u A dinner table laden with hearty fare re-creates a typical meal of the revolutionary era and the early days of the United States.


BUZZ BRANDT HAVE LIVED temperately,”


wrote Thomas Jefferson in 1819, “eating little animal food, and that as a condiment for the vegetables, which constitute my principal diet.” Yet in the final years of his life in his Virginia hilltop home of Monticello, Jefferson’s table was renowned for its fabulous feasts, original cuisine, and exotic dishes, as diplomats, statesmen, scientists, farmers, friends, and a founding father or two gathered to dine almost every day. Edmund Bacon—the overseer of Monticello— recalled visitors showing up “in gangs” who “mostly ate him out of house and


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home” as they were plied with such unfamiliar delights as parmesan cheese, olive oil, french fries, dijon mustard, and vanilla ice cream. Despite his professions of gastronomic moderation, Jefferson was a true gourmet, and his passionate love affair with food revolutionized the diet of his contemporaries and transformed the culinary map of America forever.


First Course


Thomas Jefferson grew up in Virginia, a colony that was settled by English noblemen with a taste for haute cuisine. While the New England


Puritans subsisted on a diet of porridge and meat boiled with veg- etables and the Quakers of the Delaware Valley ate scrapple (a concoction of pork organs and grains boiled into a mush and then fried), wealthy Virginia aristocrats feasted on roast beef, stewed swan, and fricasseed chicken with herbs. Despite the general disdain in the colonies for French cooking, Jefferson—the son of a well-to-do landowner—was no stranger to the delights of the Parisian table. As a student at William and Mary College in Virginia, he dined regularly at the governor’s mansion in


D E C E M B E R 2 0 1 1 / J A N U A R Y 2 0 1 2


PHOTO: TED SPIEGEL/CORBIS


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