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discipline), and renowned in Philadelphia as the president’s chef, Hercules was known as a dandy. Although enslaved, he, like many free chefs of the period, was able to sell leftover food and tallow; his perquisites from the kitchen garnered him the tidy sum of almost two hundred dollars a year. Following the service of the presidential meals, he would step out into the streets of Philadelphia immaculately attired—linen, silk shorts, a waistcoat, a velvet-collared frock coat, silver-buckled shoes, and a cocked hat—and brandishing a gold-headed cane, to head forth to meet with other fashionable black dandies of the time. The city was full of black notables; Hercules was one of them, and he was certainly aware of the others.

However, despite his princely income, his fame, and his relative freedom of movement, Hercules was not content with his lot. He wanted his freedom. He yearned for it and planned for it and escaped when he could. Tobias Lear, Washington’s longtime personal secretary recorded his escape:

It is sad to relate that Uncle Harkless was so captivated with the delights of Philadelphia that in 1797, on the day Washington left the city to retire to private life at the end of his second term, he ran away rather than return to Mount Vernon. Although diligent inquiries were made for him, he was never apprehended.

His escape troubled the Washington family. “The running off of my cook has been a most inconvenient thing to this family,” wrote Washington, who spared no expense in attempting to find him. No doubt finding it difficult to understand why one such favored slave would leave, Washington charged Frederick Kitt, his former house hold steward in Philadelphia, with finding Hercules and returning his property to him, noting, “but little doubt remains in my mind of his having gone to Philadelphia, and may yet be found there, if proper measures were employed to discover (unsuspectedly so as not to alarm him) where his haunts are.” Several weeks later, Washington renewed his request to Kitt, stating that any expenses incurred in finding Hercules and returning him to Mount Vernon would be paid by Colonel Clement Biddle, but it was to no avail. Hercules had slipped off into the night. His six-year-old daughter, who remained enslaved at Mount Vernon, expressed thoughts that were probably more representative of those of Uncle Harkless himself. When asked by a guest at Mount Vernon if she were upset to never see her father again, she replied, “O! sir, I am very glad, because he is free now.” Despite our lack of knowledge of him or his dishes, Hercules, the chef who doesn’t even have a last name for history, was more than a grace note to the history of African American chefs. He was the first black chef for the country’s first chief executive.

Washington, though, was not alone in savoring food prepared by enslaved hands. Throughout the country, south and north, whites reveled in the foods that blacks cooked. The smooth running of many of the founding fathers’ house holds rested on the strong black backs of the enslaved. It resided in the firm grasp of the laundresses who starched and ironed tablecloths and the scullions who scrubbed out pots both iron and copper. It depended on the young children who weeded the gardens and flicked flies from foodstuffs at the tables and on the serving men and women who walked briskly along the “biscuit express,” bringing the food from the kitchen outbuildings to the main dining rooms. It was there in the sound agricultural judgment of the farmers as well as in the capable hands of not only the chefs but also the kitchen staff. The enslaved grew the squashes and tomatoes, prepared the broiled shad and macaroni pie, set the tables, served the food, and cleaned up afterward. The first chief executive may have set the bar with his black chef, but the preeminent bec fin of the founding fathers was undeniably Thomas Jefferson.

The man from Monticello and his culinary contributions to the American menu are legion. Less well known is the fact that Jefferson was also responsible for the inclusion