Thomas Jefferson's Creme Brulee

by Thomas J. Craughwell

  As a culinary apprentice and the servant of an American diplomat, James Hemmings would have spent most of his time in the best parts of town. On his own, however, he may have wandered into working-class neighborhoods, such as the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, where laborers and their families lived in crowded apartment buildings. Such places were teeming with people, but the neighborhoods were more or less safe for strangers. Virtually all the inhabitants earned a living, and local shops and markets were well supplied with food and other goods.

  James’s acquaintances would have warned him to stay clear of the city’s slums, however. Dark and filthy, populated by the most desperate people, these dangerous areas were shunned by the upper classes and avoided by the working class. Unemployment, disease, and early death were omnipresent in the slums, where a population density of 1,000 to 1,300 people per 2.5 acres was typical.29 Residents had few job skills; they had never mastered a trade and tended to take temporary work as laborers on construction projects. They were often underemployed, if not altogether unemployed.30 The unspoken fear among the well-to-do was that a famine or epidemic would drive the slum dwellers to the breaking point and provoke a riot that would sweep across the city. Even the Marquis de Lafayette, whose exploits during the American Revolution had proved he was a friend of liberty and an enemy of tyranny, worried about the potential for violence. Writing to César Maubourg, the comte de la Tour, Lafayette said: “One must not play games with a population as numerous as that of Paris, where the slightest disturbance can go further than people think.” Lafayette’s fears came to life on July 14, 1789, when an angry mob stormed the Bastille, the first act of violence that, in a matter of six years, would spill an ocean of blood and convulse France in ways Lafayette could not have imagined.31

  Life in France changed Thomas Jefferson. He is typically remembered as an ardent gardener, a conscientious farmer, and an advocate of the simple life in the country, yet Paris inspired his secret passion—the excitement of urban living. While Adams and Franklin settled in bucolic suburbs, Jefferson took up residence in the heart of the capital. He bought a street map and took long walks exploring the neighborhoods, studying the new buildings and the old, and recording his opinions of both. Gothic architectural landmarks such as the Cathedral of Notre Dame and the Church of St. Germain des Prés did not touch Jefferson—he considered them relics of the barbarous Middle Ages, when church and state crushed the simple faith of the people beneath the tonnage of hierarchy, ritual, tradition, and incomprehensible doctrines. He favored newer churches built in the neoclassical style, such as St. Philippe du Roule, near his home, and Ste. Geneviève (now Les Invalides), which featured bright, open designs based on the classic architectural styles of ancient Greece and Rome. Jefferson’s preference for natural light and fresh air led him to applaud the transformation of the city’s oldest bridge, the Pont Neuf. Inaugurated in 1607, the bridge had grown crowded with tiny shops and houses perched along its edges, reducing the passage across the Seine to a dark, constricted alley. In 1787 the shops and houses were torn down and the bridge was restored to its original, grand, unencumbered appearance.32

  The one thing Paris lacked was the presence of a royal family. Since 1682, when Louis XIV made Versailles the seat of government, the monarch and his family no longer lived in the capital. Although Louis had authorized the refurbishing of the Louvre and Tuileries palaces, he rarely stayed in either, and his successors followed his example. Consequently, Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette, and their children appeared in Paris only for special events. One such exception took place on April 1, 1785. On that occasion Jefferson would experience the soon-to-be-extinguished splendor of the ancient regime. The queen, Marie Antoinette, had given birth to a son, Louis Charles, and to celebrate the birth of the prince, Louis called for a Te Deum to be sung at the Cathedral of Notre Dame. Thanks to the intervention of the Marquis de Lafayette, Jefferson and John Quincy Adams, along with several other Americans in Paris, were invited to the ceremony and given prime seats in a specially constructed gallery overlooking the high altar.

  To the American Protestants, the scene at Notre Dame, now decked out for a grand royal occasion, would have been dazzling. Jefferson, who was nominally Episcopalian, would have been familiar with the cadences of the Book of Common Prayer, which, although majestic, were part of church services that were rather austere. Young Adams had been raised in the strict Calvinism of his Puritan ancestors. The Sunday services he had attended would have been even more austere—no prayerbook, no organ music, no vestments for the clergy, and no decoration whatsoever. Both men were impressed by the spectacle they witnessed in the Paris cathedral. In his diary Adams wrote a detailed account of the event, including what the nobles and other dignitaries were wearing and where they were seated, how the king and his two brothers fell to their knees the moment they arrived at their places in the sanctuary, and the quality of the singing of the choir (“exceeding fine music”) and of the archbishop of Paris (“his voice seems to be much broken”). According to Adams: “What a charming sight: an absolute king of one of the most powerful Empires on earth, and perhaps a thousand of the first personages in that Empire, adoring the divinity who created them and acknowledging that he can reduce them to the Dust from which they sprung.… I was vastly pleased with the Ceremony.”33

  Despite its impressiveness, most likely Jefferson was not vastly pleased with the ceremony. He never cared for pomp and splendor. In fact, years later, on the day he was inaugurated as president of the United States, he walked to the Capitol to take the oath of office. Moreover, the throng in Notre Dame that day would not have appealed to him, for he disliked kings, princes, and aristocrats. Even during the Reign of Terror, when the revolutionaries raged out of control, he still preferred republican France, however bloody, over law-abiding but monarchical England.

  What did please Jefferson was the city itself. “A walk about Paris,” he said, “will provide lessons in history, beauty, and in the point of Life.” The historians Lucia Stanton and Douglas L. Wilson believe that the five years Jefferson lived in the French capital were “arguably the most memorable of his life. Paris—with its music, its architecture, its savants and salons, its learning and enlightenment, not to mention its elegant social life … had worked its enchantments on this rigidly self-controlled Virginia gentleman.”

  Paris changed the life of James Hemings as well. It was there that he lived as a free man. And as he learned the art of French cooking, he looked forward to the day when he would return to America and become completely and truly free.

  Chapter 3

  A FEAST FOR THE PALATE

  Writing about the comfortable life enjoyed by the French bourgeoisie, especially those people living in Paris, Voltaire said: “More poultry and game is eaten in Paris in one day than in a week in London.… [I]n no other city in the world does a larger number of citizens enjoy so much abundance of all good things.”1

  What Voltaire failed to mention was the daily challenge of feeding a city of one million inhabitants. Twice a week in the mid-eighteenth century, 60,000 cattle, 400,000 sheep, and 125,000 calves, not to mention an unknown number of pigs and goats, were herded into the city’s markets. Suburban villages such as Montreuil and Passy were home to massive market gardens where all manner of fruits and vegetables were grown to be sold in the capital, thirty minutes away. The village of Vaugirard was famous for its artificial garden beds in which vast quantities of mushrooms were cultivated. Farms outside Paris provided milk, butter, eggs, and some cheeses, notably those made from goat’s milk, although varieties from outlying provinces, such as Gruyère and Roquefort, were also available. Then there was wine, considered indispensable by members of all of France’s social classes; it was brought in by the cask via boat from the renowned vineyards of Burgundy and Beaujolais.

  Inside the city were institutions and individuals who attempted to supply at least some of their own food. Monasteries and convents, as well as many of the large properties owned by nobles and
the well-to-do, were equipped with vegetable and herb gardens, orchards, and even fish ponds. John and Abigail Adams were delighted to find orange trees growing in their garden at Auteuil. Even in the heart of the city, small-scale farming was undertaken by tenants who kept chickens, rabbits, and pigs in their courtyards.

  But the essential food—the staple of the French diet—was bread. Sacks of grain and flour arrived almost daily to satisfy Parisians’ appetite for fresh loaves. A bad harvest resulting in shortages of grain could result in murderous riots in which the targets of the mob’s fury were indiscriminate, from humble bakers to grain speculators to merchants suspected (sometimes correctly) of hoarding supplies of grain and flour in an effort to drive up prices.

  All this meat and produce and grain had to be transformed into meals for thousands of hungry citizens, and comprehensive cookbooks soon became widely available to aid in food preparation. The quintessential guide to all things culinary was Les Dons de Comus, a three-volume cookbook published in 1739 by François Marin. The chef addressed his book to “the enlightened public,” meaning the bourgeoisie, who had come to appreciate fine food. Chefs de cuisine, all of them men, disdained working for the middle classes and held out for employment with the nobility. The middling population, however, would not be denied good food, and so they hired skilled women cooks, known as cuisinières, who had mastered the recipes and techniques described in Marin’s book and who could produce meals that rivaled those of their snootiest male counterparts.2

  Marin championed a nouvelle cuisine that was refined, using the freshest ingredients, and his recipes were anything but simple. His sauces, for example, called for precise technique and expensive ingredients. One meat stock required five pounds of veal, a quarter pound of ham, a whole chicken, and beef marrow as well as onions, carrots, and turnips. The result, Marin wrote, should be “soft, unctuous, and of a kind which will be useful to all sauces.”3 Among the many culinary delights Marin popularized are many of the classic French sauces that are still served today, including béchamel, Allemande, Espagnole, supreme, hollandaise, and Soubise, named for the Prince de Soubise, a renowned eighteenth-century gastronome whose meals were so extravagant and delicious that Louis XV was a frequent guest at his dinner table.4 Marin, in a moment of hyperbole, insisted that a master chef could cook anything and make it delicious. To illustrate his point, he told a story of a caterer whom a group of gentlemen took by surprise when they ordered a dinner at an inopportune moment: the caterer’s pantry had no meat or fish of any kind. But he did have an old pair of gloves made from buffalo leather. So he shredded the gloves, stewed them in onions, mustard, and vinegar, and served them to his guests. The gentlemen, having no idea what they had eaten, exclaimed that the meal was a great success.5

  Not everyone was a fan of Marin’s cuisine. The philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau was outspoken in his dislike of French food. “The French do not know how to eat,” he declared, “because so specialized an art is required to make food eatable to them.… Reform the rules of our cooking; have neither flour-thickening nor frying; butter, salt, and diary products should never be put over a fire.” He advocated a vegetarian diet of locally grown produce, whatever was in season, prepared as simply as possible. He once said that his ideal meal consisted of “milk, eggs, salad, cheese, brown bread, and ordinary wine.”6 Rousseau’s philosophy of the simple life won him a broad audience in the second half of the eighteenth century, but his ideas about diet never gained much of a hold in a nation where gastronomy, the pleasures of savoring lengthy and elaborate meals, was a national pastime. Both upper- and middle-class French men and women adored the gourmet fare that chefs and cooks had raised to an art form throughout the country, and particularly in Paris, which attracted the widest variety of raw products, the most talented chefs, and the most discerning palates from every part of France and beyond.7

  As the Prince de Soubise knew from personal experience, Louis XV relished the elaborate cuisine of his time. Fortunately for the king, he found a partner who shared his love of all things delicious: Madame de Pompadour, who became Louis’s official mistress in 1745. To Madame de Pompadour’s many other charms was added her skill as a cook, and she began a new fashion in which royals and nobles prepared meals for intimate dinner parties that welcomed only a handful of guests. At these private suppers, Louis perfected a dish he called poulet au basilic, chicken stuffed with chopped basil and other herbs, brushed with raw egg, and then roasted. Leftovers were served to the pages, the young boys who waited on the king and his mistress.

  Madame de Pompadour had acquired her taste for fine meals in her bourgeois parents’ home. It was said that her ancestors had been grocers and butchers, and the rumors may have been true. Certainly, she knew her way around food and had a discerning palate.8 Although she encouraged Louis to cook, she also kept a chef de cuisine, whom she challenged to create new dishes. He named one of his culinary inventions after his employer: filets de volaille à la Pompadour, or boned chicken breasts that were pounded flat, stuffed with sweetbreads, and braised in bouillon. Because these were royal meals, the chef and his staff used silver cooking utensils and served each course on either silver plates or Sèvres porcelain (a favorite of Madame de Pompadour). This luxury was then imitated by the middle classes as well, and the practice continued to spread. In the late eighteenth century Arthur Young, an Englishman traveling in France, reported that he was surprised to find silverware even in hotel dining rooms.9

  It was also during this era that “masquerading” became a popular trend in cooking. In an effort to surprise and delight diners, chefs would disguise foods as other foods or sometimes as inedible objects. Cuisinier Gascon, a cookbook published in 1740, provided recipes for chicken shaped like bats, veal in the shape of donkey droppings, and something with the unappetizing name of “green monkey sauce.” Responding to these types of food in disguise, Voltaire complained: “I detest biting into what appears to be a portion of meat and finding it to be two kinds of rabbit and mostly turkey.… And I like a crust on my bread!” Apparently, the rage for refinement had eliminated even that classic of French fare, the crusty baguette. But if the French were losing baguettes, they were gaining pasta, for Cuisinier Gascon included recipes for lasagna, ravioli, and gnocchi.10 For all of Voltaire’s grumbling, most French intellectuals enjoyed the elaborate meals characteristic of the age of Louis XV and Madame de Pompadour.

  Upon the death of his mistress in 1764, Louis, who by this time had come to equate food with love, took as his new mistress another member of the bourgeoisie, Jeanne du Barry, whose father was a cook.11 Like her predecessor, Madame du Barry sponsored a new style of cooking, in this case, light, flavorful dishes that appealed to her guests’ taste for the novel without leaving them feeling bloated. Another innovation of her kitchen was her choice for chef de cuisine—Madame du Barry hired a woman. Other grand households followed where the king’s mistress led, and for the first time in the history of French cuisine, female chefs began taking charge of kitchens in the palaces of the French aristocracy. It was believed they were superior to male chefs because, in part, by the time a male chef was forty years old his palate was no longer reliable, whereas a woman supposedly never lost her ability to detect the subtleties of taste.12

  Madame du Barry’s menus reflected the new simplified style of French cooking. At one dinner prepared for the king, her chef served a pheasant consommé, a ragout of snipe, poached chicken in a cream and butter sauce, roasted chicken with watercress salad, crayfish in Sauternes, and peach ice and strawberries in maraschino washed down by a liqueur made of green walnuts. A persistent legend says that Louis was so pleased with the meal that Madame du Barry asked him to confer upon her chef the cordon bleu, an honor formerly reserved for men.13

  Louis XV’s grandson and heir, Louis XVI, did not advance cuisine in France, perhaps because he never had a mistress. Nonetheless, he enjoyed food and ate prodigious quantities at almost every meal. One witness saw him put away in a single si
tting an entire chicken, four mutton chops, salad, and six eggs; he finished off the dinner with a single slice of ham.14 By the 1780s, during Louis XVI’s reign, the prime influencers of French cuisine had shifted to the grand ladies who hosted Paris’s most glittering salons. Madame Necker, for example, hosted Tuesday night suppers for a select handful of guests who might include the influential Duke of Talleyrand and Madame de Staël. Even in the years and months immediately before the outbreak of revolution, when France was plagued by food shortages, Madame Necker and others of her class continued to enjoy sumptuous meals.15

  Although he did not like his food disguised or his bread trimmed of its crust, Voltaire did enjoy eating well. It was customary at the time for friends to send one another gifts of food, and from Voltaire’s correspondence we know that a dozen baskets of apricots and, on one occasion, an entire wild boar exchanged hands. Writing of a friend who had sent him a gift of game birds, Voltaire said, “His partridges and his ideas have been received—both are good.”16 Voltaire’s love for rich food led him to form friendships with fellow gourmands such as the Duke of Richelieu and renowned chefs like Gaspard Grimod de La Reynière, whose grandson would later write a celebrated cookbook, Almanach des gourmands. On one occasion Voltaire sent his own chef to study for a while under Grimod de La Reynière. “It is not that I aspire to serve as good fare as you,” Voltaire wrote to the chef, “but a cook gets rusty working for a sick man … and one must protect the fine arts.” Indeed, it appears that the philosopher overindulged in rich food. He complained to a friend, “How good fat hazel-hens are, but how hard they are to digest.” Unwilling to give up indulgent meals, he turned to medicine to soothe his indigestion but found that the cure often made him ill. “My cook and my apothecary are killing me,” he said.17 When he invited people to visit, Voltaire promised them especially tasty dishes. “Come and eat our trout and cream,” he wrote to one prospective guest while tempting another with “a truffled turkey as tender as a squab and as fat as the bishop of Geneva.”18