A pretty funny TNR cookbook review by Saveur's Kelly Alexander about conservative cuisine and -- who knew? -- the conservative food movement. Long story short, it's studiously ordinary:
...Cheney's recipe [chicken florentine] is an outstanding example of how conservatives are winning the war on flavor by appropriating traditional middle-class American food and making it their own. The result is that lefties today are consistently portrayed as folks who are out of touch with the tastes of the electorate--that they are members of what our president once so eloquently called the "brie and cheese" crowd. "There is the idea that, somehow, you think you are smarter and better than somebody if your taste buds are at all cultivated," says the Boston-based Democratic political consultant Michael Goldman.
What's so interesting about this conservative food movement, though, is that it's completely counterintuitive--you've got guys with big means carrying on about beans, literally. Outstanding examples of this abound in The Great American Sampler Cookbook. For instance, we have Tom DeLay's "Big Bend Bean Dip," which includes nothing more than pinto beans, an onion, some fat (bacon drippings or butter, it's up to the cook), cheddar cheese, and a few slices of canned jalapeņo peppers. Nothing against bean dip, but is this blue-collar fare what DeLay really subsists on? Not bloody likely if restaurant records from Signatures (lobbyist Jack Abramoff's once-happening luxurious D.C. commissary) are to be believed. [...]
The point here is not that conservatives don't like foreign food or that they honestly eschew expensive food. It's that they've mastered the art of faux populism--the vast majority of them probably like their sushi as much as any liberal. They've just figured out how to appear as if they don't.