There’s a wonderful piece about Jeane Kirkpatrick, one of this country’s two great U. N. ambassadors (the other, of course, was Daniel Patrick Moynihan), in today’s Food section. Seems that Jeane Kirkpatrick wasn’t just an intellectual with a first-rate mind? — he was also a great cook:
“In 1985, when a senator called Jeane J. Kirkpatrick to ask why she was leaving her position as the first female U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, she replied, ‘Harry Truman used to say that if you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen. I believe the converse: If you can’t stand the heat, get back to the kitchen.’
“Kirkpatrick, who died last month, loved cooking for her family and friends almost as much as talking about political ideas. As articulate about rice as she was about Ronald Reagan, who appointed her, she honed her techniques by cooking breakfast and dinner for her three boys in Bethesda. Before she was a professor at Trinity College and later Georgetown University, she was a stay-at-home mom until her youngest son, Stuart, was 8.”