The Capital: Adieu to Pease Porridge

Pickled okra. Spinach soufflé. Double divinity. Et, mon Dieu, ze bar-bé-cue! Escoffier would have turned in his grave. Last week White House Chef René Verdon, who is only mortal, turned in his apron instead.

A onetime chef aboard the French Line’s Liberté and later at Manhattan’s perfectionist Carlyle Hotel, French-born René was hired by John F. Kennedy in April 1961. He made a memorable White House debut with trout cooked in Chablis as the entrée at a luncheon for former British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan. The Kennedys’ treasure later won international renown with such dishes as chicken in champagne sauce and an incomparable quenelles de brochet. But one President’s meat is another’s poisson, and under L.B.J. the mâitre soon found himself tasting such Texas delicacies as Pedernales River chili and purée of garbanzos, a pease porridge cold that, in René’s mournful words, is “already bad hot.”

Fortunately, Verdon, 41, seldom had to confect family meals, which are usually prepared in a separate second-floor kitchen by Mrs. Zephyr Wright, the Johnson cook for 23 years. At $ 10,000 a year, he was hardly overpaid—but then how many chefs can boast that they slept in the White House for nearly five years? René’s reign was not seriously threatened until last October, when Mrs. Mary Kaltman, an old family friend and a veteran director of foods at such epicurean establishments as Harlingen Air Force Base and Austin’s Driskill Hotel—whose manager describes her as “real good on food and labor costs”—was appointed White House “food coordinator” and kitchen economizer.

Mrs. Kaltman, a blonde, fiftyish divorcée of formidably efficient mien and determined stride, whacked cuisine costs by making René use frozen foods (a “very lousy” thing in the White House, he complained). That was the beginning of the end. The end came ever closer when she also insisted on pointing out her favorite recipes in a well-thumbed copy of the Gourmet Cookbook. “I have a master pastry chef who has been doing these things for 40 years,” muttered the disconsolate chef. “You just don’t open the cookbook to page 40 and stick it under his eyes.”

For a man of Verdon’s virtuosity, the new regime was not easy to stomach. What Zephyr cooked for the President’s family upstairs, he shrugged, was their affair. But after a few Kaltman-coordinated state banquets, the chef protested that he had a certain reputation to maintain. “You just don’t ask a chef to serve red snapper with the skin still on it and beets with cream all over them,” he declared with grim finality after last week’s dinner for Pakistan’s President Mohammed Ayub Khan. And so, at week’s end, he quit the Great Society for café society, probably in Manhattan, where a chef of renown can command impressive sums for preparing dishes never dreamed of by Howard Johnson—or Lyndon.