The Culinary Vegetable Institute in Milan may seem far-flung when it comes to the hubbub that is the Cleveland restaurant scene. But edible ideas can be born anywhere, and this home to chef experimentation for The Chef’s Garden, a specialty grower of greens and baby vegetables for top restaurants across the country, has found its latest muse in the neighboring Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Library & Museums in Fremont.
For CVI’s executive chef Jamie Simpson, it’ a nonstop flight to the White House. The White House of the late 1800s, that is.
On Saturday evening, he’ll be taking paying customers with him, laying out an eight-course dinner inspired by an 1887 work called “The White House Cookbook,” and introducing principals from the Hayes center who can talk about the 19th president, his family, and how they lived and ate.
It all started with the vintage cookbook, given to him by a friend. Simpson’s mind got cooking fast.
“I really love food of that era,” said Simpson, a boyish chef with dark hair pulled back into a ponytail. “You can see the early influence of French cuisine and where it started in this country. Chefs here started putting a foundation down to food preparation, and giving an organization to it. What we may call sausage gravy is really bechamel, a real process to make sure gravy has no lumps, and doesn’t taste floury.”
Simpson soaked it all up and then connected with the Hayes center, the grand brick home of our post-Civil War president. A menu was born.
Simpson and his staff will roll out a meal inspired by an earlier time but executed with contemporary presentation. He will still make meat stock from bones, vegetables and spices. He’ll clarify it to a shimmer, but then add goodies such as chunks of braised beef short-rib and floating dainties from the garden.
That’s not all. Seven other courses will include oysters on the half shell, Clover rolls, Canape a la Russe, radishes, salmon with sauce Bearnaise, Pomme Dauphine, “cucumber and bloom” with veal marrow, sweetbreads, legumes, chervil and shaved bread, an intermezzo of Parsnip Sorbet with walnut liqueur and arugula blossom, Stuffed Manchester Farms Quail with foie gras and mushroom farce, along with Tourne Carrot and Potato. Dessert will be Burnt Almond Charlotte and tiny pastries called mignardises.
Simpson swears the mechanics of making such food is a “pretty common, elegant presentation, with not much interpretation.
“It’s just got to be perfect, and that intimidates me.”
Certainly it intimidated White House chefs through the ages. While at their Ohio home called Spiegel Grove, the Hayes family ate elevated local fare such as chicken, veal cutlets, corn fritters and lemon cake – often prepared by Winnie Monroe, their African-American chef. The White House years in Washington, D.C. took them into grander territory. The Hayes center has all the paperwork to re-imagine pomp and circumstance of the time.
“All the menus are in French,” said center director Christie Weininger. “There would be 14-, 15-, 16-course meals with every elaboration. One course might just be cheese, but the meals lasted for several hours with a leisurely pace and small servings of things.”
Back in those days, the president paid for it all.
“Hayes estimated at the end of four years, if he subtracted the cost of state dinners from his salary, there would not be a lot left over,” Weininger said.
She and Kathy Boukissen of the library will be at the dinner to talk about the Hayes legacy.
Simpson will be busy, but two weeks before the dinner, his mind was spiraling into extra possibilities. Maybe he should create a dish of less-used parts of animals, like they did back then. But he wouldn’t want to intimidate today’s eaters. Maybe he’d want to ditch electric kitchen tools all together, pushing ingredients through a sieve rather than a food processor.
“It’s would be,” he said, “just a good, old-fashioned challenge.”
IF YOU GO:
What: Presidential Dinner from the “White House Cookbook” of 1887.
Where: Culinary Vegetable Institute, 12304 Mudbrook Rd, Milan, 44846
When: 6:30 p.m., Saturday Feb. 19
Cost: $75 per person, plus tax and service charge
Contact: CVI online or call 419-499-7500
Our editors found this article on this site using Google and regenerated it for our readers.
