The 250 year old kitchen of Thomas Jefferson's enslaved chef James Hemings

Daily Mail ^ | 10 January 2018 | Valerie Edwards

[mairdie]

Archaeologists have uncovered the 250-year-old kitchen of Thomas Jefferson's enslaved chef, James Hemings, who introduced mac and cheese and meringues into US culture.

Hemings became the property of Thomas Jefferson in January of 1774 when he was just nine years old.

His younger sister is Sally Hemings, who had six children believed to have been fathered by Jefferson after the death of his wife Martha Jefferson.

Growing up, Hemings was one of Jefferson's favorite servants and even accompanied him to Paris, France, in 1784.

In France, Hemings learned the art of French cookery and upon their return to America, he introduced crème brûlée, meringues and continental European-style macaroni and cheese to American cooking.

Hemings became one of the most masterful chefs in the US and prepared dishes for the future president and his guests in the kitchen of Jefferson's Virginia plantation, Monticello.

[mairdie]

You’re welcome, Sunken. Too bad no one is interested in the historical kitchen.

[Jamestown1630]

I’ve never believed it was Thomas; it would have been out of character. Randolph, on the other hand...

[dsc]

“Too bad no one is interested in the historical kitchen.”

I was, when I saw this a couple of days ago. Just saw a show on the kitchens of Henry VIII, too.

After a few viewings, the “enslaved” thing started getting on my nerves.

[mairdie]

I visited a house of one of my ancestors in upper NY and they gave me a tour of what was still antique in the kitchen from the 1600s. It's now the Glen-Sanders Mansion and, like most of those houses, mostly rebuilt.

A friend bought a house from the 1800s and had an original cookstove installed in the kitchen. Changed all of her recipes. I need to ask her for pictures.

I've been long disturbed by what the libs are doing with history. I just tend to concentrate on good things and vote against the bad.

And, by the way, hugs.

[SunkenCiv]

Bringing up certain subjects is a — dare I say it — recipe for disaster! ;^)

[Abathar]

And to think what we've turned his delicious craft into -

Somewhere there's a former slave spinning in his grave about now...

[mairdie]

Oh, VERY well done! Or rare, as the case may be.

[iowamark]

Note that the kitchens were always hidden away in the basements at that time, quite different than the show kitchens we see today. James Hemings will always be in the shadow of his sister Sally. He was unhappy, perhaps alcoholic, committing suicide in 1801.

[mairdie]

How incredibly sad.

The two 1600s kitchens I’ve seen were both on the ground floor. I know that kitchens were later moved as outbuildings to minimize fire damage to the main house, but what advantage did it have to put a kitchen in the basement? It couldn’t have been fire because a fire would shoot straight up. It would certainly discourage the lady of the household from spending much time there with her servants.

I’ll go back and check out my Dutchess County houses book and see where their kitchens were.

I’m not familiar with Virginia architecture at all. My only area of study is New York.

[iowamark]

Kitchens were seen as dirty places where the servants worked. They were dirty in the days of wood fired stoves. Monticello used dumbwaiters to carry food and wine from the basement to the main floor.

Julia Child was a sort of pioneer. The idea of a rich lady doing her own cooking was radical in the 1950’s. Rich ladies didn’t cook, they had servants to cook for them.

[mairdie]

I have a rather tilted view of antiquity because my area of study is Dutch New York. The Dutch built a culture here that wasn't primitive at all. When they placed orders for goods to be brought by ship, they contracted that the ballast in the ship was good Dutch brick for building their houses. Read the inventories of New Amsterdam and it's filled with precious metals and finely crafted furniture.

There was more an expectation of education for women, even if they didn't go out and work professionally. They worked in the shops and, even if well to do with servants, worked alongside their servants. It wasn't a culture that encouraged laziness in anyone. The attitudes you read about are shocking in their modernness in a period you think about as culturally impoverished.

A cousin of the Schuylers, brought to America by her father, wrote a fascinating book from the point of view of a child not quite accepted within that society.

Memoirs of an American Lady

The children were separated into groups that competed against one another, but the groups were chosen so that close blood relationships were unlikely to form new romantic ones. She wasn't made a member of the groups, as someone who wouldn't marry into them. Slavery was also different in Dutch society. Perhaps because it wasn't about large plantations, there were far fewer slaves and the relationships were different. A wealthy child was given a slave at birth, and they were raised together in the same crib, and educated together. When a young man went off to earn his living, it was a dangerous endeavor because the best fortunes were in the wilds of fur trapping. The young man and the slave he was raised with left together and there were as many stories of one bringing back the injured partner as the other way around.

NOT to say anything in favor of slavery, of course. It's just that the viciousness you hear about in stories of the south and of the really primitive west were not the norm in the old Dutch NY stories. The earliest anti-slavery societies that I saw forming there were around 1800.

The book I'd recommend strongly was Anne McVicar Grant's book, "Memoirs of an American Lady" which is about Margareta Schuyler, Madame Schuyler, the daughter of John Schuyler and wife of John's brother Peter's son Philip. So much for the effectiveness of childhood groups to prevent close marriages.

The Schuylers were deeply tied into the local Indians, with the women learning the Indian language, and the barn kept open for traveling Indians to spend the night under shelter. When treaty negotiations were going on, the Indians asked for Peter Schuyler to be part of the talks.

Anne married James Grant, a minister, and accompanied him to his Highland parish of Laggan in 1779, where she published extensively. Her husband's health wasn't good and her financial position precarious. Sir Walter Scott, among others, petitioned the king for a pension for her of 50 lbs a year.

The Dutch culture I'm describing fell apart as it was assimilated into the more successful British Episcopalian world of New York.

[iowamark]

Have you read Joe Lash’s book Eleanor and Franklin? He gives the history of the Dutch Roosevelt brothers who emigrated to New York. Their descendants were Theodore, Eleanor, and Franklin Roosevelt. I thought that it was fascinating. Those families attained such power and then declined rapidly.

[Vision]

TJ got the recipe from a trip to Italy. Guess he gave it to James to make.

[mairdie]

I haven’t. Thank you for the suggestion.

I have gone to the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library & Museum because it contains some 5 original Carrier Addresses written by Henry Livingston. All the Roosevelts descend from Henry’s grandfather, Gilbert Livingston, who studied for the ministry under Rev. Solomon Stoddard of Northampton MA, the grandfather of Rev. Jonathan Edwards. Stoddard was a Congregational minister from Northampton MA but the various Calvinist sects interacted fairly freely in those days. Livingston decided against the ministry, but ended up as the least successful of the Livingston brothers - the sons of Robert Livingston, 1st Lord of Livingston Manor. What he did seem to have was the happiest family.

The Livingstons, like the Roosevelts, also diminished greatly. One of my cousins - the money didn’t come down our line - had one of the huge mansions on the main drag in Newport RI. She loved genealogy but what she was always begging me to do was find her a connection to the Livingstons. I never could, but it was fascinating that the desire to be part of certain families still remains to this day. And this, while she was descended from the Brown U Browns and her grandfather created the current Medal of Honor design.

[Sooner Gal]

Sorry to resurrect an old thread, but I toured Monticello yesterday and our guide made things uncomfortable.

Apparently the word ‘slave’ is now politically incorrect - she always used the term ‘enslaved person’.

I learned that although Thomas Jefferson was very happy in his 10-year marriage (according to his writings), Martha left no writings and she bore 6 children during that time and was ill during and between the pregnancies so “shrug” we don’t know whether she was happy or not.

I also learned that TJ essentially raped Sally Hemings since the imbalance of power meant that she could not give consent.

I also heard slavery of that time compared to the modern day issues of immigration and “mass incarceration”.

I wanted to hear the facts (good, bad, and ugly) of what occurred during Jefferson’s life, but I don’t need to hear a tour guide’s viewpoint injected into it.

[dsc]

“I also learned that TJ essentially raped Sally Hemings”

They’re presenting that as fact, are they?

Scoundrels.