This 1890 photo of
This 1890 photo of the White House kitchen matches descriptions from Jefferson’s time, when a French chef and a staff of nine were responsible for preparing lavish
meals almost daily.
Jefferson commissioned a pasta-making machine and introduced pasta dishes like those he had enjoyed in Europe to his dinner guests in America.
had just been taken from the oven.” And at a President’s House dinner in 1802, “potatoes served in the French manner” (french fries) caused a sensation.
Last Orders
rage in eighteenth-century Paris, and Jefferson had commissioned a pasta machine to be shipped to him from Italy. While he was in France, Jefferson had copied down a recipe for making “macaroni,” making it clear that the pasta he was interested in was spaghetti: thin strips of dough, hand rolled into a noodle shape. There are other recorded menus from Jefferson’s table as well. Isaac Coles, Jefferson’s secretary, remem- bered boiled beef, mutton, beef steaks,
T H E E L K S M A G A Z I N E
fowls with oyster sauce, sausages “with a rich onion sauce,” fish, cabbage, spinach, potatoes, turnips, carrots, beans, salad, pickles, hickory nuts, and havana chocolate. New York congressman Samuel Mitchill mar- veled at being served what was apparently a version of baked Alaska —ice cream covered by warm pastry. “Among other things,” Coles wrote, “ice-creams were produced in the form of balls of the frozen material inclosed in covers of warm pastry, as if the ice
Elected to two terms in office, Jefferson, like George Washington, declined to serve for a third term. He wrote to his Parisian friend Pierre du Pont de Nemours: “Never did a prisoner, released from his chains, feel such relief as I shall on shaking off the shackles of power.” In March 1809, he made his final departure from public life, retiring at last to his beloved Monticello, where streams of visitors were treated to meals, as Daniel Webster remembered, “served in half Virginian, half French style, in good taste and abundance.” To George Gilmer, Jefferson wrote: “I am as happy nowhere else, and in no other society, and all my wishes end, where I hope my days will end, at Monticello.” On July 4, 1826, Thomas Jefferson died in his bed, surrounded by family and friends, on the same day as the fiftieth anniversary of the adoption of the Declaration of Independence. Blessed with an invincible passion for life, our third president—lawyer, politician, architect, statesman, scientist, farmer, botanist, mapmaker, musician, inventor, linguist, and master gardener—was an unrepen- tant gourmet whose extraordinary love for food revolutionized the culinary habits of America. ■
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PHOTO: BEN FINK/GETTY
PHOTO: CORBIS
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