Thomas Jefferson's Creme Brulee
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1785 Following the death of Lucy, Jefferson sends for Polly. She arrives in Paris attended by James’s sister Sally Hemings, then 14 years old.
1787 In spring, Jefferson tours France and northern Italy, sampling food, collecting wine, and smuggling rice out of Lombardy.
1787 During the summer, James completes his training in the kitchen of the Prince of Condé.
1789 On September 17, James prepares a farewell dinner for four of Jefferson’s friends, among them the Marquis de Lafayette.
1789 Jefferson, Patsy and Polly, and James and Sally Hemings, return to the United States in November. Jefferson arrives with 86 crates of European kitchen utensils and equipment and hundreds of bottles of wine, cheeses, and ingredients unavailable in America, such as olive oil and Maille mustard.
1790 Jefferson accepts an appointment as secretary of state in the cabinet of President George Washington. James’s intention to begin training his brother Peter in French cuisine is postponed so that the former can serve as Jefferson’s chef in New York City.
1790 In July, Jefferson uses James’s cuisine to put his political rival, Alexander Hamilton, in a mood to compromise regarding the location of the U.S. capital.
1793 On September 15, Jefferson and James sign a contract in which Jefferson promises to grant James his freedom as soon as he trains Peter Hemings to be a French chef.
1796 Jefferson frees James Hemings on February 5. James goes to Philadelphia, where he finds work as a cook.
1797–1801 Jefferson serves as vice president to John Adams.
1800 Jefferson is elected U.S. president.
1801 At Jefferson’s invitation, James returns to Monticello to serve as chef de cuisine during the president’s summer vacation. Jefferson returns to Washington, D.C., in September. James goes to Baltimore, where he works as a cook in a tavern. After several days of heavy drinking, James kills himself in October. Jefferson sends a friend to Baltimore to learn the details of the “tragical news.”
1803 Without consulting Congress, Jefferson purchases from France the vast Louisiana Territory.
1804 Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, along with 45 men, begin the exploration of the Louisiana Territory.
1809 Jefferson fulfills his term of office and retires to Monticello. He completes his 1,000-foot-long vegetable garden.
1815 Jefferson sells his library of almost 7,000 books to Congress; these will form the nucleus of the Library of Congress.
1825 The University of Virginia opens for classes, with Jefferson serving as the first rector, or president.
1826 Jefferson dies at Monticello on July 4. Several hours later, John Adams dies in his home in Quincy, Massachusetts.
NOTES
Prologue
1. Katharine E. Harbury, Colonial Virginia’s Cooking Dynasty (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2004), 41.
2. Quoted in James E. McWilliams, A Revolution in Eating: How the Quest for Food Shaped America (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 114–15.
3. Harbury, Colonial Virginia’s Cooking Dynasty, 47.
4. Ibid.
5. The couple had four other children, all of whom died while young: a daughter named Jane, an unnamed son, and two daughters, both named Lucy. Only Martha and Mary (who later chose the nickname Maria) survived to adulthood.
6. Because accidental fires were so frequent, kitchens were separate buildings in most European and American homes, even as late as the early 20th century.
Chapter 1: Americans in Paris
1. Fawn M. Brodie, Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History (1974; reprint, New York: W.W. Norton, 2010), 210.
2. Henry S. Randall, The Life of Thomas Jefferson (New York: Derby & Jackson, 1858), 1:411–12.
3. Jefferson’s Memorandum Books: Accounts, with Legal Records and Miscellany, 1767–1826, ed. James A. Bear and Lucia Stanton (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997), 1:556.
4. The Writings of Thomas Jefferson (Washington, D.C.: Thomas Jefferson Memorial Association of the United States, 1904), 1:90.
5. Michael Knox Beran, Jefferson’s Demons: Portrait of a Restless Mind (New York: Free Press, 2003), 210.
6. Jefferson’s Memorandum Books, 1:536–37.
7. The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Julian Boyd (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1950–), 7:508.
8. Dumas Malone, Jefferson and the Rights of Man (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1951), 2:4–5.
9. Simon Schama, Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1989), 76.
10. Howard C. Rice Jr., Thomas Jefferson’s Paris (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1976), 3.
11. Malone, Jefferson and the Rights of Man, 2:5.
12. Stacy Schiff, A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America (New York: Henry Holt, 2005), 296.
13. Diary of John Quincy Adams, ed. David Grayson Allen et al. (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1981), 2:147.
14. Thomas Fleming, “Franklin Charms Paris,” American Heritage 60, no. 1 (spring 2010): 103.
15. Walter Isaacson, Benjamin Franklin: An American Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003), 353.
16. Thomas J. Schaeper, France and America in the Revolutionary Era: The Life of Jacques-Donatien Leray de Chaumont, 1725–1803 (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 1995), 100–101.
17. Isaacson, Benjamin Franklin, 428–29.
18. David McCullough, John Adams (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001), 300.
19. Cited in McCullough, John Adams, 301.
20. Diary of John Quincy Adams, 1:217.
21. Ibid., 218.
22. Ibid., 218–19.
23. Annette Gordon-Reed, The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (New York: W.W. Norton, 2008), 80.
24. Lucia C. Stanton, Slavery at Monticello (Charlottesville, Va.: Thomas Jefferson Foundation, 1993), 13.
25. Mary Chesnut’s Civil War, ed. C. Vann Woodward (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1981), 29.
26. Stanton, Slavery at Monticello, 14.
27. Ibid., 13.
28. Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello, “Thomas Jefferson and Slavery,” http://www.monticello.org/site/plantation-and-slavery/thomas-jefferson-and-slavery (accessed April 11, 2012).
29. Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 159.
Chapter 2: A Free City
1. The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Julian Boyd (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1950—), 9:254.
2. Annette Gordon-Reed, The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (New York: W. W. Norton, 2008), 165.
3. The Works of John Adams, Second President of the United States, ed., Charles Francis Adams (Boston, Mass.: Little, Brown, 1856), 8:47.
4. New York Society Library, “Bringing Home the Exotic: François-Jean Chastellux, Travels in North America (1787),” http://www.nysoclib.org/exhibitions/travel/chastellux_francois.html (accessed March 7, 2012).
5. Howard C. Rice Jr., Thomas Jefferson’s Paris (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1976), 64–65.
6. Ibid., 66.
7. Ibid., 52.
8. Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 8:472–73.
9. Rice, Jefferson’s Paris, 51–52.
10. William Howard Adams, The Paris Years of Thomas Jefferson (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1997), 20.
11. Simon Schama, Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1989), 26-27.
12. Henry Adams, History of the United States of America during the Administrations of Thomas Jefferson (New York: Library of America, 1986), 1:101.
13. Gordon-Reed, Hemingses of Monticello, 169.
14. Ibid., 172.
15. Ibid., 172, 175.
16. Ibid., 176.
17. Sue Peabody, “There Are No Slaves in France”: The Political Culture of Race and Slavery in the Ancien Régime (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 4.
18. Gordon-Reed, Hemingses of Monticell
o, 180.
19. David Garrioch, The Making of Revolutionary Paris (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 109.
20. Ibid., 110–11.
21. Alistair Horne, Seven Ages of Paris (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002), 151.
22. Andrew Hussey, Paris: The Secret History (New York: Bloomsbury, 2006), 161.
23. Ibid., 162.
24. Horne, Seven Ages of Paris, 152–53.
25. Hussey, Paris, 163.
26. Ibid., 185–86.
27. C. C. Pearson and J. Edwin Hendricks, Liquor and Anti-Liquor in Virginia, 1619–1919 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1967), 45.
28. Thomas E. Brennan et al., eds., Public Drinking in the Early Modern World: Voices from the Tavern, 1500–1800 (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2011), 4:191, 188.
29. Daniel Roche, The People of Paris: An Essay in Popular Culture in the Eighteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 34.
30. Ibid., 53.
31. Olivier Bernier, Lafayette: Hero of Two Worlds (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1983), 196.
32. George Green Shackelford, Thomas Jefferson’s Travels in Europe, 1784–1789 (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 17–18.
33. Diary of John Quincy Adams, ed. David Grayson Allen et al. (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1981), 1:243–44.
Chapter 3: A Feast for the Palate
1. Quoted in Esther B. Aresty, The Exquisite Table: A History of French Cuisine (Indianapolis, Ind.: Bobbs-Merrill, 1980), 42.
2. Ibid., 43.
3. Barbara Ketcham Wheaton, Savoring the Past: The French Kitchen and Table from 1300 to 1789 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983), 205.
4. Aresty, Exquisite Table, 43–44.
5. Wheaton, Savoring the Past, 209.
6. Ibid., 224–25.
7. Ibid., 232.
8. Aresty, Exquisite Table, 49–50.
9. Ibid., 51–52.
10. Wheaton, Savoring the Past, 201–2.
11. Aresty, Exquisite Table, 52–53, 55.
12. Ibid., 59–60.
13. Ibid., 60–61.
14. Ibid., 64.
15. Ibid., 65.
16. Wheaton, Savoring the Past, 213.
17. Cited in ibid.
18. Cited in ibid., 215.
19. Ibid., 216.
20. Rebecca L. Spang, The Invention of the Restaurant: Paris and Modern Gastronomic Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000), 1–2.
21. Ibid., 36.
22. Ibid., 7–8.
23. Ibid., 8.
24. Ibid., 8–9.
25. Ibid., 54–57.
26. Ibid., 65, 79–81.
27. Aresty, Exquisite Table, 66.
28. John Reader, Potato: A History of the Propitious Esculent (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2009), 120.
29. What’s Cooking America, “Potatoes: History of Potatoes,” http://whatscookingamerica.net/History/PotatoHistory.htm (accessed March 7, 2012).
30. Reader, Potato, 120–22.
31. Frances Phipps, Colonial Kitchens, Their Furnishings, and Their Gardens (Portland, Ore.: Hawthorn Books, 1972), 97–98.
32. Louis B. Wright and Marion Tinling, eds., The Secret Diary of William Byrd of Westover, 1709–1712 (Petersburg, Va.: Dietz Press, 1941), 316.
Chapter 4: The Wine Collector and Rice Smuggler
1. George Green Shackelford, Thomas Jefferson’s Travels in Europe, 1784–1789 (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 75.
2. The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Julian Boyd (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1950–), 11:215.
3. Ibid., 10:612.
4. Ibid., 11:477.
5. James M. Gabler, Passions: The Wines and Travels of Thomas Jefferson (Emeryville, Calif.: Bacchus Press, 1995), 59.
6. Ibid.
7. Jancis Robinson, ed., The Oxford Companion to Wine, 3rd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 150–53.
8. Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 11:415.
9. Ibid., 13:31.
10. Ibid., 11:285.
11. Ibid., 13:313.
12. Eric Pfanner, “In Burgundy, It’s All About Terroir,” New York Times, September 16, 2011.
13. Gabler, Passions, 62.
14. Ibid., 63.
15. Ibid., 64.
16. Ibid., 65.
17. Shackelford, Thomas Jefferson’s Travels in Europe, 79.
18. Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 11:418–20.
19. Ibid., 11:420.
20. Ibid., 11:421.
21. Ibid., 11:226.
22. Ibid., 11:423.
23. Gabler, Passions, 73.
24. Ibid., 77.
25. Ibid., 86.
26. Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 10:280.
27. Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 18:247.
28. Gabler, Passions, 87.
29. Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 11:283.
30. The Writings of Thomas Jefferson (Washington, D.C.: Thomas Jefferson Memorial Association of the United States, 1904), 19:33.
31. Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 18:432.
32. Shackelford, Thomas Jefferson’s Travels in Europe, 90.
33. Thomas Jefferson: Writings, ed. Merrill D. Peterson (New York: Library of America, 1984), 792.
34. Lucia C. Stanton, “Mediterranean Journey, 1787,” Monticello Keepsake, April 12, 1987.
Chapter 5: Brother and Sister, Reunited
1. The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Julian Boyd (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1950–), 7:616.
2. Ibid., 7:538–39.
3. Ibid., 7:441.
4. Abigail Adams Smith, Journal and Correspondence (New York: Wiley & Putnam, 1841), 45.
5. Fawn M. Brodie, Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History (Bantam Books, 1979), 191.
6. Lucia C. Stanton, Free Some Day: The African-American Families of Monticello (Charlottesville, Va.: Thomas Jefferson Foundation, 2000), 108.
7. Thomas Fleming, Intimate Lives of the Founding Fathers (New York: HarperCollins, 2010), 303.
8. Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 11:573.
9. Ibid., 11:575.
10. Brodie, Thomas Jefferson, 277.
11. Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 11:551.
12. Annette Gordon-Reed, The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (1974; reprint, New York: W. W. Norton, 2010), 229.
13. David McCullough, John Adams (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001), 373.
14. Ibid.
15. Gordon-Reed, Hemingses of Monticello, 229–30.
16. Cited in Virginia Scharff, The Women Jefferson Loved (New York: HarperCollins, 2010), 182.
17. Elizabeth A. Fenn, Pox Americana: The Great Smallpox Epidemic of 1775–82 (New York: Hill and Wang, 2001), 273.
18. Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello, “Inoculation,” http://www.monticello.org/site/research-and-collections/inoculation (accessed April 12, 2012).
19. Howard C. Rice Jr., Thomas Jefferson’s Paris (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1976), 104–5.
20. Simon Schama, Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1989), 771–74.
21. Gordon-Reed, Hemingses of Monticello, 251.
22. Ibid., 166.
23. Ibid., 167.
24. Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson, Accounting for Taste: The Triumph of French Cuisine (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 135.
25. Ibid., 139.
26. Jessica B. Harris, High on the Hog: A Culinary Journey from Africa to America (New York: Bloomsbury, 2011), 80.
27. Gordon-Reed, Hemingses of Monticello, 209–10.
28. Ibid., 227.
29. Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello, “Maria Cosway, Engraving,” http://www.monticello.org/site/research-and-collections/maria-cosway-engraving (accessed April 12, 2012).
30. Merrill D. Peterson, ed., Visitors to Monticello (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1989), 28.
31. Damon Lee Fowler,
ed., Dining at Monticello: In Good Taste and Abundance (Charlottesville, Va.: Thomas Jefferson Foundation, 2005), 102.
Chapter 6: Boiling Point
1. Fawn M. Brodie, Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History (1974; reprint, New York: W.W. Norton, 2010), 305.
2. Samuel Eliot Morison, The Oxford History of the American People (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), 361.
3. The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Retirement Series, ed. J. Jefferson Looney (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005–), 7:248.
4. Brodie, Thomas Jefferson, 310.
5. The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Julian Boyd (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1950–), 14:426.
6. Franklin L. Ford, Europe, 1780–1830, 2nd ed. (London: Longman, 1989), 102.
7. Simon Schama, Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1989), 296–97.
8. Ibid., 399.
9. Ibid., 400.
10 Ibid., 403.
11. Ibid., 404–5.
12. Ibid., 420.
13. Boyd, Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 8:404–6.
14. Thomas Jefferson: Writings, ed. Merrill D. Peterson (New York: Library of America, 1984), 78.
15. Antonia Fraser, Marie Antoinette: The Journey (New York: Nan A. Talese-Doubleday, 2001), 279–80.
16. William Howard Adams, The Paris Years of Thomas Jefferson (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1997), 254–55.
17. Boyd, Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 11: 482.
18. Adams, Paris Years of Thomas Jefferson, 273–75.
19. Boyd, Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 15:10.
20. Adams, Paris Years of Thomas Jefferson, 286–87.
21. Boyd, Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 15:326.
22. Ibid., 307.
23. Ibid., 426.
24. Brodie, Thomas Jefferson, 313.
25. Boyd, Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 15:375.
26. Brodie, Thomas Jefferson, 314.
27. Adams, Paris Years of Thomas Jefferson, 5.
28. Gouverneur Morris, A Diary of the French Revolution, ed. Beatrix Cary Davenport (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1939), 1:259.