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By Jennifer Sherman RobertsTwitter is a funny, messy place where topics and tropes wantonly mingle and merge. Memes about Tide pods follow presidential proclamations. Rankings of Very Good Dogs scroll alongside obituaries.And sometimes you can go to Twitter for updates on twenty-first-century American politics and find modern-day illustrations of your-seventeenth-century English research interests. Or at least I did when following a tweet thread from Benjamin Wittes (Senior Fellow in Governance Studies at The Brookings Institution and editor-in-chief of the acclaimed Lawfare blog): between intergovernmental document requests, I found the kind of cultural exchange of recipes that fascinates me.In the Lawfare blog post, Wittes explains he had heard rumors that a 2017 holiday message from CIA director Mike Pompeo was divisive, “inappropriately political and exclusionary.” He filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to see the message and wrote a post about it (as he does with all FOIA requests he makes).A month later, before he could hear back about his FOIA request, Wittes received a letter from Pompeo himself. Enclosed was a copy of the holiday message to the CIA and a letter from Pompeo with this closing:We both agree that our country is facing some of the most complex national security challenges in history and that we all benefit if we work jointly to promote American national security, even if we disagree on the best way forward. It is unfortunate, indeed sad, that you chose to publicly cast doubt on our team without so much as the courtesy of a simple phone call that could well have answered your ‘question.’ You should have been better than that, Ben.And then, incongruently (as least to me):I hope, too, that you will try the fudge recipe that I also included in the workforce message. It is my mother’s recipe and she loved that others enjoyed it during the holiday season.As you can see in the document embedded in the post, the recipe itself is a little ho-hum (apologies to Dorothy Pompeo)—it is almost identical recipe to one found on the back of jars of marshmallow fluff.[caption id="attachment_1450" align="aligncenter" width="295"] Good Housekeeping, December 1962 - Vol. 155 No. 6 Photo: https://www.flickr.com/photos/29069717@N02/14805648958[/caption]This is not to say, however, that the recipe is presented as generic—it is printed on holiday paper, highlights pictures of the Pompeo family (including the dog) attempting the recipe, and adds a little history of Pompeo’s mother, Dorothy.Despite its lackluster provenance, the recipe’s title trumpets this recipe as “secret,” a now clichéd way of lending a recipe authenticity and value. The recipe is framed as not just a postscript, but a valuable gift.Many scholars, notably Amanda Herbert, have pointed out the use of recipes to create alliances and cement bonds of friendship. Herbert discusses women’s social networks in the seventeenth-century, but similar kinds of dynamics seem to be at play in this exchange between twenty-first-century men: the written recipe as means of cultural exchange and the reliance on ethos of the recipe’s author (Mike’s mother, presumably invoking tradition and welcome).As Amy Tigner and Allison Carruth note in their examination of a recipe by Lady Ann Fanshawe for drinking chocolate and its colonial legacy, “this fundamentally literary act points first to collective memory, and then, to the act of exchange. The receipt/recipe is a medium of transmission that represents a sense of community networked in ever-widening circles.”Is this recipe for fudge, then, a gift, an olive branch of sorts from Pompeo to Wittes? An attempt to create an alliance across political difference in a fractured and contentious American moment?Or is this gift of a mother’s fudge recipe a performance, a sort of folksy, downhome counterstrike meant to evoke human exchange over legal maneuvering?Wittes himself is noncommittal. He grants that the holiday message “contains nothing objectionable," but says,As to Pompeo’s accusation about me, I post all of my FOIA requests and will continue to do so. I will also always post all responses I get to them—whether they support, or, as in this case, refute the premises that led me to submit them.I look forward to trying his mother’s fudge recipe.Before he could get around to it, however, an associate of his, Shannon Togawa Mercer, managing editor of Lawfare blog, tried the recipe with happy results.https://twitter.com/benjaminwittes/status/952971634419347458In this one unexpected exchange run many themes familiar to those who study recipes: Recipes as gift exchange Recipes that establish bonds and forge connections Claims of “secret” recipes Documenting the recreation of recipes Recipes as historical/familial archive.This window into government and intelligence-communities also shows that recipes retain enormous cultural capital and can both convey meaning and actively form bonds.They say politics makes strange bedfellows. Apparently, politics also makes strange kitchen-mates.