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Hemings, as one enslaved, was certainly aware of the underpinnings of poverty that upheld the lives of the French aristocracy. He apprenticed in their kitchens and worked alongside their impoverished help. But he also served in a diplomatic house hold where the elite of the time gathered and no doubt heard Franklin and Jefferson and Adams debate the relative merits of the American and French systems of government. French laws regarding slavery were a labyrinth of confusion. Once he landed in France, Hemings fell under the “Freedom Principle,” which held that slaves were free on French soil, as French slavery was usually confined to its colonies. However, the laws were complex and often contradictory and slaves did exist in the capital, having been brought from the colonies by their wealthy masters. Their numbers were small, however. Indeed, the French were concerned with the growing presence of slaves in the country and tried to regulate their length of stay.

At the time, Paris numbered among its citizens only one thousand blacks and people of mixed blood, a small number when compared with the black inhabitants of London of the period or the large black populations in developing American cities like Charleston, Philadelphia, and New York. The free Parisian blacks were the manumitted sons and daughters of colonial plantation owners. The city though was comparatively open and even had its black elite. There was the mulatto Chevalier de Saint-Georges, son of a former governor of Guadeloupe and a black woman; he was the best swordsman in Europe, a Freemason, and a composer whose name alternated on concert bills with that of Mozart. Mixed-race Thomas-Alexandre “Dumas” Davy de la Pailleterie, the father of writer Alexandre Dumas, was a noted solider and another honored swordsman. Both were leaders of the elite black community. Hemings would have known of these other blacks and their stature in the city. Although enslaved, he was paid wages by Jefferson during his Paris sojourn and had relative freedom of movement.

Hemings was initially apprenticed with the caterer who provisioned Jefferson’s Parisian house hold, Monsieur Combeaux. From him, he is certain to have learned the basics of French cuisine and how to create the multiple dishes that were required for the classic service à la française, which offered multiple dishes set out on crisp napery that was de rigeur in the best houses of Virginia. Hemings also mastered the Europe an potager, or stew stove, a brick and plaster assemblage complete with wood-fired burner holes, which was the precursor of today’s modern stoves. The new stove granted the cook the ability to control the flame and the temperature in ways that were unimaginable in hearth cooking and allowed for the creation of the more subtle dishes. Jefferson was so taken with the novelty that he had a stew stove built in a kitchen of Monticello in later years, one of the few in the United States. In France, Hemings came to know the wide array of copper cookware that was essential for the preparation of meals in the French manner: turbotières (lozenge-shape pans for cooking fish), braising pans, roasting pans, boilers, molds, and more. Costlier than cast iron, but better able to conduct heat, the copper cookware was an integral part of the culinary equation that produced the fine dishes to be served on Jefferson’s cornflower-sprigged blue-painted china, newly acquired from the royal porcelain factories.

Hemings’s work under the tutelage of Monsieur Combeaux was only the beginning of his Parisian apprenticeship. He was also sent for periodic training sessions with a variety of the city’s notable chefs, including a pastry chef and a cook in the house hold of the prince de Condé. His Virginia repertoire of simple country fare was expanded with the addition of dishes made with à la mode ingredients like crawfish, truffles, and the newly adopted potato, all washed down or even seasoned with champagne and