large company once or twice a week. Jefferson dined a dozen every day.” James Hemings had declined the position of executive chef to the new president, preferring instead to work at Monticello, so Jefferson recruited Honoré Julien, a French chef de cuisine who had worked for years in George Washington’s presidential kitchen. Overseeing nine kitchen staff was the superbly trained Etienne Lemaire, a maître d’hôtel who was also charged with managing the domestic staff and supervising the dinner service. According to Jefferson, Lemaire possessed two “indispensable qualifications”: “honesty, and skill in making the dessert.” To his new staff, the president made his policy regard- ing food clear: “While I wish to have every thing good in its kind, and handsome in stile, I am a great enemy to waste and useless extravagance, and see them with real pain.” Lemaire drove a horse and cart every day to the local fresh markets in Georgetown to buy supplies. A week’s purchases might include 120 pounds of beef, ninety pounds of mutton, ten pounds of lard, eight pounds of butter, along with an astonishing number of pheasants, partridges, wild pigeons, ducks, and wild and domestic turkeys. Lemaire carefully noted each transac- tion in a sheepskin-covered daybook, which he would turn over to Jefferson for review. To cater to the president’s tastes, he filled the larders with a great variety of vegetables: asparagus, squash, mushrooms, broccoli, endive, artichokes, spinach, cabbage, “sellerie,” and the president’s favor- ite—peas.
Desserts included apples, oranges, pineapples, and watermelons, with jellies, custards, cakes, pies, petits fours, macaroons, savoy biscuits (sponge cake), peach flambé, and ice cream (snow, Jefferson thought, made the best ice cream). From France, Lemaire ordered olives, olive oil, anchovies, capers, almonds, artichoke hearts, vinegar, Maille dijon mustard, smyrna raisins, figs, and prunes. To remain true to his roots, Jefferson also brought to Washington two women from the Monticello kitchen to serve him typical Virginia cooking like
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u In one of his letters, Jefferson wrote down a recipe for “potatoes deep fried while raw, in small cuttings”—what would later come to be known in the United States as french fries.
batter cakes, fried apples, ham, and corn bread.
Dinners at the President’s House were lavish affairs. At four o’clock, a bell was rung, and Jefferson would invite his guests—senators, diplomats, philosophers, scientists, private citizens, and Native American chiefs— into the space now known as the Green Room, seating them in “pell- mell” style, without regard for rank or title (a breach of etiquette that often enraged European ambassadors). Jefferson preferred a round or oval table with neither head nor foot, so that there could be a “democratic solution to the issue of precedence,” as one guest put it. To ensure privacy and a flow of conversation uninter- rupted by “mute but not inattentive listeners,” the gadget-loving Jefferson stationed dumbwaiters at each table, upon which servants could place food and then retire. He also devised a system of circular shelves embedded in the wall so that, as one guest noted: “On touching a spring they turned into the room loaded with the dishes placed on them by the servants without the wall, and by the same process the removed dishes were conveyed out of the room.” Dressed casually in corduroy breeches and waistcoat, the tall, lean president would often serve guests himself. “He performed the honors of the table with great facility,” observed William Plumer. And according to Benjamin
Latrobe, another frequent diner: “Mr. Jefferson said little at dinner besides attending to the filling of plates, which he did with great ease and grace for a philosopher. He became very talkative as soon as the cloth was removed.” While the guests were merrymak- ing in the dining room, Honoré Julien, the French chef de cuisine, labored below in a vaulted basement kitchen. The kitchen had a fireplace at each end, both crowded with long-handled skillets, cranes to support heavy cook- ing pots, and roasting spits. Margaret Bayard Smith, a chronicler of early Washington society, reported that “the excellence and superior skill of Jefferson’s French cook was acknowl- edged by all who frequented his table.” The first account of an actual menu at the President’s House comes from the pen of Massachusetts Federalist Manasseh Cutler: “Rice soup, round of beef, turkey, mutton, ham, loin of veal, cutlets of mutton or veal, fried eggs, fried beef, a pie called macaroni. Ice cream very good, crust wholly dried, crumbled into thin flakes; a dish somewhat like a pudding inside, white as milk or curd, very porous and light, covered with cream sauce—very Fine. Many other jimcracks (nuts and sweetmeats), a great variety of fruit.” A “macaroni pie” was Jefferson’s version of macaroni and cheese: broken pasta covered with butter and parmesan cheese and baked. Un- known in America, pasta was all the
D E C E M B E R 2 0 1 1 / J A N U A R Y 2 0 1 2
PHOTO: STEVE PREZANT/CORBIS
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