After attending the Cordon Bleu in London in 1977, I returned from Europe and settled
out at Hood Canal at a home I owned. I started a catering business and wrote The
Apple Cookbook and The Berry Cookbook. Later I went to work for La
Petite Maison, on the west side of Olympia, as their luncheon chef. About a year
and a half after I’d worked there, I heard through professional friends in Seattle
that the job at the Governor’s Mansion was available. It was decided that it would
be more cost effective to hire a chef than to have things catered. I thought it
would look good on my resume, and I’d probably be there a couple of years. I had
an interview with Lois Spellman and was hired. That was in 1983. So that’s how I
started. There were two housekeepers. One of them, Hai Vo, helped me in the kitchen
and did housework. We became quite a team.
The kitchen was fairly well equipped except the pots and pans. They were using home-style
pots and pans, and I needed larger, commercial types. So little by little, I’d add
a pan here and there. Through the whole twenty-five years I was there, I think I
left it better equipped than when I came.
The hardest thing at the very beginning was the State china. Originally, when it
was purchased, there were place settings for forty-eight. Exactly forty-eight! There
was no allowance for breakage. I think the original set was purchased by the Foundation
for the mansion. Things have been broken along the way. So, out of a place setting
of forty-eight, in 1983, say, I had forty-four dinner plates, forty-eight salad
plates, and no soup plates. There might be nothing to serve soup in that matched
the china. That was really hard, because I had to plan my menus around the available
dishes. Eventually we did get new dishes, and we could seat eighty people for a
sit down dinner. We had complete place settings of the State china, a soup plate,
a salad plate, a cake plate, a cup, a saucer, and a dinner plate.
There were places that couldn’t deliver, because their trucks were too big to get
into the Capitol campus. Charlie’s Produce quit delivering, because if you don’t
have a big enough order, it isn’t worth the company’s time. I used to make sure
I had at least a fifty-dollar order for someone to deliver. Well, now it’s a minimum
of four hundred dollars. With the prices today, every time they stop a truck and
take the driver’s time, it costs the company money. So things have changed quite
a bit.
During the Gardner administration, Jean and Booth Gardner did a lot of entertaining.
They had lots of small dinner parties, lots of receptions, and a lot of lunches.
Booth would have working lunches, and there might be fifty people in attendance.
It seemed like they did more lunches than anybody during the time I was there.
With some administrations, I worked directly with the First Lady and we’d plan the
menus. But then, different first ladies had different takes on how they wanted to
do that. The Gardners were in office for eight years. The first three or four years,
Jean and I would sit down, and I’d give her my suggestions for what we might serve
at this function or at that function. After a while, she pretty much left it up
to me. Sometimes she’d have a suggestion. She might come back from a party and say
she’d had a particular tasty dish. I remember once it was bow pasta. And she said,
“It had this kind of sauce, and can you come up with something like that?” I tried
to come up with something. You know, it was kind of fun. She often came back with
little ideas that I’d explore.
I gave Booth cooking lessons once. He wanted to learn how to make some sauces and
an apple pie. That was near his last couple of months in office. We did that.
There were times I’d have funny little requests from the Governors. I remember that
Booth Gardner had high cholesterol for a time and we were trying to lower his fat
intake. I wasn’t going to serve the whole luncheon of forty people totally low fat.
He loved turkey and a turkey sandwich with mustard, lettuce and no mayonnaise. Once,
I did a three course, upscale, working lunch, but it wasn’t over the top. He came
back to the kitchen and said, “I want my usual.” I tried to explain to him that,
as the host, it probably wouldn’t be a good idea to have a turkey sandwich when
everybody else was having something different.
When the Lowry administration came into being, Mary Lowry pretty much said, “You’re
the professional. Do what you think best.” I’d still try and would say, “We’re having
a lot of dinner parties in the next couple of months. What are you hungry for? I
don’t want to keep serving you something you’re not hungry for.” We worked it out.
I did a little cooking for the mansion families, but during Lowry’s administration,
in the early ‘90s, there were some new ethics laws that came into play. Here in
Washington, we have more stringent ethics laws on our books than most states. Using
me in the kitchen to cook family meals was frowned upon, since that was using state
resources for their personal benefit. So, I really stopped doing that and the First
Family didn’t want me to do it anymore either. Now, if there were leftovers, extra
soup or something, that would fit in. But it would be on a lower key.
When the Lockes moved in, I came up with the menus, then too. It was during Gary
Locke’s administration I prepared a very attractive and delicious dessert [for an
Area 8 GMF fundraiser]. We were able to get white chocolate Chinese takeout boxes
from Chocolates A La Carte in California and filled them with tiramisu. Then I took
almond paste and pressed it through a ricer and that was for noodles coming out
of the box. I took little marzipan apples and placed them around. You know, there
was probably a little dollop of whipped cream on top of the box. I love doing something
like that.
I remember one Christmas at the mansion I did something called Nutcracker Sweets.
I put a little pool of caramel sauce on the plate and sat a little white chocolate
drum with dark chocolate mousse in it, a chocolate drummer boy, and three tiny triple
chocolate cake packages on the plate. That was really fun!
There were a few things that didn’t work out quite that well, though. For a fundraising
dinner, I was making crème caramel for eighty people. I had these big ovens that
take big sheet pans. And you have to put it in a Bain Marie, which means it cooks
in water, and I was doing it in glass ramekins. I learned that with that much moisture
in those ovens and at a low temperature, the moisture would bead up and get into
the crème caramel. I had about sixteen of those that were like soup. The last two
tables, sixteen people, had ice cream with pineapple sauce.
Once in a while, I’ll get a first lady calling me up to say, “Kyle, how did you
do such and such?” Or, “Can I have that recipe for that?” Mona Locke has requested
my minestrone soup recipe twice. She misplaced the first one. And that was one of
the recipes that Gary Locke enjoyed the most out of my repertoire of things.
Tastes have changed a bit. At one time, for hors d’oeuvres, we served oyster shooters
because they were popular at a reception. Now I don’t think they would be as popular.
Yes, there was a time that we had raw oysters and shellfish bars. I think it’s just
trends. I remember, in 1983, Eva Goldberg, who was one of the founding members of
the Governor’s Mansion Foundation, was in charge of the annual meeting that the
trustees have at the mansion. It’s an annual luncheon meeting every year, and Eva
would set up the menu. Tomato aspic seemed to be a favorite, but it was just something
from the 1950s to me, and I thought we should move on to something else. We worked
out a solution and Eva and I became the best of friends. The Foundation became very
important to me and I had a fond place in my heart for it. When it got to be, maybe
in the late 1990s, I really got to know a lot of the members and a lot of the trustees
of the Foundation. I thought, you know, maybe I could be a trustee. So I sort of
just asked a few people, is there any reason why I couldn’t be a trustee? And they
decided I should be a trustee. And ever since then, I seem to get more and more
involved in this organization.
[Among her many voluntary contributions, Kyle designed and maintains the GMF Website—www.wagovmansion.org.
She also maintains the membership data base, produces needed brochures, and provides
the printed nametags and mailing envelopes for almost every GMF event.]