Chinese chefs who served US presidents, and the delicious dishes they cooked

A decade ago, while he was researching his book on African-American cooks in the White House, Adrian Miller came across an intriguing title in the University of Denver library’s special-collection catalogue.

The book, published in 1939, was called To a President’s Taste: Being the Reminiscences and Recipes of Lee Ping Quan, Ex-President’s Steward on the Presidential Yacht, USS Mayflower, as told to Jim Miller.

“[When] I finally got to look at that book, I almost fell out of my chair. It’s a memoir cookbook. It was the most complete telling of a chef’s story that we’ve ever had in presidential history up to that point. The fact that it was by a person of colour, too, was also noteworthy,” Miller said recently.

“So it wasn’t really germane to the book I was writing about African-American chefs, but I just made a mental note that at some point this book needs to be reintroduced to folks, because it was printed in 1939 and it just seems like it fell into obscurity.”

When Miller, a former lawyer who worked in the White House during Bill Clinton’s administration, finished writing his book, he talked to a few publishers, asking if they were interested in reprinting Quan’s book, but they all declined.