Thomas Jefferson's Creme Brulee

by Thomas J. Craughwell

  When Jefferson left Washington in 1809, he became so overwrought saying good-bye to his maître d’hôtel, Étienne Lemaire, that all he could manage was a brief “adieu.” Later he wrote to Lemaire, whom he praised as a “faithful, & skillful” steward. He added that Lemaire’s “whole conduct [was] so marked with good humour, industry, sobriety & economy as never to have given me one moment’s dissatisfaction.” Lemaire moved to Philadelphia soon after leaving the President’s House. In 1817, a friend to whom he had loaned $5,000 went bankrupt. Despondent at the loss, Lemaire threw himself into the Schuylkill River and drowned.

  Chef Honoré Julien remained in Washington, where he opened a small shop that sold pastries, candy, and ice cream; he also managed a catering business. He kept in touch with Jefferson and occasionally sent him gourmet gifts, such as Swiss cheese or canvasback ducks. He died in 1830. His son Auguste, whom he had trained as a chef, often catered banquets at the White House during the administration of President James K. Polk.

  At Jefferson’s table at Monticello, politicians and members of Washington society, as well as myriad visitors to the plantation, were exposed to fine French cuisine. Yet, despite this pocket of culinary adventurousness, Americans of all classes held fast to the style of cooking common in the British Isles. In fact, Americans generally became suspicious—even hostile—when confronted with what they viewed as “fancified” food. Moreover, by the 1830s a large majority of Americans had begun to see their plain food as a virtue. Cookbooks emphasized simplicity and frugality, not meals that brought a succession of interesting flavors to the table. Plain cuisine even became an issue in the presidential campaign of 1836: William Henry Harrison’s supporters managed to convince voters that their man was just ordinary folks, content to live in a log cabin, eat his corn mush, and wash it down with old-fashioned hard cider. Martin Van Buren, his opponent, was portrayed as a foppish, Frenchified, un-American snob who sipped Champagne from a silver goblet and liked to begin his meals with consommé. The smear worked, and the gourmandizing Van Buren lost the election. It was not until the late nineteenth century, when the new American millionaires began importing French chefs to serve in their kitchens, that French cuisine truly gained ground in the United States.

  In the twentieth century, Americans came to consider the cuisine of France as the epitome of fine dining, something reserved for master chefs working in multistar restaurants. Then, in 1961, Julia Child published Mastering the Art of French Cooking, a three-pound tome that demystified complicated cooking techniques and made French cuisine accessible to home cooks everywhere. It was a groundbreaking achievement. Child’s cookbook remained on the best-seller list for five years and inspired four televised cooking shows as well as a hit film, 2009’s Julie and Julia. Child was so successful and so popular that she is widely believed to be responsible for single-handedly introducing Americans to French food. That is a misconception, of course; the real credit goes to a founding father and one of his slaves.

  THE WINE

  CONNOISSEUR

  Wine lovers like to quote Thomas Jefferson, who once described the drink as “a necessary of life.” It is a fine phrase, but the editors of the Thomas Jefferson Encyclopedia point out that their subject considered many things a necessity, including books, salad oil, salt, and hair powder.1 Jefferson was introduced to wine in Williamsburg at the dinner tables of his mentor George Wythe and the governor of Virginia, Francis Farquier. He learned to love it while in Paris, and he immersed himself in the art of winemaking on his tour through the vineyards of France and northern Italy. Jefferson’s experiences in Europe made him eager to introduce the great wines of the Old World to the inhabitants of the New World.

  Jefferson was not always a wine connoisseur. A 1769 inventory from Shadwell, his childhood home, reveals that the family’s cellar held 4 bottles of Portuguese wine, 15 bottles of Madeira, 54 bottles of cider, and 83 bottles of rum. But his tastes evolved. Another inventory dated 1772—the year he married Martha Wayles Skelton—lists 10 bottles of port, 29 bottles of beer, 31 bottles of miscellaneous wines, 37 bottles of Portuguese wine, 72 bottles of Madeira, 3 gallons of rum, and half a hogshead (the equivalent of 27½ gallons) of Madeira.2

  The man who was most influential in Jefferson’s oenological education was Philip Mazzei, an Italian surgeon, merchant, and horticulturalist with an interest in human rights. In 1773 he sailed to America to meet the people who had such a strong sense of independence. Like Jefferson, Mazzei studied new agricultural methods that would increase crop yields. The two men met not long after Mazzei landed in Virginia, and it appears each recognized in the other a kindred soul. Early one morning, the pair hiked the land adjacent to Monticello looking for a suitable tract for Mazzei’s farm. They found four hundred acres east of Jefferson’s estate that had exactly the type of soil Mazzei was looking for: a mixture of clay and pebbles such as one finds in the French wine region of Burgundy. Mazzei bought the land and called the farm Colle, Italian for “The Hill.”3

  From Europe Mazzei had brought ten Italian vignerons (winemakers) as well as vines, olive saplings, and silkworm eggs. He intended to introduce three things to America that the country did not yet have: a vineyard, an olive grove, and a silk industry. Soon after acquiring the property, Mazzei announced his “Proposal for forming a Company or Partnership, for the Purpose of raising and making Wine, Oil, agruminous Plants, and Silk.” Jefferson became a partner in what was known as “the Wine Company.” Other investors signed on, inspired by Mazzei’s assurances that no spot in America was “better calculated” to be America’s wine country than Virginia.4

  In 1774 a frost killed all the grapevines but did not dampen Mazzei’s enthusiasm for his new home. When the wine, olive oil, and silk project failed, he took up a new interest—America’s struggle for independence from England—and enlisted in the Albemarle County militia. When Jefferson had worked up a rough draft of the Declaration of Independence, he showed it first to Mazzei and asked for his opinion. Mazzei became a Virginia citizen, and in 1778 the government of Virginia sent him to Italy to secure funds for the revolution from the grand duke of Tuscany.5

  Jefferson’s wine education began in Williamsburg, after he had graduated from the College of William and Mary and while he was studying law under the direction of George Wythe. Wythe had a wine cellar, as did Governor Farquier. The wines Jefferson likely drank most often were claret from France’s Bordeaux region and Madeira, a fortified wine like port, which came from Portugal’s Madeira Islands. At the time, these wines were popular among gentlemen both in America and in England. Jefferson especially enjoyed Madeira, and it was the wine the Continental Congress called for to toast the adoption of the Declaration of Independence.6

  Even before he traveled to France in 1784, Jefferson’s palate inclined toward French wines. In France he discovered Champagne and Chambertin, a grand cru vineyard, which became one of his favorite wines. (By the way, grand cru identifies a vineyard that has the highest potential to make great wines; it is not a guarantee that every vintage will be stellar.) He also liked wines from Italy and southern France, and it appears that he never lost his taste for inexpensive Portuguese wines. Among his favorite Italian wines were Montepulciano—virtually unknown to American wine lovers in Jefferson’s day—as well as Chianti, Marsala, and the sweet dessert wine the Italians call Vin Santo, because many priests choose this as the wine they consecrated at Mass. His cellar also held wines from Spain, Germany, Hungary, and even Greece. When Daniel Webster came to dinner at Monticello, Jefferson produced a bottle Webster called “Samian,” which wine historian John Hailman believes was the Muscat produced on the Greek island of Samos.7

  In French wine, Jefferson demanded the best: Château d’Yquem, Château Margaux, Latour, Lafite, and Haut-Brion. These are wines that connoisseurs still revere. He ordered cases of Champagne and served it at virtually every dinner he hosted in the President’s House. For most of his guests, this was their introduction to sparkling wine. It has been
said that by serving Champagne to distinguished men and women from every corner of America, Jefferson single-handedly made the drink popular, a favored wine for festive occasions.8

  Most of his wines Jefferson imported directly from Europe, but that was no guarantee of quality. Extremes of heat or cold during the crossings damaged the wine. Some ships bearing his orders sank in storms or fell victim to pirates. Just as bad as “the lawless rovers of the sea” were the dishonest carriers who loaded the wine casks aboard small boats and sailed them up the Potomac or the James River to Jefferson. Occasionally, some “rascally boatmen,” as Jefferson called them, helped themselves to the contents, refilling the casks with water.9

  Jefferson enjoyed wine the way he enjoyed fine food—it was something that gave him pleasure, it was something he could share with guests, it was something he could study. In his enthusiasm, at his President’s House dinners Jefferson often discussed the wines that were being served that evening. Perhaps he went on too long, perhaps it was a one-sided conversation since so few people in American could hold their own against Jefferson in a discussion about wine. At least one guest, John Quincy Adams, found Jefferson’s wine talk tedious and “not very edifying.”

  For a wine lover, he drank abstemiously, three or four glasses at dinner, never more. And wineglasses in Jefferson’s day were small, holding perhaps a third of the amount of a modern balloon wineglass. As a rule he drank modest wines, what we would call the house wine, when he was dining with his family, and saved the fine wines for guests. To the house wine, he usually added a little water, perhaps to cut the alcohol or smooth out the flavor of a rough wine. In a letter to Joseph Fenwick, the American consul in Bordeaux, Jefferson placed an order for himself and for George Washington: ten dozen bottles of Château d’Yquem for himself, thirty dozen for Washington; ten dozen bottles of Château Rausan for himself and twenty dozen bottles of Château Latour for Washington. He also asked Fenwick, “I must beg you to add 10 dozen for me of a good white vin ordinaire, or indeed something better, that is to say of such a quality as will do to mix with water, and also be drinkable alone.”10

  This shipping bill dated September 27, 1821, “by order, for account & risk of Thomas Jefferson Esq. of Monticello (Virginia),” details a large shipment of foodstuffs bound for the port of Boston. Packed inside cases were hundreds of bottles of red and white wine, including “white wine of Limoux” and “Muscat de Rivesaltes,” as well as superfine olive oil, macaroni, and anchovies. (Courtesy Library of Congress, Manuscript Division, Thomas Jefferson Papers)

  After having studied the architecture of Palladio, Jefferson decided to build a new house in the Palladian style atop his little mountain. When he tasted French cuisine, he decided to have James Hemings trained as a French chef. His encounters with macaroni convinced him that he must have a pasta-making machine at Monticello. As much as possible, whatever good things he found, Jefferson wanted to be able to make them at home. Such is the case with wine. In spite of the failure of the Mazzei Wine Company, Jefferson still hoped that wine could be made in Virginia. He even planted cork trees so that the stoppers would be on hand when he bottled his first vintage.

  Jefferson had two vineyards laid out beside his garden wall, one measuring nine thousand square feet, the other measuring sixteen thousand square feet. He had cuttings for twenty-four different varieties of grapes sent to him from Europe, and in 1807 his slaves planted 287 vines. Like Mazzei, he planted Vitis vinifera, the cornerstone of European vineyards. That species could not thrive in America, where it fell prey to black rot and phylloxera, two diseases that are fatal to wine vines. When that experiment failed, Jefferson tried to make wine from native American grapes, such as the fox grape, V. labrusca, and the Scuppernong, V. rotundifolia. The vines were pest-resistant, but the wines they produced were unpalatable.11

  The War of 1812 cut off Jefferson from his suppliers in Europe. In 1815, he lamented to a wine merchant in Norfolk that the war with England “at length left me without a drop of wine.” To refill his depleted cellar, he wrote to Stephan Cathalan, an American residing in Marseille, who arranged for shipments to Monticello. “I resume our old correspondence with a declaration of wants,” Jefferson said. He wanted Hermitage, a red Roussillon, and a certain red wine from Nice that Cathalan had been able to purchase for him before the war.12

  And so Jefferson began to fill his cellar once again. Sometimes, a shipment of five hundred bottles would arrive in a single day. All were locked in the cellar, behind a door of double thickness, in a room where all the windows were barred. Wine was something Thomas Jefferson could not live without. Even in his final years, when he was deeply in debt, he continued to purchase it. At his death, there were six hundred bottles of wine in the Monticello cellar.

  VEGETABLES:

  THOMAS JEFFERSON’S

  “PRINCIPAL DIET”

  Vegetables were Thomas Jefferson’s favorite food. He did eat meat, however, so we cannot call him a vegetarian. By the standards of his day, his preference for vegetables was surprising: in eighteenth-century America, meat was just about everyone’s preferred dish, and vegetables were often regarded as a garnish. “I have lived temperately,” he wrote to a physician in 1819, “eating little animal food, and that not as an aliment, so much as a condiment for the vegetables which constitute my principal diet.”1 His granddaughter Ellen W. Coolidge recalled that “he lived principally on vegetables.”2 After dining with Jefferson, Daniel Webster observed, “He enjoys his dinner well, taking with meat a large proportion of vegetables.”3 And Jefferson’s overseer, Edmund Bacon, tells us that when Jefferson did eat meat, he was “especially fond of Guinea fowls,” although he would also eat “good beef, mutton, and lambs.” Unlike most Americans of the period, “He never [ate] much hog meat.”4

  In his thousand-foot-long vegetable garden, Jefferson grew almost all the vegetables, fruits, and herbs he needed to feed himself, his family, and their guests. Over a period of nearly sixty years he experimented with ninety-nine species of vegetables and three hundred thirty varieties. He also cultivated plants that were unknown in his neighbors’ gardens, including tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, and peanuts.5

  Jefferson’s decision to plant a large vegetable, fruit, and herb garden was as practical as it was botanical. There was no large-scale produce market in Albemarle County. Like his neighbors, if he wanted choice fruit and vegetables, he had to grow his own. Of course, Jefferson could not simply buy some seedlings, stick them in the ground, and then walk away to let time and nature do their work. He had to cultivate and maintain the beds carefully. He recorded which varieties he acquired, the characteristics of each plant, the manner in which they were planted, how they thrived, and the date they were harvested and served to him at dinner. A true gardener, he loved watching his plants grow and savored the foods they produced, but he also relished keeping detailed statistics about each crop. He once wrote, “There is not a shoot of grass that springs uninteresting to me.”6

  The scientist in Jefferson made of his garden an outdoor laboratory. He conducted “experiments” with plants not only to determine their viability but also to find the hardiest, best-producing varieties for the local climate and conditions. He imported a type of broccoli from Italy and planted a fig tree he had acquired in France. He raised beans that Lewis and Clark had found on their expedition through the American West. “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.”

  The man who built one of the most beautiful homes in eighteenth-century America also desired his garden to be visually appealing. Along the border of the square in which he grew tomatoes, for example, he planted okra and sesame plants. The smooth, red skin of the tomatoes contrasted with the rough, deep green of the okra, while the sesame plant, standing five or six feet tall, added height and visual interest. When he planted eggplant, he alternated white and purple varieties. Th
e cherry trees he placed along the walkway through the garden, where they would provide shade.7

  Within the garden stood a small brick pavilion designed by Jefferson. It was perfectly square, measuring thirteen feet six inches on each side. Also on all four sides was a tall arched window, so that the interior was flooded with light and would catch passing breezes in summer. In this little building Jefferson liked to read or sit quietly and enjoy the view of his garden. Not long after his death in 1826, a violent storm blew down the structure. Archaeologists uncovered its foundations in 1980, and the pavilion has since been reconstructed.8

  Jefferson probably directed most of the work in the garden, with his enslaved field hands doing all the planting, weeding, hoeing, and harvesting. However, he was not above getting his own hands dirty. From the recollections of his slave Isaac Jefferson, we learn that, “for amusement he [Jefferson] would work sometimes in the garden for half an hour in right good earnest in the cool of the evening.”