Word: verdon
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...disagree most emphatically with Chef René Verdon [Dec. 24]. How dare he burn his chefs card? His clear duty is to go on working for his President and to make le hot dog; to cover everything with la catchup and forget sauce béchamel and quiches Lorraine for the duration. Quitter, draft dodger, outcast! Let his new place of employment be published far and wide so that all of us patriotic citizens may go there and savor his disgrace...
...Dean Acheson to Gene Autry, George Meany to Thomas Dewey. By candlelight in the evergreen-decked state dining room, they feasted on roast duckling, Bibb lettuce salad, lobster imperial and "Yule log" dessert (chocolate cake coated with mocha butter)-the last culinary triumph of White House Chef René Verdon, a Kennedy find who heatedly gave notice a week before the party that he was leaving...
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...
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...
...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...