Thomas Jefferson's Creme Brulee Read online

  Copyright © 2012 by Thomas J. Craughwell

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher.

  The publisher wishes to express thanks to Bonnie Coles and the staff of Duplications Services at the Library of Congress, Leah Stearns at Monticello, and the Digital Curation Services department at the University of Virginia Library for their help with images for this book.

  Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Number: 2011946051

  eISBN: 978-1-59474-579-9

  Designed by Doogie Horner

  Cover illustration by Dan Craig

  Editorial assistance and photo acquisition by Jane Morley

  Production management by John J. McGurk

  Quirk Books

  215 Church Street

  Philadelphia, PA 19106

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  v3.1

  TO MY FRIENDS AND

  FELLOW FOOD

  HOUNDS, TERESA

  AND BILL GIBBONS

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue: The Man Who Abjured His Native Victuals

  Chapter 1: Americans in Paris

  Chapter 2: A Free City

  Chapter 3: A Feast for the Palate

  Chapter 4: The Wine Collector and the Rice Smuggler

  Chapter 5: Brother and Sister, Reunited

  Chapter 6: Boiling Point

  Chapter 7: The Art of the Meal

  Epilogue

  Appendix

  The Wine Connoisseur

  Vegetables: Thomas Jefferson’s “Principal Diet”

  African Meals on Monticello’s Table

  A Selection of James Hemings’s and Thomas Jefferson’s Recipes

  Chronology

  Notes

  Select Bibliography

  Prologue

  THE MAN WHO

  ABJURED HIS

  NATIVE VICTUALS

  About five in the afternoon of May 7, 1784, not long after dinner had been served at Monticello, Thomas Jefferson sat down to write a brief note to his friend and protégé William Short. “Congress have to day,” he wrote, “added me to the commission for negotiating treaties of commerce with the European powers.”

  News had just arrived from Paris that one of the commissioners, John Jay, was sailing back to America, leaving the team one member short. Jefferson would fill the void. He had not yet booked passage or begun to pack, but already Jefferson’s ever-busy mind had an inspiration about what he might accomplish in Paris, and he was not thinking about commerce commissions. “I propose for a particular purpose to carry my servant Jame with me,” he informed Short. “Jame” was nineteen-year-old James Hemings, one of Jefferson’s slaves. And the “particular purpose” was to apprentice James to some of the finest chefs in France. Thus began the most interesting and influential culinary partnership in American history.

  We know Thomas Jefferson as a political philosopher, an amateur naturalist, an ardent gardener, a zealous bibliophile, and an inveterate tinkerer. But he was also a serious gourmand. Researchers studying Jefferson’s papers have found notes detailing 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. For fifty-eight years Jefferson kept a Garden Book and a Farm Book that recorded myriad details of plantation life, including what was grown at Monticello, how the crops fared, and when the produce was ready for his table. These documents reveal that Jefferson, whom many consider the most cerebral of the founding fathers, was also a man of the senses, one who was governed by his taste buds.

  Like all food hounds before and since, Jefferson collected recipes, and more than 150 of these have survived. Many are variations on early American comfort food, like catfish soup, beef stew, and apple dumplings; such dishes were known in Jefferson’s day as “plantation fare” and surely formed part of the meals served at Monticello.

  His decision to have James trained as a French chef tells us that Jefferson, who was interested in just about everything, was also curious to learn more about the celebrated cuisine of France. Exactly when he became interested in French cooking is a mystery—he had no opportunities to sample refined Continental cooking while in the United States. There were no French chefs in eighteenth-century Virginia; most cooks were enslaved Africans or free blacks, a fact that may account for the African influence in much Southern cuisine and explain the presence of such ingredients as okra and sweet potatoes, which were transported to the New World on slave ships. French colonists were present in America, however—mostly Huguenots (French Protestants) who settled mainly in Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and South Carolina. Like every other immigrant group, they brought their culinary traditions to the New World, but they never introduced their country’s haute cuisine to the American colonies. In fact, they disdained it, as did their English and Scotch-Irish neighbors, whose opinions resembled those of eighteenth-century cookbook author Hannah Glasse. In her 1784 book The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy, Glasse dismissed French cuisine as “an odd jumble of trash” and denounced “the blind folly of this age that would rather be imposed on by a French booby, than give encouragement to a good English cook!”

  The mainstays of American colonial cooking were primarily meats (boiled, roasted, baked, or stewed), breads, heavily sweetened desserts, and generally overcooked vegetables. An archaeological excavation at the Virginia home of the rabble rouser and rebel Nathaniel Bacon uncovered piles of bones from such diverse animals as chickens, cattle, pigs, sheep, deer, and rabbit as well as duck, geese, quail, and passenger pigeons. Nothing out of the ordinary among those items. But archaeologists also found the skeletons of turtles, catfish, sturgeon, bear, and even a bald eagle. Most surprising were the remains of frogs. Bacon’s varied diet was probably representative of what other colonists ate, too.1

  Like their English counterparts, early Americans preferred their foods seasoned with garden herbs. Clove, nutmeg, allspice, and cinnamon were available, but their high cost made them prohibitive to most cooks and caused spices to be used sparingly in colonial kitchens.

  Fresh fish appeared on the table from time to time, but, aside from sturgeon and oysters, seafood dishes were not popular. The earliest settlers in Massachusetts were especially scornful of fish—a fact all the more extraordinary in a place where the nearby ocean teemed with cod, flounder, haddock, and sea bass, and the rivers, lakes, and streams flowed with trout, pike, bass, and catfish. When the Pilgrims gathered fresh, succulent clams and mussels, they invariably fed them to their pigs. The tidal pools near Plymouth were brimming with lobster, but the Pilgrims regarded the flavor of these crustaceans as bland and uninteresting. In his journal for the year 1622, William Bradford, governor of Plymouth Colony, recorded the landing of a ship filled with settlers from England. The arrival was a thrilling event, yet Bradford confessed that he and his fellow residents were humiliated to have nothing better than lobster to offer the newcomers.

  The Puritans of Massachusetts were devoted carnivores, and they shared the Native Americans’ taste for wild game—the English had enjoyed venison and rabbit in the Old World, and deer and hares were abundant in the New World as well. The local tribes also introduced the English settlers to baked beans. The natives mixed the legumes with maple syrup in an earthenware pot, added a large piece of fatty bear meat, and then set the pot in a pit lined with hot stones to bake for several hours. The colonists adapted the recipe to suit their tastes: they preferred molasses as a sweetener and substituted salt pork for bear meat. The result was a di
sh that has become a New England classic. Food folklore tells us that throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Saturday night in Boston was “baked beans night”; recipes for this hearty dish can be found in the oldest surviving Yankee cookbooks.

  The Indians also introduced the European settlers to corn, which immediately became a staple of the colonial pantry. Later in Virginia and other colonies with large enslaved populations, corn took on particular importance. Because the primary cash crop on plantations was tobacco, a labor-intensive plant that required near-constant attention, the enslaved field-workers were forced to toil from dawn until dark six and a half days a week. Consequently, few slaves had time to tend their own gardens or to hunt or fish to feed themselves and their families. It fell to the plantation owners to provide their provisions. And since human labor was a valuable commodity, most masters took care to feed their slaves healthy food. Indian corn became the keystone of the slaves’ diet.

  Native to America, corn was readily available and easy to grow. Best of all, it was remarkably nutritious. This fact was made clear when some planters began replacing their slaves’ rations of corn with wheat. Soon thereafter the slaves were noticeably weakened, their powers of endurance diminished. Planter William Byrd recorded that his slaves “found themselves so weak that they begged to allow them Indian Corn again.” When George Washington tried replacing corn with wheat, he found that his slaves, “in order to be fit for the same labor, [were] obliged to have a considerable addition to their allowance of meat.”2

  It was during the American Revolution, when France sided with the colonists against the British, that American officers first encountered France’s culinary flair. The cooks in the French army adopted an American classic, roasted turkey, but enhanced it by adding truffles to the stuffing. The French even added corn mush sweetened with molasses to their menu, a staple of the American frontier that they improved by adding a shot of cognac to the recipe and topping the dish with whipped cream. Despite this promising beginning, the French alliance had no lasting impact on colonial cuisine. As late as 1796, when the first American cookbook was published in Hartford, Connecticut, author Amelia Simmons declared, “Garlicks, tho’ used by the French, are better adapted to the uses of medicine than cookery.”

  After the revolution, some American tastemakers promoted plain food as a virtue. Cookbooks emphasized simplicity and frugality, not meals that brought a succession of interesting flavors to the table. French cuisine was openly derided as foppish and fancified—unworthy of honest, down-to-earth, straight-forward, plain-speaking Americans. Patrick Henry, who became one of Jefferson’s foremost political antagonists, once publicly denounced the epicure of Monticello as a man who had “abjured his native victuals.”

  The “native victuals” of Virginia in the late 1700s were undeniably homey, but they were also served in abundance. Breakfast might include freshly baked bread, corn pone, pancakes, cold ham, chicken, and several types of hash, washed down with tea and coffee. Dinner was heavy on meats, especially when guests joined the family for the evening meal: baked ham, roasted turkey, boiled mutton, and roast beef, plus raw oysters, many vegetable dishes, and salad tossed in a vinaigrette dressing, with nuts, puddings, stewed fruit, fresh fruit in season, and perhaps calf’s-foot jelly for dessert. On special occasions or holidays such as Christmas, the menu might include roast pig. The idea was to display hospitality by offering guests virtually anything their hearts desired.

  Jefferson was as gracious a host as any member of Virginia’s plantation aristocracy. In August 1773, his wife, Martha, recorded that in the space of three weeks and two days, the household and their guests had consumed “6 hams, 4 shoulders, 2 middlings [of bacon] … 3 loaves of sugar in preserves, one ditto in punch.” Clearly, Jefferson did not scrimp when it came to entertaining, but he disliked the wasteful, excessive choices that were the hallmark of traditional plantation fare. He pared down his menus, an economy noticed by at least one of his houseguests. During Jefferson’s final years, Margaret Bayard Smith, wife of the editor of the National Intelligencer, stayed at Monticello. She could barely conceal her disappointment when all she was offered for breakfast was “tea, coffee, excellent muffins, hot wheat and corn bread, cold ham, and butter.”

  The lavish “groaning board” Smith missed had become a tradition in English America. What the colonists had in abundance was food, and they loaded their tables with a rich variety of dishes as both a token of hospitality and a sign of their personal pride in the richness of the New World. At another Virginia home, Smith would have found several varieties of meat and fish from which to choose, along with soup—often more than one—fresh vegetables in summer, pickled vegetables at other times of the year, bread, puddings, and fruit preserves. The food historian Katharine E. Harbury points out that although many differences separated the upper and lower classes in colonial Virginia, the menus of both were virtually identical. The same meats and vegetables served at a stately plantation home could also be found in the cabins of a frontier farmer.3 The only difference was in the preparation: the gentry favored elegant sauces and had house slaves who could make them, whereas a woman on the frontier lacked the time and income for such luxuries.

  Virtually all the settlers of colonial Virginia were English born or of English descent, and they possessed an almost overwhelming desire to be as refined and sophisticated as their families and friends back in England. Household inventories show that the plantation aristocracy collected linen tablecloths, fine china, and silverware, including forks, a relatively new implement in seventeenth-century Virginia. Before its invention, diners used spoons, knives, or their fingers to deliver food from their plates to their mouths. The fork had obvious advantages: it was easier to manipulate than a spoon, safer than a knife, and tidier than fingers. Although the Virginia elites adopted the fork, the rest of the colony was slow to bring the innovation to their tables. A study by Lorena Walsh and Carole Stammas reveals that between 1700 and 1709, only between 3 to 8 percent of Virginians owned the tined utensil. By 1778, that number had risen to only 21 percent among the poor and 52 percent among the middle class.4

  The management of a plantation household fell to the lady of the house. She supervised the cleaning, mending, and laundry. She oversaw the various methods used to preserve food: smoking and salting meat, pickling vegetables, and laying down root vegetables and fruit, as well as beer, wine, and cider, in cool underground cellars. In addition, the mistress planned the meals, ensured the food was prepared properly and served elegantly, welcomed guests and arranged their accommodations, and, of course, saw to the needs of her husband, children, and domestic staff. In common parlance, housekeeping was known as “carrying the keys,” a reference to the large ring that held the keys to every room and storage facility on the plantation, which she kept with her at all times. Martha Jefferson would have learned these management skills from her mother, and ideally she would have passed these lessons along to her daughters, Martha and Mary (later known as Maria).5 But when their mother died in 1782, the girls, called Patsy and Polly in their youth, were only ten and four years old, still too young to have been taught how to supervise all the necessary household-related tasks.

  For Jefferson, Monticello was a private mountaintop paradise, and he planned it as such. The house, inside and out, expressed his ideas of beauty, harmony, and perfection. So, too, did the grounds. His gardens were not simply decorative; they produced the fruit, vegetables, and herbs that fed his family. They also served as botany laboratories where he experimented with varieties of fruits and vegetables to discover which ones would thrive in Virginia.

  In 1770, Jefferson directed his slaves to cut a large terrace from the side of the mountain behind Monticello and clear the ground for a kitchen garden. In time, this garden would expand to a thousand feet long and eighty feet wide and produce more than three hundred varieties of vegetables. Initially, Jefferson divided the two-acre area into twenty-four square plots and assigned each to grow wha
t he called “fruits,” “roots,” and “leaves.” Tomatoes and beans qualified as fruits, carrots and beets as roots, and lettuce and cabbage as leaves. Along the border of the garden Jefferson planted English peas, his favorite vegetable. Around the entire expanse he had constructed a ten-foot-tall wooden fence to keep out wildlife (especially deer and rabbits) and his livestock. Below the terrace stood Jefferson’s orchard of four hundred fruit trees, his vineyard, and his berry garden, in which he grew currants, gooseberries, and raspberries.

  Throughout his life Jefferson experimented with different varieties of plants, importing them from Europe and Mexico. “I am curious to select one or two of the best species or variety of every garden vegetable,” he wrote, “and to reject all others from the garden to avoid the dangers of mixing or degeneracy.” He ordered young fig trees from France, squash and broccoli seeds from Italy, and pepper seeds from Mexico. Meriwether Lewis and William Clark returned from their exploration of the vast Louisiana Territory and beyond with new varieties of beans and salsify—collecting unfamiliar edible plants had been part of the instructions they received from President Jefferson.

  Jefferson’s orchard—he called it “The Fruitry”—grew primarily apples and peaches, whose bounty delighted him. During one especially plentiful harvest, he wrote to his daughter Martha, “We abound in the luxury of the peach.” He also grew other exotic species, including apricot trees imported from France and almond trees from Spain.

  It was Jefferson’s dream to make fine wine at Monticello, and he ordered cuttings of Vitis vinifera, the classic European wine grape, for his two vineyards. Unfortunately, the European vines did not thrive in the local soil. Black rot and infestations of phylloxera, a species of louse that attacks grapevine roots, destroyed the plants. After seven failed attempts to cultivate European vines, Jefferson experimented with hardy American grapevines; these plants were pest resistant, but the wine they produced was unpalatable.