Welcome to River Cafe Table four, a production of iHeartRadio and Adami Studios.
I have three brothers. My brother Joe is the eldest.
I'm Valerie, the second and the only girl, and then my brother Jimmy, and then the baby is Frankie. And we are a typical mid twentieth century American family.
Valerie Biden's family are typical Americans in some ways, but not that typical. Her brother Joe is President Biden. And in today's River Cafe Table four, we'll be talking about food and family from the kitchen table to the White House. When President Biden's first wife died in a tragic accident, Valerie stepped up to support her nephew's beau and hunter ice cream, hot dogs, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, vows.
Food memories are made up of American classics. But we'll begin right now with her favorite recipe from the River Cafe.
It's quick sweet tomato sauce.
Serve six to eight, three tablespoons olive oil, three garlic cloves peeled and cut into slivers. Two one kilogram jars peeled plum tomato drained of their juices, A handful of fresh basil or oregano leaves. Heat one to two tablespoons of the olive oil in a large pan and fry the garlic until it is soft.
But not brown.
Add the tomatoes with some sea salt and black pepper, and cook fiercely, stirring constantly to prevent the tomatoes from sticking as they break up. As they cook, the tomatoes will release their juices when the liquid has evaporated. Add the remaining olive oil, the basil or oregano, and more seasoning if necessary.
Serve hot and I.
Always use the basil, and it's spectacular. It makes me smile because every family dinner, we all sit down and we have spaghetti and meat balls with tomato sauce, tell the same stories and laugh at the same jokes as if it's the first time we ever heard them.
Can I ask you about food at the White House? What's it like when you go to eat with your brother.
At the White House?
Joe the President and First Lady aka Joe and Jill. They don't have breakfast served. That's a time when you can get up and go to the small kitchen and have coffee or cereal and not have people around, you know, who are very gracious and want to take care of you. But it's just a quiet time lunch. My brother is rather a pedestrian eater like I. He'll have a ponifish salad, ponfish sandwich or a chicken salad sandwich, and always if we can, tomato soup. They make great tomato basil soup.
And then dinner, normal dinner that they suits set and it's usually Jill, my sister in law, is very conscious of help. I mean she's she's what I want to be when I when you grow up.
Yes, when I grow up.
And generally she has a fish meal salmon and a crust and delicious. But Joe and I said, oh we're eating healthy again. Okay.
Do you share a lot of time over food?
It's almost always over a meal.
Especially since my you know brother, when he travels now it's an entourage and it's generally and it's an inconvenience to other people. I mean, it's for his safety and he's very we're very appreciative, but it inconveniences other people, you know, to go in in the arrest.
So we don't go to restaurants very often.
We either at his house or my house and Jimmy Biden's house. Frankie, our youngest, is in Florida, so not at his house. But we sit and again tell the same old stories. We poke fun at each other, and you know, in I have found that in a family that's close or a large family, your place in the family stays the same if you're sixty years old or
if you're six years old. Once the baby, always the baby, you know, once the middle, always the middle, once the eldest always and once the only which is of course me and I would have it no other way. I love, I love, love love growing up with my three brothers. They were a gift to me. I always say that I earned my husband, but my brothers were a gift.
What was food like in the Biden household growing up?
Food was we always had enough of it to begin with, but it was ordinary. We didn't dine, we ate, but we always ate together every night. We grew up in a middle class Irish Catholic background.
My brothers.
As the first born, he was born in Scranton, but by the time I guess he was eight years old, my father got work and moved to back home to Delaware, where dad was from.
But what did your father do.
My father was a car salesman and then he ended up managing mostly Chevrolet dealerships, different ones here in Delaware.
He come home for dinner. My father.
The one thing about him was he had insisted upon impeccable table manners. My brother Jimmy probably has a left elbow that's still weak from my father smacking it, you know.
When he put it on the table.
So we had to know what the right knife and fork were and how to pass our dishes. And that was the only thing he was absolutely stern about. And he thought it represented good matters.
And I think it is very telling the way people are considerate in a way, if that's what matters are at the table, and how things have changed. When I talked to Nancy Pelosi, she said that she'd never sat down in her child at a table where there wasn't a tablecloth. Was that the Biden household as well?
Well?
What Mom and Dad had on the dining room table was a piece of glass that was fitted that covered the table so it would save the wood. And we always had place met and we always had napkins. And Mom was an ordinary cook in the best sense of the word. I mean, we were Hamburger's hot dogs. My favorite dish at the time was pot roast. You would always make that for me for my birthday.
But there were certain rituals.
Sunday morning after Mass, we would come home and Dad always made hotcakes.
That was a big deal.
There are three foods that I never ate when I was a child, and I don't know why, but I didn't like hotcakes, and I didn't like hot dogs, and I didn't like cam oh the h Yeah, and my mother never made me eat them. So everybody would have hot hotcakes with maple syrup.
I had my cheerios and milk.
The second ritual was because we were a Catholic family, we didn't eat meat on Friday, so on Fridays we had missus Paul's frozen fish sticks, which meant that all four children grew up to really dislike fish, I mean because we had to eat it. But more often than that Mom would substitute. And that's when we had spaghetti. Mom made her homemade spaghetti sauce.
What was that? Can I ask you what that was?
Big kansa tomato sauce.
I think she would put in a pork chop, but I never I was not in the kitchen. I was out playing ball with my with my brothers. We came in, you know, Mom had dinner ready. We sat down and ate and there were no chores, like we didn't have to clean up after the table or because Mom would always say, my job is to be the mom, and your job is to be the students.
Go do your homework.
The big deal in the house of food was if things were good on Saturday night, we would my brother and I would ride our bike, or if it were bad, Mom would drive us up to the local Custlers pharmacy where they had ice cream, and we would get a half gallon of Briar's ice cream and the ice cream was vanilla, chocolate and strawberry. Nobody liked strawberry. I think Jimmy I think Jimmy Biden was the only one to
eat the strawberry. But that was the big deal. We'd had the half gallon of ice cream and we would watch at Sullivan Joe on Sunday night.
And then when you went to college, did you cook for yourself? You no longer had your mother saying go and study. What did you do for food?
Then? Well, I had a meal ticket, and at the time, everybody lived on campus all four years, so I didn't have an apartment where I had to experiment. You know, there was a meal ticket and we ate normal college food.
What college did you go to?
Where was the University of Delaware, Delaware about fifty minutes from our home. But to me, I had graduated from Ursuline Academy for Young Girls. But I thought I had died and gone to heaven. I went to the University of Delaware, five thousand undergraduates, co ed, and I was in a brand new world and I loved every single minute of it. And my big brother Joey was there too. He was a junior when I was a freshman, and I was there because because of him, I was a
good student and I got in Delaware. But my mom and dad were not able to afford room and board, which is what the essence of college was. And I desperately wanted to go in room and board, and my dad told me, Toney, look, I can't swing it. You know, you could commute. And my brother in that right after that called a family meeting with mom and dad, and respectfully, we were very, very aware of my father's dignity and it pained him that he wasn't able to send us
both to room and board. But my brother said, Dad, I've thought about this, and here's what I proposed. Vo's a good kid, She's smarter than I. She deserves college more than I do. So I'm going to drop out this coming semester in September. I'm going to work for the year, save money so that I can go back the next year, so that Voo could take my place, because she should be able to go to Delaware. She's
earned it, ye, my father said. My father called my brother champ and he said, Champion can't do that because my dad was as in that generation and that time, in mid nineteen sixties, my dad assumed that I would get married and have children and that you know, the man had to be was the breadwinner.
And he said, you know, you have to raise a.
Family and support a family, and VAL's not going to have to do that. She'll have her pick of whatever she wants. But my brother said, no, he wanted to do it that way. And somehow, long story short, Ruthin And it was late August, right before school started. My father somehow managed to get alone another loan and I went to the university with my brother, and as I said, I realized what a gift it was from my parents, and I squeezed every single thing I could out of the school.
I loved it.
You were thrust at a very young age into cooking for young children, taking care of your brother's children.
I jumped into domestic life, and you know what. I had a very close friend. Her name was Maureen. She had two young boys who were close in age to bow and hunt, and she would give me quick, down and dirty recipes.
You know that they like this, and they like that.
She used to make scalop potatoes and she said, get brock worst, which I didn't know. They were fat hot dogs as far as I was concerned, and put them on top. And that was a great dish, an easy dish. And I did that and I served it. We used to have a lazy Susan in the kitchen and I served it. Nobody told me to take the skin off the brock wars. So when I took it off and went to serve it to the boys.
It flew off the table. They said, Aunt vaol. I mean it was always a little bit of you.
But you were twenty. You were twenty six. You know, cut yourself some slack. I mean that is very very young.
When I got the boys and started to cook, I wasn't a cook.
I mean I was an eater.
So I made probably most nights of the week chicken breast, which I boiled interesting boiled sucken breast.
And came to be known as my rubber chicken.
And boiled chicken breast. And meat loaf was another thing that I made. And I would try in the beginning now and I'm trying when I had the boys, I'm trying to be healthy, and I tried making flounder and telling them that it was chicken oh.
In their favorite dish.
And all of both friends who called me aunt vol when you know this whole, these kids who all grew up together. Specialty was egg in the cup, and that was a soft bailled egg. And I never had a time, Ruthie, I had an instinct exactly when it was right.
That's very that's impressive because it's really hard to make a good soft boiled egg. Yeah.
I would put it in the cup along with some shell, always a little bit of shell, some salt and pepper butter, and I would break up toast and put it in an egg in the cup, and that was bowen hunts. My children and all their kids. That was that was a favorite meal. Aunt found didn't really screw that one up much.
It's very traditional. It's very English. I think they call it as a fellow American. It's called soldiers, isn't it. They'd make the little sticks of bread and then you tip it into the egg.
Yo that I would give my children with tang and what they call they called uh, I would sing it, do.
It with a ting tang kong.
That was the drink of astronauts.
But it was, I mean, it was.
It was a terrible time, Ruthie, a terrible tragedy, but it was also a time of healing.
And there was joy.
These boys they loved me full throttle, and I love them and uh, and they healed Joe and we healed as a family, I mean, and there was there was joy. And as I said, five years later, Joe was able to come out of it because he met this wonderful woman, Joe Jacobs, and fell in love.
So Uh.
The best thing that my memories of raising being with the boys would My brother bought me a jeep to travel around with the boys, and we were up high and we would look out the window and.
We had a passer by.
We'd be at a stop signer or a red light, and the boys would look out and we'd see the person, and then we'd go off and we would spin magical tales like where they were going? What do we think that they were doing? The jeep was like a magic carper ride. And we always had peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and ting tang tong in the backseat, okay for an emergency.
If this was a food of everyday life, and you describe the meals around the table after school and before homework, did your parents ever or did your family ever go to restaurants.
A graduation or first communion or something like that. But we would always have a tray and you know, bring it help. The big thing that we did in Delaware that we always brought home where hoggies or subs we call them.
And that's when the.
Family gets together, if it's lunchtime or even going into dinner, it's either hogies where we all grab them go out and sit in the porch on the picnic table, or when we sit down to dinner.
It's spaghetti and meatballs. And now it's my.
Spaghetti sauce, which is very similar to your quick suite tomato sauce. At the risk of sounding preachy, but again from our parents, there was family, and there's faith, and there was a responsibility to each other. And then that went to moved over to the community at large. And there are so many people who are in need of food, which is a travesty in this country. And I'm very happy that I'm able to work with the Ministry of Caring.
We have three places throughout the city that serve food, and it's over a hundred churches and synagogues and religious groups and that do that. And I think, I mean, it's just so obvious if we if we don't have nutrition, then we don't have energy. And we don't have energy, we don't have power, we don't have an ability to think and to be on our feet. If we have food shortages, we.
Fall into political problems where you have to cross borders to go.
You know, politics is the art and signs of living together peacefully. While we tussle over the allocation of scarce resources and with climate change, with our scarce resources, with the fact that in America, only less and two percent of our families, our farm and ranchers. We have to be more vigilant and we have to be aware that we are our brother's keeper.
I'm really glad we talked about this because talking to a woman who is campaigned, who is political, who is active, who has values, you just defined politics in a certain way of caring for each other. But politics is also active. It should be the role of a government to make sure that every child is fed when they go to start their day at school, that they go home to a house where there is food, that there's access to food. And when we look at the poverty in the United States,
it is shocking that our children are hungry. I know that the President has tried to push laws through is working on it. It must be one of the great concerns of his political life.
And it all comes under the umbrella of health and health for every American should be a right and not a privilege.
And what was food like on the campaign trail?
Well, very very rarely did we get to go to a nice restaurant. The truth is the food on a campaign is grab and grow. Applebee's is a great I presume great restaurant, but one I never ever want to walk into again, because every meeting in Iowa was that Applebee's and we had fried food and fried food and whatever it was. It reminds me of campaigning. And I'm not disparaging Applebee's. I just it reminds me of sitting trying to talk a county chair into supporting my brother.
The foods were what, you know what. We would pick up those fruit bars that were supposed to give me energy and nutrition, but mostly it was Coca cola, a Hamburger grabbing on the road. And then any and I mean this in the best sense, any local Italian restaurant was really good. My choice of restaurants would either be Italian or Greek.
I love both of those foods.
I suppose. My last question to you is to say, if food is alleviates hunger and food is an expression of love, it is also comfort. And so if you were having a day where you just looked at a meal or food as comfort, is there a food that you would choose to give you that comfort.
Yeah?
I would have a rigatoni with red sauce, and if I were particularly adventuresome, I would chop a salad because I know how to make oil and moneager dressing. That's one of the few things I do know that I'm good at. And I would have a salad and I would have some French bread with butter. I would have a coke first, and this just shows you how unrefined I am. I would have my glass of wine after because I wouldn't want to mess.
Up either taste.
I know it's supposed to have wine and it's supposed to reflect and augment the food. I just want the red sauce.
Well, you can have whatever you want. Val Biden, you can have whatever you want. Thank you very much.
I'm going to come see you.
Okay, we'll waity for you. We're going to get that dive coke and red tomato sauce and glass of white wine ready for you. To visit the online shop of the cafe, go to shop Therivercafe dot co dot Ukka.
River Cafe Table four is a production of iHeartRadio and Adamized Studios. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.