What Was At Stake
Nobody recorded what was served for dinner on Maiden Lane in the summer of 1790.
They were too busy rewriting the country.
It is June of 1790. The Constitution has been ratified for just over a year. George Washington is the
first President. The new federal government is housed in New York City, in rented buildings, with no
permanent home and no settled sense of what it is allowed to do. And underneath the pageantry of
founding, two fights are quietly tearing the young republic apart.
The first is money. The states had borrowed enormous sums to fight the Revolutionary War — from
France, from the Dutch, from their own citizens. Some states had paid down their debts. Most had not.
Alexander Hamilton, the brilliant and infuriating Secretary of the Treasury, had a plan: the federal
government should assume all of the states’ war debts, consolidate them, and pay them off under
federal credit. One move to establish that the United States was a serious country that honored its
obligations.
The Chef Who Came From Paris
The South hated it. Virginia had already paid most of its debts. Why should Virginia be on the hook
for Massachusetts? James Madison, leading the House, had killed Hamilton’s assumption plan twice
already. It was dead.
The second fight was geography. Where would the permanent capital of the United States be located?
New York wanted it. Philadelphia wanted it. The South wanted it on the Potomac — close enough to
Virginia to keep the new government from drifting entirely into northern hands.
Both impasses had been grinding through Congress for over a year. Neither was moving. The country
was, in the most literal sense, stuck.
Thomas Jefferson had just returned from five years in Paris, where he had served as America’s
Minister to France. He had watched the early years of the French Revolution from a townhouse on the
Champs-Élysées. He had read everything. He had eaten extraordinarily well. And he had just been
appointed Washington’s Secretary of State.
He arrived in New York and immediately saw what the men who had been there all along had missed:
the two fights could solve each other. Give Hamilton his assumption. Give the South its capital. Trade the debt for the map.
He invited Hamilton and Madison to dinner. Just the three of them. A private table, private
conversation, private resolution.
By the time the meal ended, they had a deal. The Funding Act and the Residence Act passed within
weeks. The federal government absorbed the states’ war debts. The capital began its slow migration to
a marshy stretch of land on the Potomac that would become Washington, D.C.
This is the Compromise of 1790. It is, by most historians’ reckoning, one of the most consequential
dinners in the early history of the United States.
The man who cooked it has been written out of the story for two hundred years.
His name was James Hemings.
James Hemings was born in 1765 in Charles City County, Virginia. His mother was Elizabeth
Hemings, an enslaved woman of mixed parentage. His father, by every credible historical account,
was John Wayles — a white planter who also happened to be Thomas Jefferson’s father-in-law.
This made James Hemings the half-brother of Martha Wayles Jefferson, Thomas Jefferson’s wife.
When John Wayles died in 1773, the Hemings family passed through inheritance to Martha and,
through her, to Jefferson. James Hemings was eight years old when he became the legal property of
the man who would, over the next three decades, both expand and constrain his world in nearly equal
measure.
In 1784, when Jefferson was appointed Minister to France, he brought nineteen-year-old James
Hemings with him. The stated plan, recorded in Jefferson’s own correspondence, was deliberate:
Hemings would train in French cuisine. He would learn the most prestigious culinary tradition in the
Western world from its living practitioners. He would then return to Monticello and bring that training
home.
So Hemings went to Paris. And what he did there was remarkable.
He apprenticed in elite French kitchens over the course of several years — including, by credible
accounts, under the chef of the Prince de Condé, one of the grandest households in pre-revolutionary
France. He learned classical French technique from the ground up: the long stock reductions that are
the foundation of French sauce-making, the architecture of a multi-course service, the pastry work, the confections, the cold preparations. He learned to make ice cream, churned by hand. He learned
macaroni — not the American casserole that bears its name today, but the pasta itself, made fromscratch, shaped and dried and then dressed with butter and blanketed with grated cheese and baked
until bronzed. He learned crème brûlée. He learned meringues, blancmange, the full dessert
vocabulary of a Parisian haute cuisine kitchen.
He also learned French. Fluent French. He read it, spoke it, negotiated in it with French suppliers,
gave instructions in it to French kitchen staff. He was, by the time he left Paris, operating as a fully
autonomous professional in one of the most competitive culinary environments in the world.
He was the first American ever trained in French haute cuisine. Not one of the first. The first.
And in France, under the legal principle known as liberté du sol — the freedom of the soil — he was
free. Any enslaved person on French territory could petition for their liberty and receive it. Hemings
knew this. He had been living in Paris long enough to know exactly what his rights were. He did not
petition.
He came back to America with Jefferson in 1789.
Enslaved.
The reasons are contested and complex. Historian Annette Gordon-Reed, whose landmark scholarship
on the Hemings family has done more than any other work to restore their history to the record,
suggests that Hemings had reasons — family, negotiation, the particular calculations of a man
weighing freedom in a foreign country against proximity to everyone he knew — that we cannot fully
reconstruct from this distance. What we know is that he came home. And that within a year of his
return, he was standing in Jefferson’s kitchen on Maiden Lane in New York, cooking the dinner that
would help determine where the capital of the United States would be built.
The Dinner
The meal itself left no menu. Jefferson’s household records from New York are incomplete, and the
dinner was, by design, informal — three men, a private table, no official witnesses. Hamilton wrote
about the compromise afterward. Jefferson wrote about it. Madison’s account survives. None of them
describe what was on the plates.
But we can reconstruct the spirit of it, because we know what James Hemings cooked, and we know
what Jefferson’s table looked like in this period.
The meal would have been French in structure. American in some of its materials. Virginian in its
accents. A hybrid of three culinary traditions, executed by the one man in New York who had been
trained to navigate exactly that hybridity.
There would have been soup — Hemings’s French training made him particularly adept at the long
stock reductions that French cuisine required, and Jefferson’s table was known for its soups. There
would have been a fish course, likely, and then a meat centerpiece prepared with the kind of sauce technique that was simply unknown to American-trained cooks of the period. There would have been
vegetables, because Jefferson was an unusually enthusiastic vegetable-eater by the standards of his
class and era. There would have been wine, chosen by a man who had spent five years building one of
the finest cellars in the young country.
And then dessert — which is where Hemings’s Paris training would have made itself most
dramatically felt. Ice cream. Macaroni baked with cheese. Possibly crème brûlée, the burnt-cream
custard whose preparation Hemings had mastered in French kitchens. These were not dishes that a
New York dinner guest in 1790 would have encountered before. They were transmissions from
another culinary world, plated by a man who had crossed an ocean to learn them.
The negotiation between Hamilton and Madison did not happen in the abstract. It happened in a room
that had been engineered, course by course, to create the conditions under which men can change their
minds — warmed by wine, slowed by extraordinary food, comfortable enough in their surroundings to
reach across the positions they had held for months. Hospitality is a political technology. Jefferson
had watched the French ruling class use it for five years. He understood that a meal could do what a
debate floor could not.
The meal worked. Within weeks, the deal was ratified. The Funding Act and the Residence Act
passed. The country had a financial architecture and, eventually, a capital. The deal held for over two
centuries.
James Hemings’s name is not in any of the legislation.
Why it Matters
For most of American history, the story of the Compromise of 1790 was told without James Hemings
in it. The dinner appeared in textbooks. The deal appeared in textbooks. The three Founding Fathers at
the table appeared in textbooks. The man in the kitchen did not.
He did not appear because the historical tradition that wrote those textbooks treated enslaved labor the
way it treated infrastructure — as a given, a backdrop, a fact of life so ambient that it required no
comment and warranted no name. The macaroni and cheese was Jefferson’s. The ice cream was
Jefferson’s. The crème brûlée was Jefferson’s. The dinner that sealed a compromise was a triumph of
Jeffersonian statesmanship.
The hands that made the food were edited out of the frame.
It took the work of scholars — Annette Gordon-Reed’s Pulitzer Prize-winning The Hemingses of
Monticello foremost among them, along with food historians like Michael Twitty and Adrian Miller
who have spent careers recovering the Black culinary history that American food writing systematically obscured — to reconstruct what Hemings actually did, what he made, what he knew,
and what he was owed.
The historical record shows that Jefferson did not introduce macaroni and cheese to America.
Hemings did. Jefferson did not introduce ice cream to American entertaining. Hemings did. The
recipe for ice cream in Jefferson’s hand — which is reproduced in culinary history books to this day,
usually attributed to Jefferson — was almost certainly Hemings’s recipe, written down by the man
who owned him.
In 1793, Hemings extracted from Jefferson a specific written agreement: if he would train his younger
brother Peter to take over the kitchen at Monticello, Jefferson would manumit him. Set him free.
Hemings agreed. He taught Peter everything he knew. The agreement was honored in 1796. James
Hemings walked out of Monticello a free man at thirty-one years old.
He worked in Philadelphia after his manumission. He traveled, by some accounts, to Spain and then to
England. He returned to Virginia in 1801. In the fall of that year, James Hemings died. The most
credible accounts describe a suicide. He was thirty-six years old.
He left no surviving children. He left no published cookbook. He left the knowledge in the form of a
kitchen inventory — a list of the tools and techniques he had brought to Monticello — that he
prepared before his manumission at Jefferson’s request. It is among the only documents in his own
hand that survives.
The erasure of James Hemings from American culinary history is not accidental. It is a pattern, and
the pattern has a name. Black cooks, enslaved and free, were the architects of American cuisine — in
plantation kitchens, in the homes of Founding Fathers, in the restaurants and boarding houses and
hotel kitchens that shaped what Americans ate for three centuries. They developed techniques, created
dishes, adapted crops and methods from Africa, from the Caribbean, from the Indigenous foodways of
the continent. And the system that benefited from their labor spent enormous energy ensuring that the
credit, the authorship, and the cultural capital went to the white families who owned them or
employed them.
Naming James Hemings is not a footnote to American history.
It is a correction to the main text.
Taste the History: James Hemings’s Baked Macaroni and Cheese
The macaroni and cheese that James Hemings made in the 1790s bears some resemblance to what
most Americans know today under that name — and some significant differences. It came from a
French and Italian tradition of baked pasta: boiled macaroni dressed with butter, layered with
generous quantities of grated hard cheese — Parmesan was the prestige choice, though American cooks often substituted whatever good aged cheese was available — and baked until the top was bronzed and the inside rich and yielding. No processed cheese. No flour-thickened sauce from a packet. Just pasta, butter, cheese, cream, and heat.
Jefferson was so devoted to this dish that he sketched a diagram of a macaroni mold and brought a
pasta-making machine back from Italy. The recipe most closely attributed to Hemings in the Jefferson
household papers describes macaroni boiled tender, dressed with butter and cheese, and baked in
layers.
This version honors that simplicity while making the dish accessible to a modern kitchen.
It is a dish that has been credited to the wrong person for two hundred years. Make it. Say his name.
Ingredients (serves 6 to 8)
• 1 pound dry macaroni or penne (use a good-quality bronze-die pasta if you can find it — it
holds sauce better)
• 6 tablespoons unsalted butter, plus more for the baking dish
• 3 tablespoons all-purpose flour
• 2 cups whole milk, warmed
• 1 cup heavy cream
• 1 teaspoon dry mustard powder
• 1/2 teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg
• 1 1/2 teaspoons kosher salt, plus more for the pasta water
• 1/2 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
• 2 cups finely grated Parmesan (about 6 ounces) — the historical choice
• 1 cup finely grated sharp white cheddar or Gruyère (a practical modern addition that rounds the
flavor)
• 1/4 cup fine dry breadcrumbs (optional, for the top)
Directions
1. Preheat and prepare the dish. Heat the oven to 375°F (190°C). Butter a 9-by-13-inch baking dish
generously, or a deep 3-quart casserole. Set aside.
2. Cook the pasta. Bring a large pot of well-salted water to a boil. Cook the macaroni until just barely
al dente — about two minutes less than the package directions. It will finish cooking in the oven and
you do not want mush. Drain and toss immediately with one tablespoon of the butter to prevent
sticking. Set aside.
3. Make the sauce. In a heavy-bottomed saucepan over medium heat, melt the remaining five
tablespoons of butter. Add the flour and whisk constantly for about two minutes until the raw flour
smell cooks out and the mixture turns a faint golden color — this is a simple roux, the foundation of
French sauce-making that Hemings learned in Paris. Slowly pour in the warm milk and then the
cream, whisking continuously to keep the sauce smooth. Cook, stirring, until the sauce thickens
enough to coat the back of a spoon, about five to seven minutes.
4. Season and add the cheese. Remove the pan from the heat. Stir in the mustard powder, nutmeg,
salt, and pepper. Add three-quarters of the Parmesan and all of the cheddar or Gruyère, stirring until
fully melted and the sauce is glossy. Taste and adjust salt. The sauce should be boldly seasoned — it
will mellow as it bakes into the pasta.
5. Combine and layer. Add the cooked pasta to the cheese sauce and stir until every piece is coated.
Pour half the mixture into the prepared baking dish and smooth it into an even layer. Scatter a third of
the remaining Parmesan over the top. Add the rest of the pasta mixture and smooth again.
6. Finish the top. Scatter the remaining Parmesan evenly across the surface. If using breadcrumbs,
toss them with a small knob of melted butter and scatter them over the cheese. The crumb topping is
optional but gives the dish a bronzed, slightly crunchy crown that is very much in the spirit of how
Hemings would have finished it.
7. Bake. Bake uncovered for 25 to 30 minutes, until the top is deep golden and the edges are bubbling.
If the top needs more color, run it under the broiler for the last two to three minutes — watch it
closely. The center should be set but still creamy when you spoon into it.
8. Rest and serve. Let the dish rest for five to ten minutes before serving. This is not optional — it
allows the sauce to settle and makes the portions cleaner. Serve in generous scoops, directly from the
baking dish.
A note on the cheese
Hemings would almost certainly have used Parmesan — the hard aged Italian cheese that French
haute cuisine had been pairing with baked pasta since the Renaissance. It was the prestige choice,
available in the Francophone kitchens where he trained, and the sharp, crystalline bite it gives to a
baked pasta is genuinely different from what cheddar alone achieves. If you can find a good aged
Parmigiano-Reggiano — not the green-canned variety — use it here. It will change the dish.
Serving Suggestion
Serve alongside a simple roasted vegetable — asparagus, green beans, or a bitter green dressed with
lemon — and a glass of something white and mineral. This dish has always been rich; it needs a
counterpoint.
If you want to honor the full spirit of the original table, add a green salad dressed simply with vinegar
and oil, a loaf of good bread, and, if the occasion calls for it, a scoop of vanilla ice cream for dessert
— another dish that James Hemings brought to American tables and another that history handed to
someone else.
Coming next on Gastro-Politics: the dinner that perfumed three religions
James Hemings cooked a meal that built a capital.
Now we go further back. Almost three thousand years further.
A queen left her home in the southern Arabian peninsula — or possibly the Horn of Africa, depending
on which tradition you trust — and crossed six months of desert to meet a king named Solomon. She
brought with her the most valuable cargo on earth: frankincense and myrrh, the resins that perfumed
every temple in the ancient world. He received her at a state dinner so carefully staged that a religious
text would preserve it for three thousand years as evidence of wisdom.
What happened at that dinner would echo through Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, build an
Ethiopian dynasty that lasted until 1974, and established the trade route that paid for one of the most
famous buildings in human history.
Next time on Gastro-Politics — the queen with three names, the king who burned her gift in her
presence, and the spices that built Jerusalem.
Bring your appetite.
And maybe your frankincense.