The Bizarre 2-Ingredient Combo Richard Nixon Ate For Breakfast

Among details recorded about their presidencies in the history books, various commanders in chief are also remembered for some odd eating habits. Woodrow Wilson started his day by drinking an absurd concoction of raw eggs and grape juice, for instance, while Ulysses S. Grant's favorite thing to eat for breakfast was a vinegar-soaked cucumber. Even Donald Trump has raised some culinary eyebrows with the controversial way he likes to eat his steak — very well done and sometimes drenched in ketchup. Richard Nixon also earns a spot in the presidential strange foods hall of fame with his penchant for a particularly strange two-ingredient breakfast combination.

The former president favored a mixture of cottage cheese and ketchup among his go-to breakfast staples. This singular habit reportedly stemmed from Nixon's grandmother, who also consumed the combo. He had additionally been advised by a doctor to incorporate cottage cheese into his diet. Problem was, the president didn't like the dairy product. To make it more palatable, he adopted his grandmother's practice and started topping it with ketchup — a detail he shared during a talk show interview and later repeated at a White House Conference on Food, Nutrition, and Health in 1969. "You can't imagine how many letters I got," the president stated in his remarks. "The dairy industry wrote and told me that I should like cottage cheese. The catsup industry wrote and told me to try it on my cereal. And others wrote and said that catsup with cottage cheese had to be unhealthy. I pointed to the fact that my grandmother lived to be 93 and she ate it all her life, so that was the answer."

Cottage cheese was at its heyday in the 1970s, when American households consumed quite a lot of it — as much as 5 pounds in a year for the average citizen. The Nixon household — and later the Nixon White House — was no exception.

When Richard Nixon and the First Family took up residence in the White House, they were given the opportunity to request preferred foods so the kitchen staff could stock up on them. Cottage cheese was prominent on the list for the family, and the First Lady reportedly promptly requested a dish of the dairy staple on Inauguration Day, shortly after moving into the White House. But there was none to be found in the White House kitchen, so a staff member hurriedly went in search of some. Thereafter, cottage cheese was always kept well-stocked for the Nixons.

In addition to his ketchup-topped order, President Nixon was also known to request pineapple with cottage cheese from the White House kitchen, a fact captured in the recordings used in impeachment inquiries against him, which, in addition to incriminating the president, also logged some of his daily food orders. The combination of cottage cheese and pineapple was famously the very last thing the White House kitchen staff served Nixon before his televised resignation from office. The small meal, featuring just two circlets of pineapple chunks, a mound of cottage cheese at the center, and a glass of milk, was illustrated in a photo taken by an official White House photographer and later released by the Nixon Library.