The White House on Friday announced the menu for Thursday’s holiday dinner honoring former Vice President Joe Biden, showing the diversity of the guests.
The menu includes brie and winter truffle orecchiette, a Rhode Island-style clam chowder, red and green beans, whipped cream maple whipped potatoes, turkey with cranberry sauce, the vice president’s tradition of sweet potato pie, a pumpkin soup, apple pie and, of course, pumpkin pie, which is never wrong.
Biden has previously joked that he likes his Thanksgiving dinner with family more than meals with foreign dignitaries. The guest list Thursday is an expansion from his 2007 dinner, which he spent in Richmond, Virginia, with President George W. Bush and then-First Lady Laura Bush.
“The idea is not to try to disappoint everybody, but I’ve got a good sense of where the needs are, and that’s where it starts,” Biden said. “I didn’t care if I had to cross the entire United States to get to any particular loved one. I wanted to do it as much as I could while I still could see them.”
Who did Biden invite this year?
White House aide Stephanie Grisham said during a press briefing earlier this week that the staff was “working our way down the list” to put together the holiday dinner menu.
“I know everybody wants to know the guest list, so I’m not going to go into that right now,” Grisham said. “We do get a bit of a heads up that there are a number of people that are well-known, so it is quite a list.”
Biden will also have a moment of silence for former first lady Barbara Bush, who died Monday.