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of many African foodstuffs in the diet of Virginians. Furthermore he promoted African American chefs and cooks to the highest levels of their profession. The world now knows of Jefferson’s liaison with Sally Hemings, the enslaved half sister of his wife. Yet little is known about another member of the Hemings family: James Hemings, Sally’s brother, who was also one of the slaves on the farms that made up Jefferson’s estates. In the kitchens at Monticello, James Hemings mastered hearth cooking and knew the functions of clockwork-turned spit jacks that roasted the joints of meat and how to wield the long-handled “spider” skillets to cook the food evenly. He had felt the heavy weight of the filled cast iron pots and endured the scorched arms and burned clothing that were occupational hazards for any eighteenth-century cook. Hemings excelled in the culinary realm and was singled out for his industry and his talent. On July 5, 1784, at Jefferson’s request, he set sail from Boston Harbor on the Ceres. By the end of the month, he was in Le Havre, and by August 6, he arrived in Paris to join Jefferson there and be apprenticed to French chefs.

The Paris that James Hemings arrived in was a city in transition. Revolution was in the air, and the events that were going on in the capital’s streets and cafes would transform the world in the five years of Jefferson’s Parisian sojourn as America’s minister plenipotentiary. Hemings lived through the American Revolution; in Paris he would witness the beginning of the French one! The city in the dying years of the ancien régime must have been an astonishing place for a young visitor from America. Paris was a formal capital with a history rooted in monarchy, where Jefferson, lord and master to Hemings, was regarded as ill-clothed and lacking in manners—a provincial. Despite that, Jefferson was much admired and received great adulation, but the world of the French aristocrats into which Hemings had been plunged was far removed from that of Tidewater Virginia.

Paris was also abuzz with the revolutionary thoughts of liberty, which could only have been galvanizing for the enslaved young man from Virginia. Hemings was in the city at a crucial time in modern French history. He surely had many a stroll through the Palais Royal, as Jefferson’s Parisian residence, at the Hôtel de Langeac on the Champs-Élysées, was not far away. The popular spot was a favorite of the city’s increasingly strident revolutionaries and also of the growing American contingent. On his daily walks he might have heard Camille Desmoulins exhort his countrymen to revolution at a Palais Royale café. Hemings was also in the city on July 14, 1789, as crowds massed to head westward to storm the Bastille. As he went about his daily business for the Jefferson house hold, he was a witness to a world in transition.

Paris was surely a culinary wonderland to Hemings, whose prior experience was defined by what he’d learned in the kitchens of Monticello. The city was filled with cafes and the newly established eating venues known as restaurants, which were created by law only two years prior, in 1782. A revolution was taking place at the tables of the French capital as well, as the entrenched formality of court dining yielded to a more demo cratic type of cuisine, with the new eateries offering the public dishes previously unavailable outside royal palaces. The new restaurants offered menus that tempted the capital’s diners with an embarrassment of riches. Some offered as many as twelve soups, twenty-four hors d’oeuvres, twenty main dishes each of beef, lamb, poultry, veal, and seafood, and a choice of fifty desserts. The whole was washed down with copious quantities of wines from France and Europe and an array of liqueurs and mixtures, like punches, syllabubs, and the beverage of the moment, coffee. The refined fare was served in a sophisticated atmosphere unlike that of the more rustic inns and traditional taverns. Chefs began to be known for their specialties, like Chef Baleine of the Rocher de Cancale on the rue Montorgueil, who was