in value to bread is oil.” From Nice he wrote to his close friend the Marquis de Lafayette: “I am never satiated with rambling through the fields and farms, examining the culture and cultivators with a degree of curiosity which makes some take me to be a fool, and others to be much wiser than I am. From the first olive fields of Pierrelatte to the orangeries of Hieres, it has been continued rapture to me.” He crossed the Alps into northern
Italy, where he rhapsodized about the olive trees (“the olive is a tree the least known in America, and yet the most worthy of being known”), spent a day learning the process for manufactur- ing parmesan cheese, and sketched out plans for a “Maccaroni mould” (pasta machine). Traveling through Lombardy, Jefferson was informed that it was illegal and punishable by death to export rice from the Pied- mont. Nevertheless he filled his pockets with unhusked grains, secretly dispatching them to South Carolina. Visiting Holland in the spring of 1788, he tasted his first waffle and bought a waffle iron. When Jefferson returned to Paris in May 1788, the city was tense. By 1789, the populace was grumbling about the shortage of bread, and troops were dispatched to guard bakery shops. Jefferson wrote to John Jay, the American secretary for foreign affairs, that civil war was expected. On July 14, 1789, the French Revolution began when crowds stormed the Bastille prison. Even though Jefferson claimed that he had “quietly slept thro’ the whole as I ever did in the most peaceable moments,” George Washing- ton, who had just been elected presi- dent of the United States under the new Constitution, granted Jefferson a second leave of absence. Arriving back in Virginia on November 23, 1789, Jefferson received an express letter from Washington advising him that he had been appointed secretary of state to the new government. This was an unwelcome surprise for Jefferson. He had planned to return to Paris to finish his term as ambassador and then to again “with- draw from Political life,” so it was with great regret that he accepted his new position. On March 21, 1790, Jefferson arrived in the provisional capital city of New York to begin his duties.
T H E E L K S M A G A Z I N E
u Parmesan cheese, unknown in the United States in the early 1800s, is one of the many foreign foods that Jefferson ordered for his kitchen while he was president.
u Olives were considered an exotic food when Thomas Jefferson served them to his dinner guests during his presidency.
Accompanying him were James Hemings, now an expert chef, and a “cream machine for ice” that he had bought in Paris. In 1796, Jefferson was appointed vice president, and on February 7, 1801, he became the third president of the United States, narrowly winning the election over Aaron Burr.
A President’s Menu
Jefferson’s residency in the Presi- dent’s House, as the White House was then called, marked the beginning of a new era in American cuisine. “Never before had such dinners been given in the President’s House,” recalled one guest. John Adams, Jefferson’s predecessor, remarked: “I dined a
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PHOTO: BOWATER/CORBIS
PHOTO: PETER ADAMS/JAI/CORBIS
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