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is a consulting editor for Saveur magazine. `Tell me what you eat and I will tell you what you are," goes the oft-quoted adage from The Physiology of Taste by Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, the nineteenth-century French lawyer and pioneer gastronome. So it was with great interest that I delved into The Great American Sampler Cookbook, which was published in 2004 and features more than 250 recipes from senators, congressmen, and even the president. Some politicians' entries were obviously given with attendant respect to geography--Iowa Senator Tom Harkin's pork chops, Samoan Representative Eni Faleomavaega's Island Samoan Chop Suey, Montana Senator Max Baucus's huckleberry pie. Then there is the "chicken Florentine." To make it, a cook should defrost two packages of frozen spinach; saute them in butter, garlic, thyme, and basil; combine them with five cups of cooked, sliced chicken; top it with a sauce made of chicken broth, flour, half-and-half, and cut-up ham; cover this with parmesan cheese; and bake it at 400 degrees for 20 minutes. The author: Dick Cheney.Consider Cheney, the man who is both the vice president of the United States and the former head of Halliburton, the man who reported a $1.9 million income-tax refund this year. The cost of all the ingredients to make this dish is no more than $20--or $3 per serving. If this is what Cheney really ingests for dinner, where is he hiding the $1,899,997? We're talking about a very rich man; it is difficult to believe that he's getting by on chicken casserole. Cheney's recipe is an outstanding example of how conservatives are winning the war on flavor by appropriating traditional middle-class American food and making it their own. The result is that lefties today are consistently portrayed as folks who are out of touch with the tastes of the electorate--that they are members of what our president once so eloquently called the "brie and cheese" crowd. "There is the idea that, somehow, you think you are smarter and better than somebody if your taste buds are at all cultivated," says the Boston- based Democratic political consultant Michael Goldman. What's so interesting about this conservative food movement, though, is that it's completely counterintuitive--you've got guys with big means carrying on about beans, literally. Outstanding examples of this abound in The Great American Sampler Cookbook. For instance, we have Tom DeLay's "Big Bend Bean Dip, " which includes nothing more than pinto beans, an onion, some fat (bacon drippings or butter, it's up to the cook), cheddar cheese, and a few slices of canned jalapeno peppers. Nothing against bean dip, but is this blue-collar fare what DeLay really subsists on? Not bloody likely if restaurant records from Signatures (lobbyist Jack Abramoff's once-happening luxurious D.C. commissary) are to be believed. According to reports first published in Time and The New York Times, at Signatures--where a steak could run more than $70 and sushi and tasting menus were de rigueur--records show that DeLay was a regular and that there was even a dinner for 16 held for his PAC for $75 per person in a private room in April 2002. That there is no record of payment for this meal is a hotly disputed topic; regardless, what is interesting is the fact that $75 can buy almost five gallons of bean dip. The only dish in the entire book that really costs a significant amount of money to prepare is prime rib from Nebraska Senator Ben Nelson, a Democrat who is obviously paying homage to his state's legacy of corn-fed beef. This reminded me of a story: An acquaintance ran into no less a conservative personage than Jesse Helms at an outpost of the Bojangles' fried chicken franchise in downtown Raleigh, North Carolina. Helms reportedly ordered the dirty rice, and I have no reason to believe it's not true; in fact, I would be shocked if Helms ate anything, say, Korean, in his entire life. But a lot of these conservative folks are really well-traveled and sophisticated in ways that Helms has never pretended to be. So why is the public buying the fact that a guy like Montana Senator Conrad Burns, another Signatures regular to whom Abramoff and his clients gave $150,000 for reelection, really eats something called "Quick and Easy Taco Meatballs" for dinner? The conjuring of a conservative public persona relies on using food to portray the "regularness" of its eater. "People want to know that you're going to eat a Hershey's bar, not $20 chocolate from Godiva. That's snobby," Goldman says. Marlin Fitzwater, presidential press secretary for Ronald Reagan and the first Bush, concurs. "If you say of a candidate, `Well, he likes bearnaise sauce on his steak,' it has no meaning to me. But, if you say he eats three kinds of broccoli, I might say, `That's a little weird.'" Spoken by a man who worked for a president whose sworn enemy was just that green vegetable. If anything, the conservative food agenda seems devoted to being one thing: plain. In the staff dining room of the right-wing American Enterprise Institute (AEI), which recently published an article on its website by visiting fellow Kenneth P. Green called "vegan-organic lifestyle doesn't help earth, isn't necessarily best," the menu is the expected fare--chicken, beef stroganoff, et cetera--although spokeswoman Veronique Rodman says that the chef has a health bent and tries to cook without cream. Daring fare is also rare in the more than 250 recipes in The Great American Sampler Cookbook, not one of which--unless you count Maine liberal Republican Olympia Snowe's baklava--can be considered truly exotic; only eight are for fish entrees. Fish seems to be a sticking point for conservatives in general. In the (mostly) gag cookbook by Susanne Grayson Townsend, How to Eat Like a Republican: Or, Hold the Mayo, Muffy--I'm Feeling Miracle Whipped Tonight, there is a neat summary of a nonconservative's perceived palate: Liberals are "arugula eaters. The people who buy free-range chicken, prepare their own duck confit, and establish relationships with their fishmongers in order to get first crack at all that fish the Republicans wouldn't touch with a stick." The fish chapter consists of just one sentence: "To tell the truth, Republicans don't much like fish." If any fares emerge as conservative favorites, it's Southwestern cuisine and heavily assimilated ethnic food. The Bush Family Cookbook, written by longtime Bush family chef Ariel De Guzman, depicts such examples as "Taco Day" (a buffet that is "the most popular get-together dish in the Bush household") and nonintimidating banquet staples like chicken kiev. A note from the author below a recipe for Mongolian beef particularly interested me: "President (41) and Mrs. Bush love Asian cuisine. When friends are invited for dinner, they don't hesitate to request Asian food. ... So keep that in mind as you plan a meal of Asian dishes throughout the book, which are some of the President and Mrs. Bush's favorites." De Guzman's book gives a nod to the notion of "ethnic" cuisine by saying the Bushes weren't afraid of it, but it then offers up only an extremely homogenized dish as an example--one that could be found in any "Chinese" restaurant in the world; it's not as if the Bushes love Asian food and don't hesitate to request zheng shi-ban yu (steamed rock cod). What would happen if a conservative like, say, Rick Santorum suddenly admitted a preference for an exotic food like sushi? "He would be the butt of every political joke in Pennsylvania," Goldman predicts. Fitzwater doesn't argue. "Sushi for Santorum is interesting just because, if there was ever a food I associated with any president, it isn't sushi. Has there ever been a sushi president? I can't think of one," he says--and then, as if on cue, admits that he himself is a sushi fan. The point here is not that conservatives don't like foreign food or that they honestly eschew expensive food. It's that they've mastered the art of faux populism--the vast majority of them probably like their sushi as much as any liberal. They've just figured out how to appear as if they don't. For the record, a call to Santorum's office yielded the information that Italian and Chinese foods are the senator's favorites. When Santorum says "Chinese," do you think he means the Bushes' Mongolian beef, or something more unfamiliar, such as Szechuan pepper crab? Perhaps it's time to update the Brillat-Savarin aphorism: Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you who you vote for.

By kelly alexander