How are you doing this evening . Thank you. Good evening and welcome. I managed to Public Programs here. Thank you for joining us tonight featuring the most recent book the president s Kitchen Cabinet the story of the africanamericans who were fed from the washingtons to be obamas. As you saw in the video since there is a oneofakind Research Institution and is dedicated to the collection, dedication and interpretation of the experience. Also you may have heard in january, the center was named a National Historic landmark by the park service so they all know what you know. [applause] the landmark status recognizes the collection of materials that represent the history and culture of people of african descent in the global transnational perspective and through Public Programs and exhibitions, film screenings, engaging in positions like the one we are sure to have today we explore the narrative and the world and also the programs you are able to explore are in the archival collection with over 10 million items but then go and visit one of the divisions where you can find books, photographs, other kinds of collections and other resources. I will tell you about the rest of the program for february but since it is black History Month everagreement hearing going to l you about black History Month in march. We are featuring the womens jazz festival and the centennial festival. We will feature an evening discussing the legacy of some of the most wellknown and emerging women today. These can be found on the website. Also you can find it in the Winter Program for sure. I want to say thank you to any of the members we have. Your support [applause] your support makes it possible to deliver consistent highcaliber programming for the lowcost and free to the public only your account. Before we turn to tonights program i will ask everyone to silence your cell phone and also, no flash photography or video. Before we get started and i introduce you to the panelists and going to bring up the director of this center. [applause] we are excited to have you here. She told you all the good news we have come a National Landmark status which we are delighted by, we have the black powers show up right now and renovations that have been going on for over a year we are excited for the new spaces. There was a moment ago i was going to come out and say i am Tanya Hopkins and conduct some of the interview with adrian whom ive known for a while who is a food writer that im going to turn the stage over to adrian and tania and welcome again, thank you. [applause] Adrienne Miller is a recovering voyeur dad worked as a special assistant to president bill clinton. We all know some of those. Today hes a culinary historian whose lecture out of the country. Adrians first book is a surprising story of an american cuisine one play at a time published in august of 2013. One to 2014 foundations of the word for reference to scholarship. The second book featured tonight of the president s Kitchen Cabinet a certified society judge and former Alliance Board member. Guiding us through tonights conversation began as a qualitative researcher and brand strategists including food, wine and premium spirits. These experiences fueled her perspective on ethnic and mainstream American Food cultures and led her to count the consulting and commentary on all Things Culinary and cultural. More recently the multimedia platform through which she also provides historic and contemporary consulting content now at historical dinners and events. As the cofounder of the Nonprofit Foundation serves as a wine specialist for inspired vendors including the june 2016 event based on the historically famous 1790 reconciliation dinner prepared by Thomas Jeffersons and slaved chef James Flemings who holds up the table for americas future please welcome Adrian Miller and hopkins. [applause] long time no see. The first time i met him was a southern conference in mississippi. I dont recall. He gets up and tells a story im all excited i think that it wasy first one like 15 years ago and im like what is he going to talk about and he gets up and tells a story about the longlost delicacy of possum and im like what is he talking about. But it turns out that was great and i actually refer to that and give you props. 100 years ago that was the dish. Guest apparently it was. People looking for longlost recipes, dont go for that. So tonight we are here t were k about the latest book that i have in my security badge, the president s cabinet, Untold Stories of africanamericans who fit our families from washington to be obamas. I thought that it was interesting you worked in the white house and you said you never even went to the kitchen . Guest the white house isnt a place that you should Wander Around if you dont need to be there but i worked on something called the president s initiative youve probably never heard of it as an outgrowth of the initiative on race and heres the wild and crazy idea. If we actually talked to one another and listened, we might find out we have more in common than what divides us, so that went on for about a year and a half and after that, the board that brand that recommended that there be an Ongoing Office in the white house to deal with racial reconciliation and other issues so that was the initiative for one america. So when you got the idea to do this book and started the research, how many years . Guest this book was eight years in the making and really what inspired me to d do it wasn employment. [laughter] is always on employment. At the change of the administration what happens if you are an appointee and by the way the way i got the job of the oldfashioned way. A friend of mine was at the Georgetown Law School and called me up while i was practicing. This isnt to disparage any attorneys practicing law just wasnt for me. I was seeking spirituals in my office so i figured i could use Something Else so i was thinking of opening up a restaurant in denver and she describes to me the initiative for one america so i did the same thing dick cheney did when george w. Bush asked him to find a vice president. I only said that my name and thats how i got it. [laughter] so we get to the end of the administration and you write out your letter of resignation so shockingly george bush accepted my resignation so the job market was soft at that point and i was watching a lot of daytime television. I thought to myself i should read something so i got a book on the history of Southern Food and it was at home on the road in history and in that book he said the tribute to the africanamerican achievement is to be returned so i emailed him to see if somebody had written that worked because it was about 10yearsold when i got it and he said no one has really taken on the project and so that led to the first book and while i was reading the sources for that book, i discovered those that cut for the president s including something written in the 1920s he was going to write a history of africanamerican cooking and he talks about some of these. One of the earliest sources i i got taken to the library and i found a photo copy of something that he typed up. Host a lot of them did have work related to food and i know there was an extensive study where there was a pathway for new money into status and class but still trickles through today. He said no one had done a piece about the africanamerican accomplishments. Was it one piece and was their connection . Is packed full of stories and people get all the different people involved. So it could be like another 50 bucks. Guest a lot of it is fragments because in the centuries even into the 20th, the africanamericans were looked down upon and servitude positions is something that africanamericans were born to do so but historical sources you only get references and he didnt even take time to print out the persons full name so it is remarkable that we see a persons full name and then we get the 20th century and its better but it wasnt a glamorous thing that it is today. It was one of the few professions that they could pursue and xls without a lot of white backlash. So a lot of it is in the society. Its also clear that they are stealing our food and so there was the skill and talent elements to this whole war. They have the improvisational approach. Then there are cooks what is the french term . Guest that is putting everything in its place so if someone in your family is like that when you try to get a recipe. Im one of those books i have to have everything set out so i know i have all of my ingredients properly measured so thats how you approach this book in terms of all the information. I have all the key ingredients to the study of the food culture so what involves people around the president and what are the things beyond the president s control the congress or the Public Perception to show how they all kind of interact. That yielded a fact detailed base which is phenomenal. Any others i want to get a feel for. [inaudible] what you are seeing are some snippets from the interesting personality that i collected in the book. Real quickly samuel was the steward for president s washington and you probably saw this story there was a lot of debate among the scholars in his race but quite a few believed that he was biracial and have a heritage. I showed the cook for george washingtogeorgewashington but ad successfully at the birthday. Host he escaped before him and i was curious if this was inspired by the other. She escapes a few years before and what is interesting is that as a portrait hanginits a porta museum in madrid spain. It is the same that did the iconic portrait of washington and what is interesting about the portrait is the outfit that hercules has is one that would be worn by eight european chef, not an American Chef at the time. Knowinhow vindictive George Washington was coming u read the letters of the reaction at the extent they try to get hercules after he escaped and you think that song from frozen, let it go it makes sense that he goes overseas because that is probably the safest thing for him to do. He actually made money selling scraps. There are stories and facts and history that are a concern. But he was such a great cook this piece about the scraps, what was that about . Sometimes they would give them some liberties to so the scraps and use them to make candles or repurpose those things. But his cooking was so good he made about 5,000 a year and in terms of what he was selling he would buy fancy clothes and he had a gold cane and he would put on that blue suit and walk around philadelphia. He was allowed to go to the opera. He had quite a few. That says a whole lot about this whole mythology that you also touch on about the propaganda around that society to make people believe that it wasnt so bad. With all of these perks, he passed the same . They dont know where he ends up, but it is a clue. The interesting thing is towards the end, well, first of all when washington brings hercules to philadelphia to be his cook, he does this for after six months he had a white woman named mrs. Reid and he wasnt feeling her cooking at all so he brings them from the mount vernon kitchen to come to philadelphia. But the tricky thing is that philadelphia, something called the gradual abolition act of 1780 so if you were an enslaved person at that time there for six months, you were automatically free. So right about this time he would attack us all the people and send them back to mount vernon and keep them there for a few weeks and then bring them back and start the clock over again. And he did this throughout his two terms. But for some reason, towards the end of the second term, he sends hercules back not to the mount vernon kitchen, but into the fields to do other hard labor, and that is what spurred him to make the for freedom [inaudible] if you read the letters in sequence hes going through the five stages of grief. [laughter] and then the letters from Martha Washington is Something Like you would see, laugh at the joke. I worked hard on that one. [laughter] i wondered if he knew it was a punishment like i am out of here. Guest washington suspected hercules was going to escape with some of the family members and one of his sons was caught stealing money out of a kind of backpack and they believe that the finance and escape attempt. I thought it was interesting this character that was luckily for you and us for the sake of this research documented in detail about the artistry and talent and all that. What was that about, it sounded like an early romance or something going on and on. He admires washington and in the diary that he kept and observations he made against the personalities and what he had going on in the kitchen, wanting to know is he had enslaved africans from mount vernon and then his boss that i talked about so they were all in the kitchen together but evidently come hercules was quite temperamental as a chef so she would feel a kinship with gordon ramsay. He talks about if they messed up how he would kind of go off on them. Another interesting person that has shown up here we have to talk about james first. [laughter] he isnt a president ial chef but his name is james hemmings. But he does cook for jefferson in the summer of 1801 in monticello. It was one of Sally Hemmings brothers and james was 19 and jefferson gets appointed to become the minister to franc mie takes hemmings over to france with him and have him trained as a classical chef and spends a lot of money to do this. He installs him as a chef after he finishes his training he starts paying him and insults him as a cuisine chef at the residence in paris and brings him back. But then as you know i we know e mid1790s, hemmings says i want to be free and he agrees to do this on two conditions, you have to teach other enslaved people at monticello how to cook because i spent all this Time Training you and you have to leave behind your recipes and he does this then he is freed in 1796. What you see is a list of all of the utensils and that is returned by his own hand at the library of congress if you ever want to read that. As mentioned earlier one of the cofounders of a foundation n that you can learn more about online and one of our other cofounders is here. We also talk about the trenchcoafrenchcooks and researy be the only one that teaches in france for this status. I think that he sets the tone. Would have been since the end slave women in monticello ended up being the assistant chef and the reason why he doesnt become the chef is that he actually drinkdrank himself to death ando one so the story goes. He will be onsite in a fellowship starting next week and you either did to this about the existing documentation with the information surfacing that we believe will provide more dimension. After jeffersons presidency, they are the cooks at monticel monticello. Anybody that has been in washington, d. C. In july and august, they had a Skeleton Crew because it is built in a swamp and people would actually get tropical diseases before reason, jefferson wouldnt let him go back to their families when he would leave the white house during summer break so they actually had to stay. We see examples of the husbands ba at monticello trying to reunite with their wives and catching them and returning them. But their life was pretty much in the basement and there were orders right off the kitchen. Its not others you can preheat and turn off a. There was a fireplace with a range on top and according to some of the sources is the secondleading cause in the 1817 reads so that shows you how dangerous. We can only imagine. I love how you learn history along the way which is great for a those of us that prefer to learn through the lens of not just food i love how you have actual quotes from the people that have worked and cooked and served. If you want to talk about some of the personalities of the dynamics between president s and some of the people that served them . One is to show how they were compounds in the situations and unwittingly or sometimes consciously they were civil rights advocates. When the africanamerican civil rights advocates could not get activists to lay out their agenda, they would often go to the cooks and ask the cook to whisper in his ear while they were serving food hoping something would register and the president would move on it. He was the longtime cook for lyndon johnson. When johnson was lobbying the bill with members of congress he would use her experiences. Back then the family would drive from texas to washington, d. C. And in many instances she wasnt allowed to go to the bathroom or eat with the family and she suffered so many indignities that at some point she refused to go on the trip so she lived in washington year round. He presents her with one of them and says you deserve this as much as anyone. One of the things we know about the personality, he would often show up late for dinner and demand food right away and he would do it. He would also often show up late and want dinner made so she would start making the food drinks and nobody complained but one thing to show how she plays a role in the perception the president has in terms of food is something i call the controversy of 1964. There was a recipe and this was a river that runs along the ranch in centralex. It has no beans because it is chili con carne. When the recipe comes out, americans freak out and want to be assured of that their president loves beans. He used the recording system pretty extensively so it starts with kennedy in terms of the recording system and johnson really ramps up and recommends it to nixon and we know how that turns out. If you will indulge me for a moment, i have a clip from the library talking about the preferences. So if we can play that clip the first you are going to hear is funny that roberts getting this flak from the public. What i did is actually transcr