Hey, Proof listeners, it's Jack Bishop.
You know that here at America's Test Kitchen, we're all about giving home bakers the tools they need to bake like pros.
And I'm not just talking about stand mixers or baking sheets.
I'm talking about the ingredient central to so many of our favorite baked goods, butter.
Bluegra is a European-style butter with 82% butterfat.
That means less water and more butterfat, which translates into tender pie dough, flaky pastries and luscious buttercreams.
Plugra butter is also slow churned, which gives it a creamier texture that blends effortlessly into your dough.
And Plugra butter was developed by chefs for chefs, meaning home bakers like us get professional quality results in our own kitchens.
Whether you're rolling out pie dough for that holiday party or baking up pastries on a Saturday morning, consider Plugra Premium European Style Butter.
Last time on Proof, just before the eruption of the French Revolution, Thomas Jefferson and his enslaved chef James Hemmings were on a ship back to America.
For five years Hemmings had trained under the finest chefs in the world in Paris, was paid for his labor and cooked for the French elite amid the backdrop of a bubbling revolution against them.
He was such an anomaly.
The food that he prepared made Jefferson famous.
Paris had abolished slavery and Hemings could have declared his own freedom on French soil, but he didn't, leading us to believe that Jefferson may have floated Hemings the possibility of his freedom should he return to America.
Jefferson was a silver tongue.
I think that he believed Jefferson's lies.
In 1789, Hemmings returned to Virginia and to Jefferson's kitchen, still enslaved.
Here, he would shape a culinary legacy that would transform American cuisine.
Still, he wanted the freedom he'd tasted in France.
Thomas Jefferson held the power to grant him freedom, but freedom didn't necessarily guarantee safety.
Today on Proof from America's Test Kitchen, part two of the James Hemmings story The Transfer of Knowledge.
I'm Jack Bishop.
Stay tuned.
Upgrade your laundry routine with a durable and reliable Maytag laundry pair at Lowe's.
Like the new Maytag washer and dryer with performance-enhanced stain-fighting power designed to cut through serious dirt and grime.
And what's great is this laundry pair is in stock and ready for delivery when you need it the most.
Don't miss out.
Shop Maytag in-store or online today at Lowe's.
At IKEA, your dreams can come true.
Well, maybe not the ones where you're being chased by a monster.
We're talking about kitchen dreams.
And there are IKEA products and solutions for all of them, whether it's a whole new kitchen, a statement glassware set or just new cutlery.
If you've got big dreams or small dreams in any size of budget, IKEA can help you bring them to life.
Visit IKEA.us slash Dream Kitchen to learn more.
Dream the possibilities.
Imagine fast hydration.
Combined with balanced energy.
Perfectly flavored with zero artificial sweeteners.
Introducing Liquid IV's new energy multiplier sugar-free.
Unlike other energy drinks you know the ones that make you feel like you're glitching it's made with natural caffeine and electrolytes.
So you get the boost without the burnout.
Liquid IV's new energy multiplier sugar-free hydrating energy.
Tap the banner to learn more.
Reporter Otis Gray has the story.
Listeners, just a quick warning that there's mention of some violent themes in this episode.
Listener discretion is advised.
So much of James Hemming's life is silent.
Moments unrecorded, stories left untold.
So, to trace him, we follow fragments that survive and lean on the imaginations of people who've dedicated a significant amount of their lives piecing together what we know about him.
Co-founder of the James Hemming Society, Chef Ashbel McElveen, is one of those people.
When he came back to the States, he was the first American trained as a chef.
Sorry for interrupting.
No, no, it's just fine.
We're still at Jefferson Medical Center in Pennsylvania in a hospital room where Chef McElveen is getting some tests done.
I don't think I've ever done an interview where someone's getting their blood drawn.
Sorry.
Despite the challenges with his health, Chef McElveen is determined to give voice to James Hemmings' story and to tell the world about Hemmings' contributions to the American culinary canon.
When McElveen talks about Hemmings, his story inevitably emulsifies into McElveen's own.
In a lot of ways, the two men lived parallel lives, centuries apart.
Both trained as chefs, both cooked in Paris, both carried the flavors of the South with them.
And the more McElveen researched Hennings, the more he realized the food he grew up cooking and how he learned were echoes of an enduring legacy.
I remember my great-aunt Laura, who was a famous cook.
And I was one of her favorites when she'd come and spend three months at our house.
And I remember her making mushroom stew.
She was talking and I was just hanging on everywhere.
And as much as she loved me, she said the sharpest thing to me.
She said, stop looking in my mouth.
Look at what I'm doing.
Believe your eyes, not your ears.
Beat that cake 80 times.
Not 85, beat it 80 times and that's the best that's gonna come out.
And the butter gotta be melted a certain way.
It's gotta cream it with the sugar a certain way.
That stuff wasn't written down in cookbook.
You stood there and you learned it.
That's transfer of knowledge.
In November 1789, James Hemmings and his sister Sally landed back in Virginia still the property of Thomas Jefferson, the man who had so famously proclaimed that all men are created equal.
They arrived back at Jefferson's Monticello estate a couple days before Christmas.
James would have seen his family for the first time in five years.
Maybe he shows off his fluent French to his mother.
Maybe his little brother Peter tries on the velvet waistcoat James bought with his own money on the streets of Paris.
Maybe it was bittersweet, but it was short-lived.
Jefferson reluctantly accepts a position as Secretary of State.
So that March, he and Hemmings pack into carriages and head to the temporary capital of the New Republic, New York City.
In 1790, it was like a city on the make.
This is Tanya Hopkins author, culinary historian and co-founder of the James Hemmings Society with Chef McElveen.
James might have felt like a whiplash coming from the Paris salons and the French kitchens.
And New York was a little different.
Quality level was a little, you know, wasn't quite the same as Paris.
1790 Manhattan was gritty.
It was bustling.
Canal Street was unpaved.
Pigs wandered the streets.
The street vendors, they would hawk pies and cider and corn and...
Oysters and the air would have been salty from the harbor and the tar from the shipyards.
There were just over 30000 people in New York at the time, and about a third of them were enslaved Black residents.
He would have been confronted again with the stark limits and degradations of the slavery that existed around him.
Thomas Jefferson rents an apartment near Wall Street where the first tremors of a financial center are stirring.
It's in this apartment that James Hemming sets up his first kitchen with imported French pots and pans and begins his legacy as America's culinary founding father.
James made the most important dinner in American history.
The dinner that helped to determine the fate of this fledgling nation.
June 20th, 1790.
Jefferson invites James Madison and Alexander Hamilton over for dinner.
The two men are in an existential battle to negotiate how the nation pays for its war debts and notably, They're not agreeing on where the capital should be.
It's the dinner that is immortalized by the song, The Room Where It Happened, in Hamilton.
In the musical.
This meeting is a backroom deal where some of the most powerful men in the country face off.
Oh, but decisions are happening over dinner.
Jefferson, as usual, is the anxious diplomat setting it all up.
Well, I arranged the meeting.
I arranged the menu, the venue, the seating.
We don't have a surviving menu from that dinner.
But chefs and historians like Hopkins have imagined it.
Hemmings preparing a multi-course feast.
Jefferson pairing each dish with wines he'd brought back from France.
Plied with fine wine, extraordinary food and maybe a Madeira with puff pastry and ice cream for dessert.
Hamilton and Madison struck a deal.
The capital of the country would move south to what is now Washington, D.C.
This is known as the Compromise of 1790.
So this comes out of this amazing dinner that James makes.
The song could be the anthem for james hemming's career.
Again and again he was the one setting jefferson's table, while history was decided just beyond the kitchen door.
That year in 1790, a lot happens.
George washington delivers the first state of the union.
The Supreme Court convenes for the first time.
The nation's population is counted.
There's just under 4 million people, which meant nearly one in six people were enslaved.
When Jefferson moves to Philadelphia later that year, Hemings comes too.
Jefferson's table draws the most powerful figures in the country george washington, benjamin franklin, john adams, aaron burr.
They negotiated likely, over meringues and truffle stuffed capons, chestnuts with virginia ham, veal roasted with stone fruits, maybe turbot slowly poached in milk and saffron.
According to hopkins and other historians, it was likely during this time that the founding fathers all indulged in the dishes that would become iconic to their nation, like macaroni and cheese, ice cream, french fries, creme brulee, meringues and whipped cream.
Even in the musical, despite lin-manuel miranda's meticulous research, sally hemmings gets a passing mention, but james hemmings does not.
That's the silence surrounding his name and, from the next three years, the very same silence he would cook from.
It's now 1793.
Hemmings and jefferson are still in philadelphia.
In France, King Louis XVI has just lost his head to the guillotine, and many of the aristocrats Hemings cooked for are fleeing the country.
In Philadelphia, yellow fever rips through the city, killing thousands.
Politicians and elites scatter, while free black residents stay behind to tend to the sick.
That same year, Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act, which made it a crime to help anyone seeking freedom.
Through it all.
Heming stands just beyond the dining room door, preparing elegant meals for the men who speak endlessly of liberty, while Jefferson himself keeps hundreds enslaved, holding in his hands the power to free them but choosing not to.
You have to realize you are enslaved by the person who penned the freaking Declaration of Independence.
From everything we can glean, James Hemmings was sharp and he advocated for himself.
In France.
He apprenticed under leading chefs and caterers, and even used his own wages to hire a tutor in order to master French.
Historians like Tonya Hopkins argue that none of this would have happened if Hemmings hadn't been advocating for himself to Jefferson, directly and successfully.
So within that unequal power dynamic, Hemmings showed that he could leverage his worth And at times maybe get what he wanted.
You're listening to all this rhetoric about freedom and this and that.
Why would you not believe that it also could apply to you as well?
In Paris, Hemings could have declared himself free.
He didn't.
We don't know exactly why, but we do know that after years of cooking Jefferson's statecraft into being, Hemmings began pressing for his freedom outright.
Jefferson had no intention of doing that.
Chef McElveen and Tanya Hopkins both believe that Jefferson would have had little to no incentive to release his dazzling, professionally trained, unpaid French chef.
And Hopkins believes Jefferson maybe felt like he was entitled to Hemmings' skills.
Like, I invested in you.
I spent a lot of money having you become who and what you are.
And a slave person like James was like a Rolls Royce.
Why haven't you give up your Rolls Royce?
It was real well.
But at some point, Jefferson does capitulate.
We don't know why, but he does it on one condition.
I need to get some return on my investment.
And here's how we're going to do that.
After the break, Jefferson presents Hemings with a deal.
And now, back to our story.
Thomas Jefferson's term as Secretary of State is over, and he's about to retire back home in Monticello.
But before he does, he writes an agreement with his servant as a signed witness, having been at great expense and having James Hemings taught the art of cookery.
If Hemings returns with him to Monticello and trains someone of Jefferson's choosing, as I shall place under him for that purpose to be a good cook, he shall be thereupon made free and I will thereupon execute all proper instruments to make him free.
Jefferson wrote that if Hemings passed along his skills he learned in France, he'd have his freedom.
And the person Jefferson chose... He must teach his brother Peter everything he learned in Paris.
We have no idea how Hemings felt about the terms of this deal that he made with Jefferson about his own freedom.
James decides, yeah, hey, it's a good deal.
I'm back at Monticello, Jefferson's estate, getting a tour of the kitchens with Dr. Lenny Sorensen.
I'm a food historian.
I have lectured on the lives of enslaved domestic workers, on food ways, on garden ways, on life in the 18th and early 19th century.
Sorensen used to work here as a research historian at Monticello, focusing on the perspective and lives of the enslaved.
Few people know more about the hemmings family than she does.
Wow, this is it.
Yeah oh, my god, the stove is incredible.
Yeah, that's just kind of like having a wolf range, you know.
The kitchen sits tucked beneath the house, its windows and doors opening to the gardens and the blue ridge mountains beyond.
Sunlight pours in.
The walls are whitewashed.
A large prep table anchors the room, with a brick oven at the back and a vast hearth once used for roasting.
Along one wall runs a seven-hole brick stove, an innovation that Jefferson brought back from France.
With these beautiful pots that all are adapted to being used with that.
Sorensen helped research and restore these kitchens and even lit the first fire in the rebuilt hearth.
And in this system, you can cook some really nice food.
And in the back corner of the room, looming, is a mighty grandfather clock.
The clock was very important.
This kitchen was built a little after Hemmings' time.
When Hemmings returned in 1793, he worked in a smaller room nearby, which in 1940 was buried under a tourist bathroom.
In 2018, there were efforts to uncover it.
And the setup in that original kitchen is similar to the one we're standing in now.
A roaring hearth, copper pots from Europe, this long, innovative stove.
Hemmings cooked for the household and began teaching cooking techniques to his brother, Peter.
Knowledge he's trading for his freedom.
And so they had to start early.
Is that the breakfast bell?
Well, it's the eight o'clock bell.
By the time this grandfather clock went off, the day's cooking was already well underway.
According to Sorensen and other historians at Monticello, this kitchen never slept.
It was a full-scale operation, running from dawn till long past dusk.
And standing here, it's really easy to imagine the chaos that James and Peter were working in.
The bustle.
The smoke.
The smell of firewood popping and chopping and cutting and chatter and conversation.
Shovels shoveling.
You have to keep these stew stoves loaded with coals.
The brothers might have been roasting and grinding coffee beans, slicing cured ham for breakfast.
There'd be freshly picked berries from just outside, gently simmering to make jams and jellies.
The smell of yeast from the breads constantly rising in cloth baskets around the room.
The hearth, an eternal flame Peter might stoke in the humid Virginia summer.
Hotter than hell in here.
Monticello could host dozens of guests at a time.
Family workers, visiting dignitaries, with their entire entourages and the kitchen, produced three meals a day for all of them.
Every day, 365.
With Hemmings in charge.
This was one of the finest culinary spaces in the country, run by one of the most skilled chefs alive and his own brigade of cooks at the ready.
They are professionals.
Everybody that works in this kitchen can be considered a professional.
There was Ursula Granger, a veteran of Monticello's kitchens, whose skills in cooking and cider making had made her indispensable for decades.
And then there were the kids, like Frances Hearn and Edith Fawcett, barely teenagers in 1793.
And Hemings was their mentor.
Guiding other workers as they butcher chickens, bring in vegetables, take out slobs, bring in water.
Watching James supervise Peter.
They might have seen James teaching Peter cooking syrup just to the point of caramelization, whisking yolks into a shimmering sauce.
This was a classroom and a business, just like kitchens are today.
Every mistake a lesson, the sauce too thin, the crust too tough, the fire too hot.
Gardeners might have paused in the doorway watching the brothers fold their baskets of figs or peaches into delicate pastries.
Everyone working, everyone watching, and they have one goal, which is to please the man who owns this house, and they know that the man that owns this house is one of the most famous people in the country.
At the center were the brothers side by side, day in and day out, likely feeling that same raw closeness you still find in busy kitchens today, forged by heat pressure and urgency.
Teaching peter might have offered peter protection skills that could keep him from being sold, But the condition of that closeness was separation.
Like so many formerly enslaved people, James's freedom would mean leaving Peter and his family behind.
Before Hemings returned from France, most American cooking was done over an open hearth.
But the new seven-hole stove at Monticello gave the Hemings brothers precision heat.
They could control to simmer, braise and layer flavors in totally new ways.
Virginia's plantation kitchens were already considered the best in the country.
And under Hemmings's command, they kept evolving.
A new cuisine was taking hold here.
French finesse meeting Virginia tradition.
Dishes of meat tend to become smaller in terms of their presentation.
Hearty dishes were refined with complex stocks and herbs.
A broader use of vegetables and sauces incorporated in them.
Probably the most famous book in early Southern cooking is The Virginia Housewife, written in 1824 by Jefferson's cousin Mary Randolph.
This book is seen as the guide to early American cooking, and historians argue it should probably be called The Monticello Housewife because of how much it drew from the kitchen Hemings established here.
Within its pages are rich ragus, delicate cream sauces, the first American recipe for ice cream and famously What Mary Randolph would have called macaroni or macaroni pie.
The ancestor of the mac and cheese we know today, the pasta cooked in milk.
It imbues the pasta with a really luscious, creamy flavor.
She's then just literally layering it with cheese and then it's baked.
Sorenson actually does cooking demonstrations in this kitchen, making macaroni from a recipe written in jefferson's hand, almost certainly dictated to him by james hemmings.
I always add an extra big splash of cream because i really like cream.
It's just gorgeous.
Jefferson traveled less during his retirement, but in his letters and papers he remained deeply engaged in politics.
He continued to host visitors, correspond with leaders, thinkers and diplomats, and play a role in public affairs for Monticello.
The Hemings brothers cooked for all these influential guests who came through.
And as the meals grew more elaborate, so did Jefferson's reputation.
The reputation he still has today, as a man of taste, refinement, and elegance.
You know what I mean?
Jefferson didn't come in here except to wind that clock.
By 1796, James has been teaching his brother Peter for around two years.
We don't know how James felt about all this, the knowledge he had being the thing that could set him free and that same knowledge being the thing that ensures his own brother's captivity.
We just don't know enough about the family dynamics.
There's competitive brothers.
There's companionable brothers.
It was hard work.
It was all day.
And at the very least, we can say that.
In the agreement of freedom Jefferson drafted three years earlier, the only condition was that Hemings trained someone to be a quote good cook.
No time frame, no specifics, just language, vague enough to ensure the bargain would be fulfilled only when Jefferson said so.
But after those years of training, James must have passed along everything he knew.
Peter learned it.
Jefferson was satisfied.
The transfer of knowledge was complete.
And that year, in February of 1796, Jefferson puts pen to paper.
I, Thomas Jefferson of Monticello, aforesaid, do emancipate, manumit, and make free James Hemmings.
He shall be free and of free condition and discharged of all duties and claims of servitude whatsoever and shall have all the rights and privileges of a freed man.
After decades of idealistic writings on freedom, Thomas Jefferson finally granted it to James Hemmings.
And just like that, James left.
In 1796, James Hemmings leaves Monticello.
He walks away from the red clay paths of his childhood from the kitchen where he forged his craft.
He walks away from his mother, from his brother Peter, from his sister Sally, now 23, still bound to Jefferson, and from her infant daughter Harriet, a child born by her enslaver.
We can only imagine what leaving his family there could have felt like.
Tonya Hopkins has thought about this.
So this is a weird dipstick in time where he had a very unique situation.
He had a degree of agency and resources on behalf of American royalty.
Hopkins says Hemings may have been in captivity at Monticello but within that captivity of Thomas Jefferson Hemings had some power and status.
And now he was on his own.
And this type of freedom may have been terrifying.
I mean, Harriet Tubman had to pull guns on people.
It would happen on every trip.
They would get so far along and get hungry and cold and rained on and terrified.
And somebody's bright idea was always, every single time, let's just go back.
They started to rationalize the comforts of the plantation.
She literally had to be like, keep moving.
She never had to kill anybody.
She never shot anybody.
But there's a saying that she says this whole idea of the mental shackles never really being lifted.
Hemings knew that leaving Monticello meant entering a country hostile to his existence.
He was free, and at any point, your freedom could be taken from you.
The Fugitive Slave Act was passed in 1793.
It allowed enslavers to drag free black people off the street on suspicion alone, while kidnapping gangs sold them back into bondage without discretion.
Mobs attacked black neighborhoods on any pretext.
And in this world, no one cared that James Hemings was the first French-trained chef in America, Thomas Jefferson's culinary superpower or the man who had cooked for the founding fathers.
He was just another black man.
Period.
Those were the metrics.
There weren't any nuances at all.
And, you know, you could lose your life very quickly.
So as highly as I think of James and his accomplishments and his brilliance and his talents, you know, I can only imagine maybe he had a harsh reality check of like oh shit.
I'm just out here without a net.
Next time on the final episode, James Hemmings makes a name for himself in a hostile world.
I don't think Jefferson ever intended it to be entirely untethered freedom.
He gets an offer from the White House.
He defied the most influential man in his universe.
And he meets his mysterious end.
I'm not saying Jefferson put a hit on him, but what I'm saying is, where is his body?
You'll probably never find his grave.
There's a lot of loose ends.
I believe he was murdered.
Tune in next week for the final episode of our James Hemmings trilogy.
If you like Proof, be sure to subscribe wherever you listen so you can get new episodes as soon as they drop.
And while you're there, why not leave us a rating or write us a review?
It really helps other people find the show.
I'm Yumi Araki, the managing producer.
I'm executive producer Caitlin Kelleher.
I'm senior producer Alex Curran-Cardarelli.
I'm associate producer Angelica Quintanilla.
I'm associate producer Louise Curran-Kensler.
And I'm Kyla Forman-Andrade, the TV and podcast intern.
Audio services are provided by Ultraviolet Audio and sound design by Matt Boynton.
Brian Campbell of Signal Sounds composed our theme music, additional music by Kyle Forrester and Jordan Pearson and by Lin-Manuel Miranda from the musical Hamilton.
And Margolis is our director of post-production, and our director of production is Diane Knox.
Fact-checking and additional research by Sarah D. Collins.
Special thanks to the Maryland State Archives, the Baltimore City Archives, Gail Jessup White, Annette Gordon-Reed, Damon Lee Fowler, the team at Monticello, David and Tanya Thomas, the late Thomas, Jade Crowell, Grace McNally, Avery Thompson, and a huge thanks to Morgan Givens for his sharp editorial assist on this series.
Nina Gianelli is the Senior Vice President of Television, Video, and Podcasts.
An Airwave Media Podcast.
