Capitol Hill Cook At Odds With Senators Over Her Secret Rice Pudding Recipe

Jet, July 19, 1999

A battle had raged for months on Capitol Hill involving the ownership of the recipe for a prized rice pudding, the dessert that helps fill both the House and Senate restaurants

No lawmaker had any idea of the root causes of the strange food tug-of-war that had eventually led to a no man's land of race relations.

For many years, the rice pudding has been a mainstay of the legislative bastion for which food gourmets from throughout the country beeline to sample.

When the Roll Call newspaper, the Hill's favorite media, printed the story about the behind-the-scenes quarreling over the political dish, reporters paid more attention to what was on the plates of the Hill eateries. With the Republicans holding only a small margin of votes over the Democrats, any subject had two sides, two meanings. None was more controversial or heated than that of rice pudding.

According to Roll Call, Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA) "had been trying to pry loose a copy of the vaunted recipe for rice pudding used by the House Members' Dining Room," but to no avail. "The powerful senator hit a brick wall as House officials repeatedly refused to turn over their secret recipe," the paper said.

One House aide revealed, "They guarded it (the recipe) with their lives. Another source commented, "Let them eat cake."

The sparring degenerated into "Senate officials trying everything from horse trading to surreptitious intelligence-gathering to win over their colleagues," the Roll Call story continued.

One group of senators even "snuck over to the House restaurant to taste the pudding to try to re-create the recipe."

The climax to the culinary feuding came when the final stumbling block turned out to be an uncompromising Black woman--Ms. Janie Galmon, for 36 years a faithful House worker.

Her resolve was more powerful than the combined might of the GOP senators. According to Roll Call, she did not want to give up her family's recipe, saying, "You're not supposed to give up something that your grandmother told you to keep." She learned the secrets of preparing the pudding in South Carolina while a young woman.

Ms. Galmon further warned that when she retires, her rice pudding may vanish from the halls of Congress, because she intends to take the recipe with her.

"Senators should be attending more to politics than to rice pudding," she jibed.

GOP Sen. Santorum responded that Ms. Galmon and her House colleagues should be put in charge of the nation's nuclear secrets. Both Democrats and Republicans in both the Senate and the House agreed to the position of the strong Black woman.