COOK FOR A KING

New Zealand Listener, Volume 5, Issue 127, 28 November 1941, Page 42

COOK FOR A KING

From an Article In "The American" By

JEROME

BEATTY

brose, with laughing blue eyes and a gay ribbon in her hair, sailed from Ireland twenty years ago to make her home in America. Had a good fairy met her on the dock at Boston, waved a wand and proclaimed "Margaret, there will come a day when you will go to London and prepare strawberry shortcake for the King and Queen!" Margaret would have chuckled her disbelief and added "Strawberry shortcake? And now, what might that be?" But it all came true. For sixteen years Margaret has been cook for the eleven members of the family of Joseph P. Kennedy, former American Ambassador to the Court of St. James. The American Ambassador’s home in London is an imposing sixstory mansion that J. Pierpoint Morgan gave to the United States. It was the custom for the Ambassador to ,employ a French chef, for the quality of the food at State affairs was of great importance.. Mrs. Roosevelt served hot A COLLEEN ‘named Margaret Am-

dogs to the King and Queen of England at Hyde Park, N.Y., and got away with 10 cent victuals, but the American Ambassador’s prestige in London would have suffered if Mrs. Kennedy’s formal dinners had been anything short of a good buy at two pounds a plate. Joseph P. Kennedy, being completely American and impatient with unnecessary tradition, saw no reason why the American Embassy shouldn’t serve Margaret Ambrose’s "plain New England cooking." They Loved It So Mrs. Kennedy planned American menus and Margaret was made an ambassador of goodwill of no small importance. Her food, unfamiliar to the palates of London’s great, had to be as enchanting as that of the best French chefs. Many an American cook would have been so flabbergasted over preparing a dinner for dukes and countesses that she would have stuck cloves into the turkey and tried to stuff the (Continued on next page)

COOK FOR A KING (Continued from previous page)

ham. But Margaret took it all in a firm tranquil Irish stride and gave them the things she had been serving the Kennedys for years. And London’s great loved it. At first Margaret had a French chef to help her, but there was an Incident, and shortly after, he departed. The Incident was this: The chef suggested for the Ambassador’s dinner an exotic symphony of fish with elaborate sauces. The Ambassador said, "Thank you, but instead, please cook me some ham and eggs." The chef went rather violently mad, as Rembrandt might have done had he been asked to paint a chicken house, and while he brooded in his toom Margaret cooked the ham and eggs. Her Strawberry Shortcake The high point of Margaret’s London: career came in May, 1939, when for the first time in history, the King and Queen dined at the American Embassy. It was the first move in the British Government’s effort to create closer co-opera-tion between Great Britain and the United States. The Ambassador and Mrs. Kennedy decided to serve a real American dinner, and most of the food was shipped from the United States. But the highlight of that dinner was Margaret’s strawberry shortcake, It was the first time the King and Queen had eaten strawberry shortcake. Newspapers printed the menu and gave strawberry shortcake so much publicity that té eat it became the thing to do, and it appeared on the menus in many of London’s best restaurants. I had always approached strawberry shortcake at a formal dinner with fear in my heart, for I wasn’t sure whether to eat it with a fork, a spoon or with both. That’s all cleared up now. Their Majesties used both.