Jackie Kennedy was one of the most photographed women in the world for most of her adult life, the woman who wore the pink Chanel suit to Dallas, who redecorated the White House as a national living museum, who spoke French to Charles de Gaulle and received the admiration of every dignitary who passed through 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue during the Kennedy years.
She was, by every public measure, a person of extraordinary sophistication and refined taste. Her favorite sandwich was a grilled cheese.
That is the specific revelation at the center of a viral EatingWell article circulating this week, and the reason it is resonating so widely is the gap between the image and the reality, the most elegant First Lady in American history quietly eating a grilled cheese sandwich with a cup of broth at her White House desk, same as anyone’s Tuesday lunch.
The source is unimpeachable. Kathy McKeon, who served as Jackie Kennedy’s personal assistant for 13 years beginning in 1964, described her employer’s food preferences in an interview with Fox News that has since become the documentary record of what Jackie actually ate behind the curtain of the public image.
“She loved grilled cheese sandwiches,” McKeon said. “And she loved hot dogs that came right off a barbecue grill.” Grilled cheese and hot dogs. The most sophisticated woman of her era. Make of that what you will.
The Lunch She Had Every Single Day
The grilled cheese was not an occasional indulgence or a weekend treat. It was a fixture. During her White House years, Jackie Kennedy’s standard lunch was a cup of broth accompanied by a sandwich.
The sandwich was often grilled cheese. She ate it at her desk, privately, the same way that millions of Americans eat lunch at their desks every day without anyone writing about it.
The specific simplicity of the choice is what makes it culturally resonant six decades later. Jackie Kennedy had access to the best French-trained chef in America. René Verdon, the White House’s official chef beginning in 1961, was installed specifically because of Jackie’s love of French cuisine, she had studied abroad in Paris during her college junior year and had developed the kind of sophisticated culinary taste that made Verdon a natural choice.
Under Verdon’s tenure, the Kennedy White House hosted state dinners of a caliber that set the template for American presidential entertaining for decades.
Jackie could have had anything for lunch. She chose grilled cheese and broth.
The choice reflects something genuine about who she was when no one was watching, a person with sophisticated public tastes and simple private ones, who had opinions about food that were occasionally strict to an extraordinary degree.
There is documentation of a period during which Jackie’s entire daily diet was a single baked potato topped with caviar and sour cream.
She followed multiple different dietary regimens throughout her life with the same discipline she applied to everything about her public presentation.
The grilled cheese was not the discipline. The grilled cheese was the comfort.
How To Make The Sandwich That Jackie Kennedy Loved
The beauty of the grilled cheese is its radical accessibility. The sandwich that was the favorite of the most sophisticated First Lady in American history requires ingredients that cost less than five dollars at any grocery store in the country and a technique that any home cook can master in a single afternoon.
The bread is the first decision. Classic white sandwich bread produces the kind of soft, slightly chewy crust that the mid-century American version of this sandwich called for, the bread that would have been in every American kitchen during the Kennedy era.
A slightly more modern interpretation uses sourdough, whose tang provides a counterpoint to the richness of the melted cheese. Either works.
The key is thickness, a standard slice, not too thin or the cheese will overwhelm it and not too thick or the inside will not heat through properly.
The cheese is the second decision and the one where quality makes the most difference.
American cheese is the choice that melts most smoothly and produces the gooey, pull-apart texture that defines the classic version, it is technically a processed cheese product but it was designed specifically for this application and performs better at it than most natural cheeses.
Cheddar produces more flavor at the cost of some meltability. A combination of sharp cheddar and a small amount of American gives you both. Jackie Kennedy, with the resources of the White House kitchen behind her, would have had access to excellent cheese of any variety.
The historical record does not specify her preference within the category.
The technique is where most grilled cheeses fail, and where understanding it separates a good sandwich from a great one. The pan should be cast iron or a heavy non-stick.
The heat should be medium to medium-low, not high. Butter both sides of the bread generously and place in the pan.
The goal is a slow, even golden brown on each exterior surface while the cheese inside melts completely. Rushing this process over high heat produces burned bread and unmelted cheese. Patience is the ingredient.
Press the sandwich gently with a spatula while it cooks. Do not smash it flat, just enough pressure to ensure contact between the bread and the pan across the full surface. Flip once.
The second side will brown faster than the first. Remove when both sides are deeply golden and the cheese has fully melted and is beginning to seep at the edges.
Let it rest for one minute before cutting. The interior is hot. The cheese needs a moment to set from liquid back to a slightly more stable state that will not immediately pour out when you cut it in half diagonally — always diagonally, the geometry matters to the experience.
Serve with a cup of broth. That is the Kennedy lunch.
The Woman Behind The Image
Jacqueline Lee Bouvier Kennedy Onassis was born on July 28, 1929, in Southampton, New York, and died on May 19, 1994, exactly 32 years ago this week, from non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma at the age of 64.
She was First Lady of the United States from January 1961 until November 22, 1963. She was married to John F. Kennedy, she survived his assassination, she married Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis in 1968 and after his death in 1975 she built a second career as a book editor, first at Viking Press, then at Doubleday, where she was known as a rigorous and devoted editor who took her work seriously and her celebrity lightly.
Kathy McKeon arrived in Jackie’s household in 1964, the year after the assassination, and stayed for 13 years.
She eventually wrote a memoir of her experience called “Jackie’s Girl: My Life with the Kennedy Family,” which became the primary source for much of what is documented about Jackie Kennedy’s private habits, preferences and daily routines.
The book is the source for the grilled cheese detail, the hot dog detail and a range of other observations about what the woman who was publicly a paragon of sophistication was actually like in private.
The picture that emerges from McKeon’s account is of someone who was simultaneously disciplined and indulgent, publicly controlled and privately warm, capable of eating a single baked potato with caviar for an entire day and equally capable of ordering a grilled cheese from the White House kitchen because it was lunchtime and that is what she wanted.
The cottage cheese was real too. Jackie ate it regularly at lunch, often with fruit, a high-protein, low-calorie choice that reflected the diet consciousness that ran parallel to the grilled cheese fondness.
Marta Sgubin, who worked as Jackie’s personal chef later in life and wrote her own cookbook, “Cooking for Madam: Recipes and Reminiscences from the Home of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis,” documented the more formal side of her food life, the poached salmon, the spinach risotto without cheese, the French-influenced entertaining menus.
What Sgubin documented and what McKeon documented together create the full picture: a woman who could host a state dinner with Dom Pérignon and casserole Marie Blanche served alongside roast beef fillet, crabmeat ravigote and asparagus hollandaise, and who could also, the next afternoon, have the kitchen send up a grilled cheese and a cup of broth and call it lunch.
Why This Particular Detail Keeps Resonating
The reason Jackie Kennedy’s grilled cheese preference continues to circulate every few years, appearing in food publications, going viral on social media, landing in EatingWell in 2026, is not nostalgia for a particular sandwich. It is the gap.
The gap between the public image of extraordinary sophistication and the private reality of ordinary comfort is the thing that makes the story feel true rather than just interesting.
Everyone has a version of this gap. The person who appears effortlessly put together in public and eats cereal over the sink for dinner. The chef who goes to McDonald’s on days off.
The fashion editor who goes home and puts on sweatpants immediately. The gap between the image we project and the comfort we seek is universal, which is why Jackie Kennedy’s grilled cheese still matters in a world that has largely moved on from everything else about 1961.
She wanted what everyone wants when no one is watching: something warm and simple that does not require any performance.
The grilled cheese does not require any performance. That is the whole point.
