Surrounded by twinkling garlands, first lady Jeannie Ritter plunks down on an oversized taupe sofa in the Governor’s Mansion and begins sorting through her recipe file.
Soon, she’s kneeling on the floor, reminiscing as recipes cascade out of the tattered red file folder onto an ottoman.
She brought her grandmother’s cookbooks and “Betty Crocker” with her to the mansion, but it’s this red folder with curled edges and cookie crumbs in the bottom that holds much more than formulas for feeding a family.
“Oh, this is like a timeline!” she says, lifting a recipe written in a child’s writing on a sheet from a real estate agent’s notepad: ” 1/2 cp rglr oil … 1/4 ts worschier sauce, 1 TB poppie seed … use blender.”
“That’s Sam! And this is Tally’s reading card!” she says, pressing to her chest a small pink notecard covered with stickers and her and her husband’s signatures.
“I can finally like my life like this and not apologize,” she says, apologizing anyway for the messy state of her files. “You keep this arsenal of recipes. These are — you know — close to my heart.”
On the back of one: “phone numbers for Father Billy.”
Turn over the red cardboard of a Zesta cracker box for her Portuguese Soup recipe.
Her Chinese Noodle Salad is on a “Take a Swing at Cancer” invitation to benefit the Dale Tooley Cancer Research Laboratory.
And Rice Pudding is written on a calendar page from Friday, Jan. 10, 1992, a cartoon with two women chatting:
“I hear there’s going to be a national convention for women who do too much.”
“I doubt it. None of us has time to go.”
Some have notes from friends: “extra sesame seeds for you” and “ask me again and you’re a dead woman!”
The scraps of paper connect her to friends and to traditions that have been a constant through her own personal growth and her husband’s political career.
For this first Ritter Christmas in the mansion, she knew some things would have to change — in the family and in their new house. This year, the grand rooms feature American Indian, Kwanzaa, Hanukkah and military decorations that she hopes will “start the conversation” about the state’s history and culture.
Her friend Cynthia Starks and other former neighbors brought over food and helped designers Jeanie Clifford, Tina Tusa and Penny Pierce of Event Ambience decorate the interior of the 100-year-old neoclassical building.
Ritter relishes the bonds that casseroles build. “We were a real charity case last year at the election, and my friends prepared food for us — they went back to the old farm community tradition,” she says. “People who couldn’t write big checks cooked meals for us.”
When The Post ran a photo of the first lady in her homey, cluttered south Denver kitchen last year after her husband Bill Ritter won election for governor, some readers criticized her housekeeping skills. Now that the Ritters have lived in the Governor’s Mansion for a year, you might think she’d have a big, glamorous kitchen with a chef and a cleanup crew.
But the reality is not so different from the kitchen in the Platt Park home where she and Bill raised their four children, August, 21; Abe, 19; Sam, 17; and Tally, 14.
“I’ll take you upstairs if you can look past the laundry that needs folding,” she says, reminding visitors this is the private part of the residence.
We didn’t see any laundry on the grand staircase leading up to the family quarters. But rounding the corner onto the second floor, we were shocked at the location and size of the kitchen, a tiny box in the center of the house. It has just enough room for one petite first lady to maneuver from the sink and stove at one end to the fridge at the other, a maximum of six steps.
“I’m on my own, babe,” says Ritter, who does not use a cleanup crew, other than her husband and kids. “We don’t just snap our fingers and get an omelet at 3 in the morning.”
But Ritter doesn’t complain, she just grabs a flowered apron from one of many on a hook, and poses for her picture.
Concerned about setting feminism and the first lady role back to the 1950s, we remind her, “You’re wearing an apron,” but she just waves it off.
“All my friends know I love aprons. I get them at estate sales,” she replies, and wears it for the rest of the interview.
As a Peace Corps volunteer in Tunisia, she would read cookbooks before going to sleep, especially “More With Less,” a Mennonite cookbook on how to consume less of the world’s resources.
“I do all of our cooking — absolutely,” she says, seeming to forget she lives in an actual mansion now.
Residence director James Finnerty says that the mansion staff handles public events, but many people are surprised to learn how independent the Ritter famiy is.
“They do their own shopping, their own cooking. When it comes time for them to be ‘the Ritters’ they just take care of themselves,” Finnerty says. “They clean up, they wash the dishes, they put them away.”
She’ll have plenty of help this weekend when the Ritters host 70 relatives in the carriage house (which underwent a $3 million renovation and addition three years ago).
But for this gathering, she’s not in charge of the food — that’s her niece Katie’s job. “You call Katie and you tell her what you’re gonna bring. You kind of fall into your strengths.”
She plans to make a turkey or the super-easy mustard- brown sugar ham she prefers to more involved dishes that keep her in the kitchen. “I call it poor man’s ham. A while ago I realized some dishes — even if they were flashy — kept me away from people.”
The Ritters go way beyond just getting together for a meal, she says of her in-laws. “They have a talent show — everyone performs — and there’s that unconditional love. When you pair food with my friends and loved ones — you can’t talk about one without talking about the other. Those recipes are really about my friends and family.”
Kristen Browning-Blas: 303-954-1440 or kbrowning@denverpost.com
Jeannie Ritter’s food for thought:
“The kids and I were talking about this, and it’s not so much about what’s on our table, but who’s at the table.”
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“Part of our role in leadership is showing our own humanity. People are surprised at our own brokenness.”
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“Food is how we honor each other.”
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“Food is partly about other senses — you wake up and the house smells like that ham, mmmm.”
