The High-Protein Snack Jackie Kennedy Loved

I’m a big snacker, so you can be sure that I’m always stocking my fridge, freezer and pantry with foods that I can enjoy between meals. Of course, I’m not the only one who loves a good snack, but I know that it’s often hard to come up with new ideas or exciting things to satisfy the hunger that sometimes takes over between lunch and dinner.

Luckily, your snack doesn’t have to be fancy to be delicious—even Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, the ultra-glamorous first lady herself, enjoyed a relatively simple snack, and we can all learn a thing or two from it. In fact, there’s lots to love about her cottage cheese and fresh fruit snack—including the fun source we heard it from.

If you love history, politics and food, there’s a good chance you’re following Bennett Rea (also known as @cookinwithcongress) on social media. He’s made it his job to sample the foods of American politicians throughout history, and he recently shared a recreation of what former first lady Jackie O used to eat in a day. 

The menu, which includes her cottage cheese and fresh fruit snack, was inspired by a couple of different books, Rea says. We’ve got a feeling the cottage cheese snack came from Jackie’s Girl: My Life with the Kennedy Family, a book written by Kathy McKeon, Onassis’s former assistant. In her book, McKeon mentions that Jackie would occasionally have cottage cheese and fresh fruit—often apple—as a midday snack. McKeon also writes that she herself got into the habit of snacking on cottage cheese and fruit when she decided to try losing weight. 

Whether you’re trying to lose weight or just stay focused and full in the afternoon, Kennedy’s snack is a smart choice. It’s satisfying, thanks to the protein in cottage cheese and the fiber in fruit. Both protein and fiber slow digestion, which can help you feel fuller for longer. Her snack is also nutrient rich, since cottage cheese is a source of calcium, magnesium and potassium, nutrients that are important for bone and heart health. Some cottage cheese is even made with live and active cultures, giving it that extra gut-healthy kick.

Depending on what fruit you choose, you’re bound to get some tasty antioxidants and vitamins on that front, too. If you want to stick with a fruit with some fiber content, an apple is a great choice, as is a pear, some orange segments or even some avocado—yep, it’s a fruit. Berries are a solid source of fiber as well, and they even have lots of anti-inflammatory polyphenols for some bonus benefits.

While Onassis’s diet included many nutritious foods, including her afternoon snack of cottage cheese and fresh fruit, it also appears pretty restrictive. In his post recreating her daily routine, Rea notes that portion control was a big part of Jackie’s eating habits, and he added that “you can feel” the stress and high expectations of being a first lady in the 1960s in every bite.

We believe that eating should be flavorful, fun and full of a variety of foods. So while it’s interesting to see what the former first lady used to eat, we’ll just be borrowing her snacking philosophy and leaving the rest in the past. With that in mind, the next time you want to add a little midcentury New England charm to your afternoon, consider keeping things simple, nourishing and delicious with cottage cheese and fruit.