Blue and red states, blue and red plates

"NOT ONLY do I eat, I also am a Democrat," wrote Frank Sinatra in an intro to 1960's "Many Happy Returns: The Democrats' Cook Book, or How to Cook a G.O.P. Goose" (the sales of which helped buy TV air time for candidates). "Not only should every Democrat own a copy of this book, but he should load up all his or her friends, and even smuggle some copies into Pasadena and other points where the enemy is strong and square."

"Many Happy Returns" is one of the more entertaining of a long string of little-noticed ephemera of political campaigns -- the partisan cookbook, written by politicos and their supporters (wives, celebrities, members of the Glendale Republican Womens Study Club), pundits, humorist gourmets, or even a displaced White House chef -- and it even has a few workable recipes.

Maybe the cookbook helped secure JFK his narrow victory that year by pleasing happy squares with Jacqueline Kennedy's recipe for crisp, light waffles (the secret is the egg whites). (It certainly won't be Cindy McCain's butterscotch oatmeal cookies that catapult Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain into the Oval Office in this election. Who cares whether she stole the recipe, which appears on the Family Circle magazine website -- they look like leaden lumps.)

In 1973's "The Watergate Cookbook," recipe titles indicate a period-appropriate cynicism -- there's "McCord's Clouded Consomme (which sounds delicious, with tomatoes, sherry, chives and cream), "Ehrlichman's Cover Up Casserole and Mitchell's Sitting Duck. It's a refreshing read, compared with so many surviving Junior League-esque spiral-bound books -- decades of earnest collections of senators' wives recipes for hot crab dip, easy chicken cacciatore and stuffed peppers.

Don't think the tradition doesn't continue. In recent years the cookie recipe has become some kind of litmus test for domestic bliss for political candidates. Hence, the McCain oatmeal cookies and Michelle Obama's shortbread, one of a cadre of recipes in the "Obama Campaign Family Cookbook" posted on Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama's website. (In 2004, Laura Bush's oatmeal chocolate chunk cookies took on Teresa Heinz Kerry's pumpkin spice cookies.)

But recipes might be beside the point in many political cookbooks.

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Let's eat, Mr. Kim Jong Il