America’s First Great Chef Was Enslaved.
His Name Was James Hemings.
This Juneteenth, in the nation’s 250th year, it is time to thank a founding father we were taught to forget. It’s time to free Chef James Hemings from the myth of Thomas Jefferson as America’s number one foodie.
By Chef Ashbell McElveen
On June 20th we celebrate the men who built this country. We rarely set a place at the table for the man who fed them.
His name was James Hemings. He was born enslaved in 1765, the older brother of Sally Hemings. He became the first American trained in the art of French cuisine. The food on your holiday table this year carries his fingerprints, even if you have never heard his name.
Think about that the next time you reach for the mac and cheese.
James Hemings is credited with bringing macaroni and cheese, French fries, meringues, crème brûlée, and French vanilla ice cream to America. He learned his craft in France, apprenticed first to a Parisian caterer and then in the kitchens of the Prince de Condé at the Château de Chantilly, the legendary house once run by François Vatel, where the food was said to outshine Versailles. Thomas Jefferson brought James to Paris enslaved. James came home a master.
But the most important thing James Hemings ever cooked was not a dessert. It was a compromise.
On June 20, 1790, in New York City, the young nation was coming apart over money. The states were drowning in debt from the Revolutionary War, and the credit of the United States, and maybe its survival, hung in the balance. Alexander Hamilton wanted the federal government to take on those debts. James Madison was blocking him. Thomas Jefferson invited both men to dinner.
James Hemings cooked that dinner.
Over his food, three of the most powerful men in America made the bargain that held the country together. Hamilton got his debt plan. The South got the nation’s capital, moved to the banks of the Potomac. History calls it the Dinner Table Bargain. Some historians say it saved the union. And the hand that set that table, that put two bitter rivals in an agreeable frame of mind, belonged to an enslaved chef whose name went unrecorded for two hundred years.
The musical Hamilton sings about “the room where it happens.” It never names the man in the kitchen.
That is the wound at the heart of this story. Jefferson became the foodie founding father, praised for the ice cream and the fine French dining he supposedly introduced to America. The truth is simpler and harder. He owned the genius who actually did it.
I have spent years of my life trying to give that genius his name back.
I am a chef. When I first learned about James Hemings, I felt something close to recognition. So little was written down about him that I had to walk through the archives searching for a life both factual and imagined. I followed him to Paris, where he ran Jefferson’s kitchen at the Hôtel de Langeac, America’s first embassy, on the Champs-Élysées. He earned a wage there. He spent it on a tutor so he could speak the French of Versailles, and on master pastry chefs to sharpen his craft. He stood on the eve of two revolutions, the American and the French, two upheavals that promised liberty to nearly everyone except the people who looked like him.
James won his own freedom in 1796. He died, a free man, in 1801. He left almost nothing behind in his own words. So we are left to do the one thing this country has always been slow to do. Remember him on purpose.
That is why I made the documentary Ghost in America’s Kitchen.
And that is why I am asking you, this Juneteenth holiday season, in the year America turns 250, to do one small thing. Watch his story. Share it.
Say his name out loud in your kitchen. James Hemings does not need a statue. He needs us to stop letting his legacy belong to the man who enslaved him.
We made the day of his people’s freedom a national holiday. The least we can do is finally credit the food.
Watch and share Ghost in America’s Kitchen: Tubi (free) at the link, and on YouTube.
Chef Ashbell McElveen is a chef, culinary historian, and founder of the James Hemings Society. His multiple awards winning documentary Ghost in America’s Kitchen was nominated for a James Beard Media Award. For interviews, contact Zhe L. Scott, Executive Producer.
Watch and share:
Tubi (free): https://tubitv.com/movies/708184/james-hemings-ghost-in-america-s-kitchen?startPos=3
YouTube: https://youtu.be/TpDkc652XBc?si=QyvAgNE95vxVFVnM