Henry Haller and Maurice Bonté with
the Nixon-Cox wedding cake, June 12, 1971.
Library of Congress.
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The White House
Chefs and the Nixon-Cox Wedding Cake
In March 1971, President Richard
M. Nixon announced
the engagement of his daughter Patricia
to Edward Cox. The details of the wedding
preparations soon appeared in newspapers.
As the June date drew closer, media attention
began to focus on the wedding cake.
White
House Chef Henry Haller and his colleagues,
White House Pastry Chef Heinz Bender and
New York pastry specialist Maurice Bonté,
were now in the spotlight. The cake was to
be a marvel of engineering and enchantment.
Its base layer would be at table height,
and feature the intertwined first initials
of the couple. The confection was to soar
to a height of close to seven feet.
Henry
Haller served as spokesman for the White
House kitchen as the cake became an ever
more prominent news feature. At the beginning
of June, the White House released a recipe
for a scaled-down version of the cake. Food
writers for major U.S. newspapers tried the
recipe, and announced that the batter overflowed
the pan.1 Haller
stayed up late testing and retesting the
cake formula, and declared the recipe to
be accurate.2
Haller,
Bender, and Bonte had reason to celebrate
on June 12, 1971. The Nixon-Cox wedding cake
was picture-perfect.3
1 Sarah Booth Conroy, "Cake Mess?" Washington
Post, June 3, 1971: B1; Raymond A. Sokolov, "Warning!
It May Not Work," New York Times,
June 2, 1971: 36.
2 Raymond Sokolov, "The Great Cake Controversy, Continued: The Making
(and Then Remaking) of a Recipe, Step by Step." New York Times,
June 4, 1971: 17.
3 James M. Naughton, "The President and the Cake Pass Tests," New
York Times, June 13, 1971: 76.
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