners: From Grace Kelly to Jackson Pollock, recreates the menus of history’s most notable dinners. Pretend you’re John F. Kennedy by cooking up a few dishes from the President’s 1963 trip to West Germany
by WILL KITCHENS
REMEMBER DINNER PARTIES? Squishing around a dining table, clinking glasses, and breaking
bread? We miss them too. But, thankfully, there’s a new cookbook to flip open if you’re in need of a heavy hit of escapism. Legendary Dinners: From Grace Kelly
to Jackson Pollock is a compendium of history’s most famous dinners, including
Truman Capote’s Black and White Ball at New York’s Plaza Hotel in 1966 and
a JFK-hosted dinner at the American embassy in the West German capital of Bonn in 1963. While JFK’s trip is remembered for the president’s iconic “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech, the meal was noteworthy too. According to the cookbook’s editor, Anne Petersen, a
young Kennedy was looking to make a point by serving a French menu. “I think what he wanted to show was that even though he was an American, he was very fine and sophisticated,” she says.
Once dinner parties return, what better way to prove that you’re fine and sophisticated, too, than by recreating JFK’s dinner in Bonn?
36 SHARPMAGAZINE.COM SPRING 2021