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"Its no surprise that once Mrs. Podesta moved to Washington, D.C., to be closer to her sons, she took to cooking at political fund-raisers. What is surprising is how she became a celebrity of sorts, wowing people not only with her meatballs but her wit. She had two sons, but she adopted another 25 people during the time she came to Washington, said her older son, Tony Podesta, a Washington public affairs strategist. She had two lives. She was a wife and mother in Chicago, but then she came to Washington and became friends with presidents and senators who always enjoyed her wit and willingness to say anything to anybody."

"Talk of pig roasting and slaughter kept popping up during dinner and was the last tale Podesta told before the guests left. To earn money while attending law school at Georgetown, he spent two years working at Turkey Run Farm in McLean, now called the Claude Moore Colonial Farm, an 18th-century re-creation.

He dressed in britches, a blousy linen shirt, floppy hat and homemade shoes and learned how to butcher and roast a pig.

Standing in the kitchen and acting out his role, Podesta explained: “It’s best to do the butchering at 4 a.m., “because pigs should be slaughtered when it is cool, and it takes a long time to roast them. The pig is hauled on a front-end loader in order to split and gut it. It’s most important to slow the pig down by shooting it between the eyes so you can cut its throat. It makes the pig less ornery and a whole lot more cooperative than if you just stick a knife in its throat.”

In homage to these skills, Podesta used to have a picture of a pig on a spit as his screen saver, but his staffers made him get rid of it, because he said: “They couldn’t stand looking into the pig’s eyes during meetings.”

In turns out that Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont was so “moved” by the Politico article that he motioned for it to be entered into the Congressional Record, and it was (Vol. 155, pp. 19129-30), under the heading, “John Podesta’s Culinary Skills”