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Thomas Jefferson’s
Creme Brulée
How a Founding Father and his Slave James Hemings Introduced French Cuisine to America
by Thomas J. Craughwell
Quirk Books
In 1787, Thomas Jefferson was traveling through the Lombardy region of Italy when he discovered that the local rice was of a higher quality than the rice back in America. He wanted to bring some seeds with him so he could grow better rice at home, but there was a problem — exporting rice or grain was illegal, and the penalty for doing so was death.
Jefferson didn’t care. He smuggled out as much as his pockets could hold, then paid someone to smuggle out even more.
As recounted in author Thomas Craughwell’s new history, Jefferson’s passion for food burned as bright as his passion for democracy. So much so, in fact, that upon leaving for Paris to serve as a commerce minister, he brought along a slave, James Hemings, who would apprentice with the finest French chefs, then bring his new knowledge and skill back to Jefferson’s home.
Thanks to this excursion, Jefferson and Hemings wound up introducing French cuisine to America, including such great American staples as macaroni and cheese and even french fries.
During America’s revolutionary years, dining tables were filled with early versions of comfort food — then called “plantation fare” — based around “meats (boiled, roasted, baked or stewed), breads, heavily sweetened desserts and generally overcooked vegetables.” Popular meals of the day included “catfish soup, beef stew and apple dumplings,” and meals were usually prepared by “enslaved Africans or free blacks,” accounting for an African touch to the food of the time, including “such ingredients as okra and sweet potatoes, which were transported to the New World on slave ships.”
French cuisine was then unpopular in the states. Having sampled truffles in turkey stuffing and corn mash augmented with molasses, whipped cream and cognac thanks to French soldiers who’d fought with them against the British, the colonists “openly derided” French food as “foppish and fancified,” with one popular cookbook of the day referring to it as “an odd jumble of trash.”
Jefferson, though, studied food as he did politics and architecture. He kept detailed notes on “the salting and curing of pork, the steps necessary to make a great cup of coffee and the reasons why the basis for all soups should be raw meat and butter.”
His garden was “a thousand feet long and 80 feet wide, and produced more than 300 varieties of vegetables” including his favorite, English peas. Such was his love for food that when he sent the explorers Lewis and Clark on their infamous expedition to the Louisiana Territory, part of their charge was to return with “unfamiliar edible plants.”
In 1784, Jefferson was appointed US Minister to France. Despite American attitudes toward their cuisine, he reveled in the chance to immerse himself in French cooking and produce, the former of which, he knew, was in the midst of a renaissance with its emphasis on using “stocks and sauces to build layers of flavor.” Jefferson saw his appointment as a chance to bring the best of this culinary wonderment to America.
By today’s standards, the relationship between Jefferson and the Hemings family could politely be referred to as complicated — and impolitely referred to as insane. But at the time, the fact that Jefferson’s white wife, Martha, was half-sister to his black slaves was shockingly common.
In 1761, a plantation owner named John Wayles began an affair with a slave of his named Elizabeth Hemings, giving him six slave children in addition to his four white children. Jefferson married Wayles’ white daughter Martha, and upon Wayles’ death, he inherited all of Wayles’ slaves including James, who was one of Wayles’ children with Elizabeth. (To complicate matters further, Jefferson had a longterm relationship with James’ sister Sally — a black slave — after Martha’s death.)
Jefferson brought James Hemings, then about 19, with him to France, having arranged for him to apprentice with a French restaurateur in the preparation of French cuisine. Bringing Hemings, though, left Jefferson with a dilemma. Slavery was illegal in France, and a law known as the Freedom Principle declared that “an enslaved person became free” as soon as they arrived in the country. So Jefferson made a deal with Hemings that “if he mastered the art of French cuisine and returned home to Monticello to teach his craft to another slave, then Jefferson would grant his freedom.”
He even paid Hemings, who was able to roam Paris as a free man, a monthly salary around double that of the average French servant.
Hemings quickly learned the vast differences between cooking in France and in the colonies. In Virginia, meals were prepared “in an open hearth” over “an unprotected fire,” often resulting in scaldings and clothing fires. French cooks had no such problems, as they used coal-fired stoves. He also used copper pots in France, which were far more durable than the American’s cast-iron cookware and conducted heat better, as well. There were also differences in the cooks themselves, as plantation meals were largely prepared by women (mostly slaves who might be whipped if a meal turned out incorrectly), whereas the vast majority of French cooks were men.
Jefferson, meanwhile, set out on a 2,400-mile journey through France and Italy in February 1787 that allowed him to investigate the culture. One of his stops was in Champagne, where “the farmer and gardener in Jefferson immediately noticed the soil, which he described as ‘generally a rich mulatto loam.’ For 700 years, that ‘mulatto loam’ had produced some of the world’s finest wines.”
Interestingly, he initially found the region’s wines not to his liking — in his notebook, he wrote of them simply, “wine not good” — although that opinion would soon change. Touring various regions, he concluded that “white pinot grapes made a finer Champagne than did red pinot grapes,” and came to believe that “contrary to popular opinion at the time, Champagne was not at its best when consumed young.”
Jefferson’s greatest culinary love, though, was for the olive, which he later called “the richest gift of heaven,” and “one of the most precious productions in nature.”
By the spring of 1787, Hemings was apprenticed to “the chef for the Prince of Conde, who taught him in the kitchens of the prince’s palace in Paris as well as his country chateau of Chantilly.” Learning from “an absolute master,” Hemings learned to use a pasta maker and was introduced to ingredients such as truffles and olive oil, all of which were as yet unknown in the states. When his apprenticeship ended, Jefferson made Hemings his head chef, an appointment that came with a larger salary, his own staff and the responsibility of preparing elaborate meals for Jefferson’s aristocratic guests.
Craughwell estimates that around 150 of the recipes Hemings mastered survived and were eventually passed down through Jefferson’s family, including such current American staples as “fried potatoes, better known as french fries; burnt cream, or crème brûlée; and macaroni with cheese.” (Craughwell notes that mac and cheese may have previously been introduced to the states by other means, but either way credits Jefferson with popularizing the dish. Jefferson’s macaroni recipe, cited here, was preserved by the Library of Congress.)
When Jefferson returned to America about five years after he had left, he brought back “eighty-six crates with kitchen utensils and equipment, including a pasta-making machine from Italy.” He also brought various wines and cheeses, olive oil and mustard, “seedlings of fruit trees” including apricots, pears and figs, and 680 bottles of wine.
Upon his return, Jefferson became President George Washington’s secretary of state, requiring a move to the new nation’s capital, New York City.
Needing a head chef in his new home, he reneged on his deal with Hemings and brought him to New York.
In 1793, four years past Hemings’ supposed freedom date, Jefferson drew up a contract promising that Hemings would be freed upon the training of another slave in the expertise of French cooking. Hemings spent the next two years teaching his replacement — his younger brother, Peter — and on Feb. 5, 1796, James Hemings became a free man.
Sadly, Hemings’ life took some strange and eventually tragic turns from there. He worked as a cook in Philadelphia and Baltimore, and when Jefferson was elected president in 1801, he offered Hemings the job of chef at the President’s House (as the White House was then known). But when Hemings wrote back with questions about the job, Jefferson didn’t reply, hiring a succession of French chefs instead.
Hemings worked briefly at Monticello during Jefferson’s absence, but soon after leaving, following a days-long drinking binge, he committed suicide at the age of 36.
With the help of his new chefs, Jefferson, as president, introduced his many guests to delicacies he had discovered overseas. Craughwell notes that he served Champagne at “virtually every dinner he hosted . . . singlehandedly [making] the drink popular.”
While Jefferson and Hemings changed the culinary world with their introduction of French cuisine to America, not all were taken with it, perhaps due to an American ambivalence about France that persists among some to this day.
During the presidential election of 1836, supporters of William Henry Harrison positioned him as an ordinary man who existed on plain old corn mash and cider, then depicted his opponent, Martin Van Buren, as “a foppish, Frenchified snob who sipped Champagne from a silver goblet and [began] his meals with consommé.”
The “gourmandizing” Van Buren lost, and it would be decades before Americans would begin to truly appreciate Jefferson and Hemings’ gift.
I ruined Tom’s macaroni
Author of the Declaration of Independence, third president of the United States . . . the inventor of macaroni and cheese?
Well, Thomas Jefferson didn’t come up with the childhood favorite, but he did popularize it. While in France, he acquired a recipe for “maccaroni,” which in this instance is a generic word for “pasta.”
He served macaroni at the White House, making it a staple dish in America, particularly in the south. In his handwriting, you can find the recipe in the Library of Congress:
6 eggs, yolks & whites
2 wine glasses of milk
2 tb of flour a little salt
— work them together without water, and very well.
— roll it then with a roller to a paper thickness
— cut it into small pieces which roll again with the hand into long slips, & then cut them to a proper length.
— put them into warm water a quarter of an hour.
— drain them.
— dress them as maccaroni.
— but if they are intended for soups they are to be put in the soup & not into warm water
How hard could it be to dine like a Founding Father? As I discovered, very.
First, there’s the proportions. Two wine glasses of milk? What constituted a glass of wine in 1776? Based on the “John Adams” miniseries, a lot smaller than our current, drunken times — so I used about three-quarters of a current glass.
The real puzzler, though, was just two tablespoons of flour. Unless tablespoons were massive in Jefferson’s time, this seems far too little. One modern recipe for homemade pasta calls for one cup of flour, with only one egg — and no milk.
Using Jefferson’s exact recipe ended up with what looked like a pre-cooked omelette. Unable to put this on the counter, much less roll it, I decided “tb” meant “cup” in colonial speak and upped the flour.
How one makes this sticky mixture paper thin is beyond me, but that wasn’t the most worrying aspect. When would these be cooked? “Put them in warm water” didn’t do anything but make the noodles wet. I hold this truth to be self-evident: You cannot eat this.
Either Jefferson’s handwriting was badly translated, this was just a rough draft and he changed it later . . . or, two centuries later, the Sage of Monticello just punked me.
— Stephen Lynch