This past week I got to teach the second of the classes I designed at the Kitchen House. This week’s class was in line with Election Day and explored the topic, “What the Presidents Ate.”

As I stated in earlier weeks, I decided to center this class on the role of the Executive White House Chef and the history of this position. This was greatly assisted in my use of Adrian Miller’s book The President’s Kitchen Cabinet: The Story of the African Americans Who Have Fed Our First Families from the Washingtons to the Obamas. This book introduced a lot of easy to understand historical context alongside a deeper conversation about ethical consumption and the racial undertones of domestic service throughout American history and how even in the kitchens and domestic spaces of highest echelons of power, America has always been affected by discrimination and institutionalized ideas of the racial hierarchy throughout the country.

The class itself had a large range of students, with the oldest being 14 and the youngest being 8. With this in mind, I tried to center my limited amount of time on what I thought was the most important part of the history that I wanted children to retain and still understand. I focused on the history of the role of the Executive White House Chef and, because we were going to be preparing his recipe, I focused on James Hemmings the enslaved chef of Thomas Jefferson and his invention of mac’n’cheese. Unfortunately, I still ran into the problem of trying to share too much information to the students and having them not remember it. Throughout the class we tried to get them to remember the names of Hercules Posey and James Hemmings but they were unable to do so.

This was a frustrating class. The students were well-behaved and they were great at listening and following directions. All of them were excited to be at EEE and were helpful and excited to participate in the cooking. Yet, despite my best efforts to try and reduce the information I was sharing with the class I continuously ran into the problem of not having enough time to get the information I wanted to share out, and the students not grasping the questions I was asking.

I have to ask myself, did I age the content of this class incorrectly? I thought that I had chosen information that would be manageable for an 8-13 age group, but looking back at how much information the students didn’t engage with, I’m not so sure. The class was held during the day and the students were largely home-school kids, so maybe having a grasp of social studies and civics is a little bit different than from a public school, but I was struggling to even get responses from the students when I asked what the three branches of the U.S. government were.

I don’t know, maybe it was just the excitement of getting to make mac’n’cheese, something that is very atypical for the programming done by Edible Ed. It was an odd experience. The food was great though, the students enjoyed the topic, and it was a fun class. I just wish that the history section had gone better.