Charlottesville Food
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The “author” of a developing post-colonial country, Jefferson’s epicurean and political leanings often took on an attitude of regional insularity and fierce independence. During the War of 1812, Jefferson shared a sentiment of self-sufficiency not unlike a modern conception of homesteading. Sounding positively anti-establishmentarian, Jefferson acknowledges, “We must endeavor to make every thing we want within ourselves, and have as little intercourse as possible with Europe in its present demoralised state.”11 The demoralization of Europe, it seems, can be transferred from the realm of politics to the realm of culinary consumption. To import European foodstuffs is, to Jefferson, to further support an antagonistic and outdated political and cultural entity. Part of Jefferson’s political platform, as well as his personal ideology, was the construction of a morally clean, democratically developed and unpretentious alternative to the static failures of the Old World. The creation of a purer source of political power went hand-in-hand with an interest in promoting more direct food sources, a development that was to occur right in Jefferson’s backyard.
As an adult, Jefferson provided one of his best-known contributions to Monticello and American agriculture in the form of his extraordinarily plentiful vegetable garden. Historian Peter J. Hatch calls Jefferson a “seedy evangelist,” referring to his garden as “an Ellis Island of vegetables.”12 This one-thousand-foot-long enclosed space held a remarkable 330 varieties of 89 species of vegetables and herbs and 170 fruit varieties.13 One can get a sense for Jefferson’s favorite vegetables by the frequency of plantings rather than mere epistolary enthusiasm; the English pea appears to have been the president’s most favorite vegetable based on the number of plantings, the amount of garden space allotted to their growth and the textual description of his “pea contests” held with neighboring horticultural enthusiasts.14 If one were to take Jefferson’s gushing remarks about the taste of the Marseilles fig or the values of an olive as concrete evidence of utter devotion, both the actual layout of his garden as well as its modern reconfiguration would have looked much different—and arguably would have been possible only in a different clime.
The layout, design and tending of the vegetable garden proved crucial to its success as an experimental horticultural playground. Jefferson’s decision to carve the one-thousand-foot-long terrace from the southeastern slope of Monticello resulted in the creation of a microclimate, or a pocket of distinct atmospheric conditions existing within a larger zone.15 The man-made terrace traps the sunshine, which leads to the earlier production of crops and an extended growing season. The slight elevation of the estate deterred harmful frost, as cold air forces warm air to drift upward during winter nights.16 Jefferson’s use of manure as fertilizer, careful study and manipulation of roots and seeds and general watchful eye provided his gardens with basic structural integrity and strong foundations.
A crucial facet of the garden’s success was Jefferson’s interest in procuring and distributing seed varieties. When certain crops and plant varieties failed in central Virginia, geologist William Maclure informed Jefferson, “Sufficient attention has not been paid in the choice of seeds to the previous habits of the vegetable depending much on the nature of the Climate and perhaps something on the soil.”17 Though Jefferson did tailor his garden to the weather and geography of central Virginia, his delight in acquiring new, even exotic, species of plants never failed. Jefferson’s correspondences reveal his excitement about procuring new varieties and, even more so, his delight at sharing seeds of his own. The Lewis and Clark expedition offered an incredible variety of new plant species “peculiar to the countries [Lewis] has visited” for Jefferson to examine and send out to friends.18 Indeed, such horticultural excitement over these newly discovered samples led Bernard McMahon, one of Jefferson’s chief gardening associates from Philadelphia, to “painfully” ask Jefferson for seeds.19 Though Jefferson might be “so much occupied with the important affairs of the Nation,” his “goodness” allowed McMahon to “procure some seeds of the indigenous plants of the western parts of America” after all.20
Given the complex, often opaque naming system Jefferson employed—identifying plants by the person who gave him the seed, a physical characteristic or place of origin—it’s not surprising that the Center for Historic Plants, an offshoot of Monticello’s gardening restoration, and Monticello itself have encountered difficulty in placing, naming and uncovering many of the species about which Jefferson wrote. But seed-sleuthing aside, the work of naming, trading and raising unique and heritage plant species continues on today in the Charlottesville area. The Heritage Harvest Festival seeks to continue the seed-trading work of Jefferson in a modern context, albeit in a more crowd-friendly manner. Organized in 2007 by Ira Wallace, the owner of Southern Exposure Seed Exchange, the annual event began at the Center for Historic Plants at Jefferson’s Tufton Farm and has since been relocated to Monticello’s West Lawn—a view at which Jefferson would have gazed while working in his study.21 The Heritage Harvest Festival offers lectures, workshops and general educational programs on the arts and joys of small farming, gardening and sustainable living. Events such as “Monticello Herbs & Their Uses” or “Thomas Jefferson & Natural History Woodland Walk” were clearly designed with Monticello’s former inhabitant in mind and would have undoubtedly been of considerable interest to him.
While some interested in homesteading and horticulture may take their cues from the early days of Monticello’s gardens, those more invested in the culinary arts may take inspiration from the meals created with the gardens’ bounty. Jefferson has attained the recent accolade of founding foodie for numerous reasons, with the rumored creation of macaroni and cheese being among them. One of the first American recipes for ice cream is in Thomas Jefferson’s cursive handwriting; the eggy custard that he describes doesn’t seem dissimilar from the ingredients listed on the side of a container from Wirtz, Virginia’s Homestead Creamery. His penchant for foreign delicacies as well as homegrown produce has been well documented by modern journalists and Jefferson’s contemporaries. If Thomas Jefferson’s horticultural correspondences and widely sourced seed collections indicate a tension between the local and the nonnative, a joint interest in the exotic and everyday, records of his meals and general palate confirm these complementary gastronomic concerns.
Jefferson may have loved his “tomatas” and homegrown English peas, but he also possessed a taste for Parmesan cheese and good Bordeaux. In letters and reports, Jefferson extolled the virtues of the olive tree, a fruit that he experienced during a voyage to the Mediterranean. He was bitterly disappointed when the trees did not grow well in South Carolina and Georgia.22 His difficulty in getting “the richest gift of heaven” to succeed in Monticello gardens or in the humid flatness of the southern coast foreshadowed his continued difficulty with getting American soil and climate to cooperate with coveted foreign seeds.23 Though Jefferson often sought alternatives to these costly imported goods, attempts at locally produced alternatives often fared poorly. Jefferson’s attempts to use sesame seeds, “among the most valuable acquisitions our country has ever made,” for salad oil likely met with the same frustrated lack of success as the southern olive trees.24
Ultimately, the food costs of both his homegrown and imported ventures indicate Jefferson’s culinary interests to be dependent on his considerable disposable income. Jefferson spent almost $10,000 in wine and groceries during his first year as president ($3,000 on wine and $6,500 on foodstuffs); Jefferson’s yearly salary was $25,000. In comparison, Meriwether Lewis was paid a mere $500 as his entire salary for the westward expedition.25 While trips to Paris and well-developed state dinners were part and parcel of Jefferson’s political career, the French chefs he hired, Italian wine he imported and sesame seed presses he purchased indicate that Jefferson’s more developed culinary pursuits were dependent on, and perhaps resulted from, his wealth.
What exactly constituted this rich Jeffersonian diet? To a modern reader, Jefferson’s dietary preferences
read like a cross between semi-vegetarianism and the everything-in-moderation diet of continental Europeans. In an 1819 letter to Dr. Vine Utley, Jefferson describes his diet in no uncertain and rather self-congratulatory terms, expressing a practice of culinary moderation so consistent as to make fellow founding father Benjamin Franklin proud. “I have lived temperately,” Jefferson attests, “eating little animal food, and that not as an aliment, so much as a condiment for the vegetables which constitute my principal diet.” Jefferson admits to going over his doctor’s recommendation of one and a half glasses of wine a day, drinking almost five glasses if entertaining, yet maintains that his choice in lighter wines negates the potential excess. “Ardent wines and ardent spirits” never accompany Jefferson’s meals; rather, “malt liquors and cider are [his] table drinks.”26
MULTICULTURAL INFLUENCES IN MONTICELLO’S KITCHEN
The style and cuisine of Jefferson’s meals reflect the various regional and national influences on Jefferson himself. Peter Hatch attests, “The western traditions of gardening ‘in England, France, Spain, the Mediterranean’ were blended into a dynamic and unique Monticello cookery through the influence of emerging colonial European, native American, slave, Creole and southwestern vegetables.”27 Recipes exist in the hands of Jefferson and his family for okra stew, fresh pea soup and sweet potato biscuits, dishes that combine Old World food traditions with startlingly new and fresh ingredients. Luckily for Jefferson, the mix of cuisines, flavors and ingredients seldom resulted in an upset stomach. Jefferson brags to have “been blest with organs of digestion which accept and concoct, without ever murmuring, whatever the palate chooses to consign to them.”28
A blueprint for Jefferson’s pasta machine. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.
Though it is commonly thought that Julia Child introduced the United States to French haute cuisine, Jefferson’s 1784 visit to Paris might be just as responsible. Like any Jeffersonian accommodations worth their salt, culinary delights at his home began in connection with accessible gardens. Jefferson resided in the Hôtel de Langeac, a fashionable maison on the even more fashionable Champs Elysées, for four years during his station as minister to the court of Versailles.29 Like his previous accommodation, the Hôtel Landron, the Hôtel de Langeac had an English garden on-site. How large a factor these small garden spaces in the middle of urban businesses played in Jefferson’s choice of Parisian quarters is unknown. However, his insistence on a house with a garden when moving to Philadelphia in the 1790s indicates that his love of recreational horticulture was likely a factor in his accommodation choice in Paris.30
While Jefferson attended to government appointments and matters of state, his cook, James Hemings, attended to the kitchen of a caterer named Combeaux. A mixed-race slave with reputed blood ties to Jefferson’s wife, Martha Wayles Skelton Jefferson, Hemings returned to Monticello after his stay in Paris, despite the fact he could have remained as a free man, given that slavery was illegal in France at the time. During his stay, Hemings learned both the art of French cooking as well as the language itself so well that Jefferson felt confident serving Hemings’s creations to French dignitaries and people of influence.31 Hemings advanced enough in both language and cooking skills to earn the lofty title of chef de cuisine at the Hôtel de Langeac.32
The cultural and culinary complexity of this situation is quintessentially Jeffersonian: an African American cook learns French cuisine at Jefferson’s request, only to return to Virginia to replicate his learnings with the bounty of Monticello’s own gardens and some choice imported materials. Jefferson maintained his penchant for French cuisine even after Hemings had been granted his freedom and moved to Baltimore. Edith Fossett cooked for Jefferson in the president’s house as well as in post-retirement Monticello in a similarly inspired manner. Daniel Webster perhaps described Jefferson’s meals, as cooked by Fossett, best as “in half Virginian, half French style, in good taste and abundance.”33
The influence of a distinctly continental brand of epicureanism touched Jefferson’s palate in more ways than on the plate. Jefferson’s appreciation of wine and his particular preferences also evolved after his 1784 visit to France. Prior to this journey, Jefferson had enjoyed the port and Madeira characteristic of Anglo-American wine consumption. Upon returning from his 1784 trip to Paris, Jefferson brought almost seven hundred bottles of wine with him.34 Recalling the effects his Parisian stay had on his developing palate, Jefferson noted, “The taste of this country [was] artificially created by our long restraint under the English government to the strong wines of Portugal and Spain.”35 Jefferson’s preference for lighter French and Italian wines became as much a political statement as personal preference. Following the American Revolution, his favoring of nebbiolo and Champagne wines offered a revolution of taste, a way of creating a new oenological heritage.
The depth of his interest in and love of gardening, food and wine does not mean that Jefferson’s ardor for epicurean pursuits had no practical, physical limitations. Jefferson was not a cook himself and had only recreational contact with his gardens and food production at Monticello. Many of the vegetables that fed the household were purchased from slave households by Jefferson rather than the products of his gardens. Jefferson may have planted seeds upon seeds of prickly-seeded spinach or tended to the lime-green fruits of the Marseilles fig, but it was the potatoes, corn and onions of Monticello’s African Americans that made up the bulk of Monticello’s food offerings. The demands of politics, myriad personal interests and limited leisure time made Jefferson’s culinary interests as much intellectual pursuits as physical realities.
It is historically problematic to discuss the accomplishments of Jefferson and Monticello without discussing the influence and presence of enslaved workers. Felisa Rogers notes the crucial fact that Jefferson’s meals were prepared by slaves, his surplus food needs attended by them and his orchards tended by them. Through the stories told by household records and letters, one may glean a crucial ambivalence in Jefferson’s attitude toward slavery and the utility of slaves from a culinary and a cultural standpoint. Jefferson took many seeds and plants, not to mention cooks themselves, from the slave community at Monticello yet considered their own nutritious needs to be on par with those of livestock.
In his Garden Book, Jefferson records three farm products that will replace bacon and corn: potatoes, clover and sheep. “The two former to feed every animal on the farm except my negroes, & the latter to feed them, diversified with rations of salted fish and molasses, both of them wholesome, agreeable, & cheap articles of food.”36 The “animal feed” for Jefferson’s slaves is made of hearty yet “cheap” material; the elaborate French dinners James Hemings designed were not to be his own cuisine, no matter the occasion. The sesame seeds with which Jefferson made salad oil, the okra in his stews and the hands executing French meals in his kitchens are a testament to the influence of African Americans on Jefferson’s gardening and culinary ventures. The image of “veteran aids,” or old slaves, tending Monticello’s vegetable garden are as important to visualize for a complete historical assessment of the time as the image of a supervising Jefferson himself.
This impression of Monticello as an experimental playground filled with myriad pleasures, frustrations and ethnic influences is remarkably similar to the reality of the plantation today. The land and gardens in which Jefferson took so much joy have been returned to a vision of their former glory, thanks to the intrepid research and hard work of the Thomas Jefferson Foundation (TJF). A visitor at Monticello today can walk through the vineyards, fruitery and vegetable gardens to see plants with their original names in a layout similar to what originally existed. However, Monticello’s current interest in—and successes with—historical accuracy has been somewhat recent and implemented by several major players in the preservation area. Just as Jefferson seems almost before his time in supporting a local, agrarian economy, those involved with the TJF are interested in making sure his ideals are still reflected in a twen
ty-first-century setting.
JEFFERSON’S INHERITANCE IN CHARLOTTESVILLE AND MONTICELLO
Before Peter Hatch, a wild-haired import from Chapel Hill via Detroit, came on board as superintendent of grounds at Monticello in 1977, the gardens and grounds were in a state of misuse and disarray. No single stone of Jefferson’s original garden walls remained; the South Orchard did not exist, nor did Jefferson’s vineyards or nurseries. Of the original vegetable garden space, 40 percent had been turned into a parking lot, while flowers filled the rest. Floral horticulture was the main focus of the garden and grounds operation when Hatch arrived, using various flower gardens to provide the house with stunning arrangements yet neglecting the more historically accurate uses of the space. Hatch notes, “At the time, the Thomas Jefferson Foundation (henceforth TJF) was a simpler organization, and Monticello more of a shrine.” Hatch, who retired from Monticello in April 2012, firmly believes the estate, through the evolution of the TJF, has become “an activist educational and preservation institution.” The year 1977 proved a landmark for both Hatch and the TJF; Hatch’s goal of using the landscape to display and educate visitors on Thomas Jefferson’s various interests and aspects was made a reality when the board of trustees committed to recapturing and reconstituting much of the Jefferson-era landscape such as the Grove, the fruit and vegetable gardens, roadways, fences and tree plantings.37