Thomas Jefferson's Creme Brulee

by Thomas J. Craughwell

  Voltaire’s love of food led him to become an avid gardener, and he grew vegetables, fruits, and herbs that in time made their way to his table. Like Jefferson, he sought out seeds for the best varieties—even the German emperor, Frederick the Great, sent seeds to him—and he kept chickens, turkeys, and pheasants (his attempt to raise partridges failed). He promised one visitor “milk from our cows, honey from our bees, and strawberries from our gardens.” And, again like Jefferson, he loved wine, especially Beaujolais, on one occasion ordering three thousand bottles.19

  The late eighteenth century also saw the emergence of an important new institution—the restaurant. Originally, a restaurant in France was, according to Thomas Corneille’s Dictionnaire universel, géographique et historique (1708), “a remedy that has the property of restoring lost strength to a sickly or tired individual.” Consommés and bouillon were considered excellent restoratives, as were wine, brandy, and cordials. But meat, cooked down to an intensely flavored liquid, was regarded as the best remedy of all. The process called for a large slab of beef, veal, or pork to be put in a large pot and covered with water. The pot was sealed with a tight-fitting lid and set over a low fire to simmer for many hours, until the meat had broken down and formed a rich liquid. Since physicians believed solid food was too difficult for invalids to digest, this liquid meat-essence was an ideal substitute, nourishing and easy on the stomach.20

  In 1766 the meaning of the word restaurant changed from a restorative beverage to a place that sold these types of drinks. The first such establishment was opened in Paris on rue des Poulies by two gentlemen named Roze and Pontaille. The location failed to draw enough business, however, so the partners moved to the bustling rue Saint-Honoré, where they enjoyed tremendous success. Initially, they sold only consommés and bouillons. Their customers sat at small tables, as they would at a wine shop or café, and sipped their restoratives. The business thrived, and Roze and Pontaille soon decided to expand their menu to include light fare such as soups, compotes, pasta dishes, rice, and eggs, all of which were promoted as restoring the health and strength of the weary. They adopted a Latin motto to playfully advertise their restaurant’s special offerings: “Hic saide titillant juscula blanda palatum, / Hic datur effaetis pectoribusque salus” (Here are tasty sauces to titillate your bland palate, / Here the effete find healthy chests). A weak chest was a common complaint in eighteenth-century Paris and could be symptomatic of anything from asthma and pneumonia to pollen allergies and tuberculosis. Physicians believed that solid food made the blood sluggish, which compounded chest ailments; to keep the blood flowing, they insisted on a liquid diet. The consommés and bouillons served by Roze and Pontaille were just what the doctor ordered.21

  Before Roze and Pontaille’s establishment, there were no restaurants as we know them today, only inns, taverns, or a cook-caterer’s shop where the offerings were limited, the cooking indifferent, and the service restricted to specific hours of the day. Joachim Nemeitz, a German gourmand who traveled to Paris in the early 1700s, was unimpressed by the cuisine available in these places. Even more appalling was the public table, a group meal where everyone sat together with no regard for a traveler’s desire for privacy, much less respect for the traveler’s social rank. Nemeitz soon discovered that people of quality did not frequent public inns; instead, they went to private ones, where they were treated with courtesy and served delicious meals prepared by master chefs.22

  Nemeitz was not the only critic of the food and service at French inns. In 1763 an ailing Tobias Smollett, the English novelist, passed through France en route to a spa in Italy. He found the food in public inns so abominable that he feared it would kill him before he reached his destination. And in 1790 an Englishwoman, Helen Maria Williams, reported that in spite of the sweeping reforms of the French Revolution, meals at public inns were still awful—so bad, in fact, that she said enduring such miserable fare day after day could drive a traveler to thoughts of suicide.23

  But travelers were an afterthought in the minds of Parisian innkeepers. Their primary customers were local city dwellers whose apartments lacked a kitchen. These clients went to the inns every day, purchased whatever the kitchen staff had prepared, and carried it home. But if a kitchenless Parisian tired of inn fare, alternatives abounded. The capital was filled with retail food shops where professionals offered a dizzying array of ready-to-eat dishes. Charcutiers sold pork, especially sausages. Rôtisseurs sold roasted game. Traîteurs prepared entire meals and delivered them (it was this arrangement that Jefferson made with Combeaux when he first arrived in Paris). In addition, there were boulangeries for bread, patisseries for desserts, strolling gingerbread sellers who purveyed their goods in open-air markets, and, of course, wine merchants. You might spend a good deal of time going from shop to shop, but in the end you would have assembled a very good meal.24

  Within seven years of opening their restaurant, Roze and Pontaille had many imitators, not to mention competitors. In fact, by 1773 Paris had so many restaurants that city officials stepped in to establish standards: the restaurant must be clean; it must serve anyone at any hour of the day; the prices must be fixed and clearly displayed; and it must admit men and women. In the 1770s, Jean-François Vacossin opened a restaurant that became a destination for Parisians as well as travelers from abroad. In the main dining room, he covered the walls with mirrors in conscious imitation of the furnishings at Versailles. His small, private rooms were hung with fashionable landscape paintings that depicted completely imaginary, totally unrealistic scenes of country life, populated especially with young, attractive shepherds and shepherdesses. Vacossin promised his diners healthy food from the purest sources. His water, for example, came from the king’s own fountain. His ladyfinger cookies were prepared in the kitchens of the Duke d’Orléans’s Palais-Royal. The sugar used in his pastries and custards was imported directly from the plantations of the French colonies in the Caribbean. All dairy products were fresh, and the meat was served not in crude hunks and slabs, but in dainty portions designed to appeal to the delicate appetites and digestion of Vacossin’s sensitive clientele.25

  By the early 1780s, however, fashions had changed. Parisian diners expected hearty meals, and Vacossin tried to keep up with the times, altering his menu to offer chicken fricassee, mutton cutlets, fish stew, and whole roasted chicken. But by this time, bigger restaurants were springing up all around the city. One of the largest, the Cirque du Palais-Royal, located (as its name suggests) in the Palais-Royal, had seating for five hundred, although clients were divided among many private dining rooms designed to accommodate parties of two, four, six, or eight persons.26

  Menus, too, were becoming increasingly diverse. One of the most popular items being served was the white potato, a relative newcomer to France. In the sixteenth century, the Spanish had encountered potatoes in South America, where the Inca called them papas. Tasty, nutritious, easy to store, and simple to cook, this humble root vegetable became a mainstay on Spanish ships. Among its other advantages, the potato also prevented scurvy, a disease caused by a lack of vitamin C, which was rampant among seafarers. Throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the potato was introduced to nations across Europe, without much success. Rumors circulated among peasants that it was poisonous and caused tuberculosis, scrofula, syphilis, and even leprosy.

  But, ultimately, Europe needed the potato. Unpredictable crop failures and devastating wars that tore the continent apart often caused the starvation of tens of thousands. In the aftermath of the Thirty Years War (1618–48), Europeans looked for crops that would feed the peasants no matter how poor the grain harvest might be. They discovered that the potato was the answer. By the 1740s, monarchs and generals had come to recognize that the potato was also a reliable source of nutrition for their armies. Frederick the Great of Prussia was such an ardent advocate that he had potato seeds distributed free to peasants throughout his kingdom.27 Within a decade the potato had become standard fare in Prussia, but it was s
till regarded with suspicion in France. Antoine-Augustin Parmentier, a botanist, was determined to change his compatriots’ opinion. During the Seven Years War (1756–63) he had been taken prisoner by the Prussians and survived on a diet made up entirely of the starchy, nutritious potato.

  His moment came in 1770, when once again the wheat crop failed in France. The Academy of Besançon offered a prize to anyone who could suggest a new food “capable of reducing the calamities of famine.” Parmentier entered the potato in the competition—and won.28 But he still had a difficult time persuading cooks and consumers that the tuber was safe to eat. Then he hit on an idea that was as sly as it was ingenious. He appealed to Louis XVI for some waste ground where he could plant France’s first potato crop. In 1785 the king gave Parmentier forty barren acres at Les Sablons, outside Paris, which he planted with potatoes, ordering the perimeter guarded by troops from dawn until sundown. As Parmentier had hoped, the sight of soldiers standing guard over a field sparked the curiosity of the local people. After dark, some of them crept into the field and dug up some of the potatoes, which they carried home and cooked. The larcenous peasants liked what they had stolen, and so they continued to pilfer the pommes de terre and eventually began growing their own.29

  The potato craze took off. According to legend, the king began wearing the plant’s blossoms pinned to his coat, and Marie Antoinette wore a garland of them in her hair. The potato was served at the royal court, which led the aristocracy to adopt it as well. Makers of fine china capitalized on the fashion by painting potato blossoms on dinnerware, and Parisian florists specialized in potato flower arrangements.

  Parmentier threw dinner parties at which potatoes were served at every course. Benjamin Franklin was the guest at one such dinner, and scholars believe that Jefferson attended one, too. Street vendors began to sell cooked potatoes to passersby, and soup kitchen fed bowls of healthy potato soup to the poor. Thrilled with the new source of nutritious food, the king told Parmentier: “France will thank you someday for having found bread for the poor.” In 1802 Napoleon awarded Parmentier the Legion of Honor; after his death, in 1813, it was customary for many years to plant potatoes on his grave.30

  Potatoes were not a new ingredient to James Hemings; by this time, the vegetable was already being consumed throughout the United States. But Hemings had other novelties to get used to. For one thing, French kitchens differed significantly from those James had known in America. Back in Virginia, most cooking was done in an open hearth. This method of working over an unprotected fire was risky business, especially because most cooks were women and wore floor-length skirts. Sparks that suddenly exploded from a burning log, or a bit of flaming firewood that rolled out of the hearth, could set a cook’s clothes alight. Then there was the sputtering fat from roasts on a spit or from meat in a frying pan, not to mention pots of boiling soups and stews that were prone to tip over. In addition to the dangers presented by the process of cooking, there was the risk inherent in raking, shoveling, and carrying hot coals, among many other possible kitchen mishaps. In 1722 Joshua Hempsted of New London, Connecticut, recorded in his diary that his servant Molly was badly scalded “in ye back & neck” after his son Nathaniel accidentally “spilld a dish of hot milk … on her.”31 In France, such accidents were much reduced because most cooking was done over a coal-fired stove.

  Other differences distinguished the two countries’ food-preparation practices. James had to become accustomed to the large number of men in the kitchen. In Virginia, meals were prepared primarily by women, many of them slaves. It was common for the mistress of a plantation to read a recipe aloud to her cooks and supervise them as they prepared the meals—we know that Martha Jefferson did this. If the meal did not turn out as intended, a master might whip the cook. As a 1712 entry in the diary of the plantation owner William Byrd II of Westover, Virginia, reveals: “I made an indifferent dinner this day because Moll [his enslaved cook] had not boiled the bacon half enough, for which I gave her some stripes.”32

  We cannot know for certain, but it seems likely that, back at Monticello, James had shown some aptitude for cooking. Why else would Jefferson have taken him to Paris to study French cuisine? Once James became a master chef, Jefferson would run little risk of enduring “an indifferent dinner.” As for James, he received an education that was unavailable anywhere in the United States. In terms of variety and quality of meat, produce, wine, and other ingredients, Paris was unrivalled. The city’s chefs were the finest in France, which meant that they were among the finest in Europe. Furthermore, there was a culture, an ethos, a philosophy of food in France that did not exist in America. Subtlety of flavor, precise technique, and beautiful presentation mattered to French chefs and diners alike, and James Hemings would master them all.

  Chapter 4

  THE WINE COLLECTOR

  AND RICE SMUGGLER

  Early in the morning of a rainy day in February 1787, the Hôtel de Langeac’s coachman drove Jefferson’s carriage from the stables to the main residence, drawing up the three horses in front of the front door. A few minutes later, Jefferson stepped out of the house accompanied by two servants, one of whom carried his small trunk. The other servant was Adrien Petit, the maître d’hôtel, who would act as Jefferson’s personal servant as well as his front man during their upcoming journey, arranging for rooms and meals with innkeepers along the way. Jefferson’s “chariot,” as he always called it, was enclosed to protect its passenger from not only the weather but also the dust and mire of the roads kicked up by the vehicle’s wheels. It was a small carriage and could accommodate only one passenger; Petit probably sat up front with the driver. According to Jefferson’s itinerary, they would first head south to Marseille and then eastward over the Alps into northern Italy. All told, Jefferson would cover some twenty-four hundred miles, round-trip, and would not return to Paris until early summer.1

  In a letter to his protégé and private secretary William Short, Jefferson revealed what he intended to investigate on his grand tour: “Architecture, painting, sculpture, antiquities, agriculture, the condition of the laboring poor.”2 In other words, everything. Yet he also had a more personal reason for traveling to the South of France; five months earlier, he had broken his right wrist while he and his horse tried to jump a fence at the park of Cours-la-Reine in Paris. The physicians bungled the setting of the bones, and, although technically healed, his wrist was still troubling him. Jefferson hoped to find a cure in the spas of the country’s warmer climes. Writing to James Monroe he said that he intended “to try the mineral waters there for the restoration of my hand.”3

  As a member of the diplomatic corps and a man of rank, Jefferson would have been justified in taking along a large retinue of servants. On this journey, however, he was not traveling as an American ambassador but as a private citizen, and his entourage was much reduced. As he wrote to his friend John Banister, “I was alone thro the whole, and think one travels more usefully when they travel alone, because they reflect more.”4 Jefferson may have been a tourist, but he was an unusually thoughtful one.

  He left the city via the Porte d’Orléans, on the southern perimeter of Paris, and then his coachman turned east toward Dijon. Fifty-five miles from Paris, at Fontainebleau, the wheels gave out, and the group was compelled to spend two days in the town, waiting for the carriage to be repaired. This problem would be a recurrent one throughout the trip, caused mainly by the humpbacked roads of France. The convex bump that stretched along every highway was excellent for draining water from the road, but it threw off the carriage’s balance, forcing Jefferson and his servants time and again to interrupt their journey and seek out repairs.

  Still, aside from the road surfaces that were hard on Jefferson’s carriage, travel through France in the late 1780s was relatively safe and easy. The government had set up post houses every ten miles along all the roads. At these rest points, travelers could hire fresh horses, drivers, guides, and servants; the inn-like establishments also offered meals
and lodging for the night. Adding to the overall sense of safety were the mounted troops who patrolled roadways, ensuring that highwaymen did not molest travelers.5

  Compared to the way most people traveled at the time, Jefferson’s style was luxurious. A less-prosperous member of the population would usually buy a seat on a diligence, a stagecoach that typically crammed eight passengers into a tiny compartment. Such journeys were almost always uncomfortable and could be awkward, especially if fellow passengers were in any way unpleasant. Furthermore, riders were at the mercy of the diligence company’s schedule, which meant that sometimes they had only a few minutes to gulp down a bit of food and use the post-house privy. Rolling along in his own carriage, attended by servants and able to stop whenever and wherever he liked for as long as he liked, Jefferson was truly among the traveling elite.6

  On March 3, he and his party reached the historic province of Champagne. The farmer and gardener in Jefferson immediately noticed the soil, which he described as “generally a rich mulatto loam.” For seven hundred years, that “mulatto loam” had produced some of the world’s finest wines. Back in the eleventh century, Pope Urban II had asserted that the wine of Champagne was the best in the world. As a native of the region, Urban could hardly claim to have an impartial opinion, but over the centuries many wine lovers have agreed with him. In the sixteenth century, Pope Leo X, Charles V of Spain, and Henry VIII of England all purchased vineyards in the region and filled their cellars with its delectable wines.