fish eggs in high style

It was what Alsop would say afterward to those people that really mattered to Jackie.  ---------------------- [excerpt, Mrs. Kennedy]  Alsop was one of the great Washington gossips, a prolific lette-writer for whom an opportunity to pass on details of the first dinner party at the White House was the equivalent of winning a lottery. 

Jackie knew that if all did not go well, Alsop, devoted though he was to the new president, would be only too happy to trumpet the news in the morning.

Given the fact that there had been no time to bring the White House food and décor up to Jackie's standards, let alone those of the finicky Alsop, there was every reason to believe that the evening might prove a failure.  Jackie approached it as a kind of high-wire act, in which a triumph would be all the more valuable and diverting in view of the perils.

...When Jackie entered the Lincoln Sitting Room, chosen in part for the imprint of history it conferred, it was evident that so far her strategy had worked.  Alsop, who wore round horn-rimmed spectacles on a bulldog face, and Roosevelt [Franklin Jr.], jowly and heavy-lidded with a mischievous glint in his eye, were chuckling over the centerpiece:  an enormous gold bucket filled with ten pounds of the finest caviar.  ...In Jackie's design the gold bucket proclaimed:  Isn't this fun and exciting!...It had another purpose as well. 

Jackie hoped to stuff her guests with caviar so that by dinnertime they would be too full to care about the execrable White House food.

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{Mrs. Kennedy, by Barbara Leaming.  2001.  Simon & Schuster.}

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