An army marches on its stomach.
—attributed to Napoleon Bonaparte
On Christmas night of 1777, General George Washington huddled over a wavering candle in a small stone house in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania. He was cold and hungry. As his officers sipped water and grumbled about the lack of alcohol, the general spooned a slurry of mutton, cabbage, and potatoes into his tender mouth. A battered spoon was his only eating implement. In the chaotic retreat from the well-fed, well-armed redcoats at the Battle of Brandywine in September, the general had lost his treasured camp chest, a handsome wooden box outfitted with a cookstove, pots, platters, plates, bottles, glasses, and a full set of silverware.
To add injury to insult, he found eating painful. Washington was forty-five years old and had lost all but one of his teeth, a bicuspid, the consequence of cracking walnuts in his mouth as a boy, he said, but also due to genetics, poor dental hygiene, and the teeth-grinding stress of war. To compensate, he wore a set of serious dentures. Fashioned from bits of lead and steel with gold springs, and a base of hippopotamus tusk inlaid with cow and human teeth (nine of which he bought from slaves), they seem more of a torture device than an aid to mastication. The apparatus rubbed Washington’s gums sore and pushed his lower lip out, which gave him a hissing lisp. He avoided giving long speeches and preferred soft foods, such as pickled tripe. The ivory dentures were stained brown by the dark Madeira wine he favored, which led to the false assumption that Washington’s choppers were made of wood. When people stared at his mouth, the hero of the American Revolution grew self-conscious and kept his lips clamped shut.
Valley Forge was a rolling upland twenty miles, or a day’s horseback ride, from British-occupied Philadelphia. On paper, it appeared to be an excellent strategic winter redoubt—protected by high ridges, surrounded by deep woods, with plenty of freshwater—that blocked the redcoats from piercing the American heartland. Though not as snowy and cold as some years, in the winter of 1777 Valley Forge was an icebound cul-de-sac, “a dreary kind of place,” Washington confided to his diary. And it lacked one essential: food.
When Washington’s fourteen thousand men, five hundred women and children, and untold numbers of slaves and pack animals arrived in the snowy Pennsylvania valley, it was as if a teeming, grimy city had suddenly been dropped onto the pristine landscape. The Continental army was a grand name for the rough collection of farmers, shopkeepers, sailors, and other nonprofessional fighters who had volunteered from the thirteen colonies and Europe. Nearly every one of them was shivering, disease-ridden, and slowly starving to death.
The quartermaster reported that he had just twenty-five barrels of flour and a bit of salt pork left. Soldiers went for days without food or water and subsisted on whatever they could scrounge—mushrooms, crab apples, tubers, a bit of rice flavored with a tablespoon of vinegar. They hunted, fished, and foraged as much as possible, but quickly depleted the valley’s larder. When one volunteer found half of a small pumpkin on the ground, he “devoured it with as keen an appetite as I should a pie,” he wrote. When the women made soup, it was “full of burnt leaves and dirt, sickish enough to make a Hector spew,” a visitor wrote. For much of that winter the troops subsisted on “fire cakes”—patties of flour and water with a dash of salt, if they could find it, formed into sticky cakes, smeared over stones, and baked in glowing embers. The result was a dense, soot-blackened biscuit that looked like a hockey puck and tasted like oyster crackers mixed with ash.
Learning of the Continental army’s plight, the governor of Connecticut sent three hundred head of cattle to Valley Forge. The troops slaughtered the bovines and ravenously consumed every bit of sinew, fat, and gristle in five days of nonstop consumption. Still, they remained famished.
To add to their misery, many soldiers lacked blankets or warm clothes and were dressed in rags or thin shirts. Washington calculated that a third of them had no shoes, and those who did often had their toes sticking out, leaving bloody streaks in the snow. Some men were “literally naked,” General Steuben noted. While the general’s honor guard lived in rudimentary wooden huts with small fireplaces, most of the camp’s tenants wintered in canvas tents that flapped in the sharp wind. Some suffered frostbite; others had legs or feet amputated. Open latrines and decaying horse carcasses emitted a putrid stench and incubated bacteria. Thirty percent of the army suffered pneumonia, typhus, scurvy, dysentery, and other diseases. The revolutionaries grew so weak they could barely engage the redcoats flitting through the woods nearby.
By the end of the winter of 1777, two thousand men had perished at Valley Forge. Morale was dissolving. Three hundred officers quit, convinced the revolution was lost. Public support for the uprising waned. The Pennsylvania legislature had fled Philadelphia to hole up in Lancaster. Imploring the Continental Congress for resources, Washington wrote that without food his men would “starve, dissolve, or disperse”—adding ominously that “three or four days [of] bad weather would prove our destruction.”
“Happily, the real condition of [the Continental army] was not well understood” by the British, noted John Marshall, a future chief justice. “The characteristic attention of [Washington] to the lives and comfort of his troops saved” the American experiment.
The general took drastic steps to maintain discipline and morale—flogging soldiers caught stealing food, forbidding card games and gambling, and staging competitions for the best hut design. Reviewing his troops, he appeared resolute and promised that spring would bring new supplies and victory. But in private he despaired. Pacing the crepuscular encampment at night, Washington could hear the men cursing his name and swearing, “No bread, no soldier!”
George Washington could be a hard, fierce man. He stood six feet two inches tall (at a time when the average height was five feet seven inches) and was a lithe horseman and dancer equipped with a sharp intelligence and a ramrod will. A keen hunter at home in Virginia, he once chased a single fox across fields, through woods, and over hills for seven grueling hours until he finally caught and killed the exhausted creature; on another day, he killed five Mallards and five bald eagles. Such unrelenting focus made him an excellent military commander who forged a nation under extreme conditions. But in the winter of 1777 the hunter had become the quarry.
As Washington slurped his stew on Christmas night, he knew his stand at Valley Forge could prove a, or perhaps the, decisive moment in the revolution, one that would seal the fate of the would-be democracy.
Not long after that moment of reckoning he made a curious discovery. Contrary to everything the general had been told, there was plenty of meat, grain, and vegetables nearby. But it was hidden. Local farmers and shopkeepers had kept their stores from the rebels and sold them to the redcoats instead. King George III paid better than Washington did, in pounds sterling, a far more robust note than the Continental currency. Enraged, Washington declared that the profiteers’ “avarice and thirst for gain must plunge everything…in one common ruin.”
He sent a thousand men out to snatch cattle, pigs, horses, sheep, poultry, and grain stores, to sabotage mills—to “forage the country naked!,” in the words of General Nathanael Greene—and selectively punished a few of the worst offenders in public, as a warning. It had the desired effect. Soon, the army’s storehouses were filled with bushels of potatoes, parsnips, carrots, onions, and cabbage, along with nineteen dozen eggs, fifty pounds of butter, thirty-eight pounds of veal, twenty-eight chickens, six bushels of apples, and two barrels of beer. To the starving troops it was a nearly unimaginable bounty.
As their strength returned in the spring, the general grew philosophical about his neighbors’ cupidity. “Instead of being blinded by political fervor, Washington recognized that fallible human beings couldn’t always live up to the high standards he set for them,” notes the historian Ron Chernow. “He believed that many Americans had expected a speedy end to the conflict and, when the first flush of patriotism faded, were governed by self-interest.”
Today Valley Forge is an undulating green National Historical Park that spreads over thirty-five hundred acres surrounded by banal tract housing, big-box malls, and chain restaurants. To get there, you drive west from Philadelphia on I-76, a traffic-choked expressway that follows the contours of the Schuylkill River, drop down to North Gulph Road, past the beige Valley Forge Casino, then take a left on a winding road that eventually deposits you at stop 5 on the Encampment Tour trail in Valley Forge Park.
There, nestled in a grassy bowl, is the stout stone house with pale yellow shutters that served as Washington’s headquarters for six months, from December 1777 to June 1778. Built by Isaac Potts, a Quaker who ran a gristmill, the humble structure served as Washington’s Pentagon, Situation Room, bunkhouse, and mess hall. It was the place where he met with key allies—the French Marquis de Lafayette, the Prussian General Steuben, Quartermaster Nathanael Greene—to plot strategy and tactics.
The house is built around the kitchen, an open rectangular room with a wide fireplace that contains a small bread oven and a metal crane from which iron pots hung over the fire. Nearby stands a worktable with a few bowls, and a tall wooden cabinet holding plates and crockery. In that space Washington’s slave cooks, Hannah and Isaac, stretched meager rations to feed up to thirty people three times a day. The house grew so crowded that Washington built a wooden dining room on the back side. Every night, the general, his wife, Martha, and about twenty-five others crammed into the stone house to sleep. As I walked through it, I imagined Washington and his commanders nestled in the short beds on the second and third floors while everyone else was packed together on the ground floor’s hardwood like so many snoring sardines.
In the spring of 1778, warm fragrant breezes blew the winter chill out of the valley. When the reinvigorated Continental army spied an early run of shad surging up the Schuylkill, they waded into the river to attack the flashing shoals with shovels, pitchforks, buckets, and tree branches, capturing as many as possible for a feast. It seemed a providential sign that their fortunes were taking a turn for the better.
On May 6, Washington and fifteen hundred men and women sat at tables laden with pickled cucumber and cabbage, roast chicken, veal pie, planked shad, parsnips, potato pie, carrot pudding and apples in crust, watercress salad, and plates of nuts. (Washington never kicked his obsession for black walnuts and hazelnuts.) The general granted each soldier a gill, or quarter pint, of rum or whiskey. He extolled their “uncomplaining patience during the scarcity of provisions” and said they had “won the admiration of the world, the love of their country, and the gratitude of posterity!”
The party lasted until five o’clock, when Washington consented to play rounders (also called wickets), an early version of baseball, with the troops. As he rode away that evening, the soldiers twirled their hats in the air, cheering, “Long live George Washington!” By which they meant: long live the United States of America.
We humans are social creatures, and for as long as we have gathered, food has played a political role. In ancient Rome and Greece, meals were used to create and reinforce personal, regional, and national identities. They were also harbingers of change: the wretched excesses of imperial Roman banquets foretold the collapse of the empire. In early America, settlers combined traditional European recipes with indigenous foods to produce a new kind of cuisine that ultimately helped forge a national identity and spur their uprising: “One might say that the whole revolutionary enterprise unfolded in a series of conversations…taking place at dinner tables,” wrote the historian Catherine Allgor.
The economics of food, most notably the British taxation of tea, provoked the Boston Tea Party in 1773, the spark that lit the revolutionary fuse. Food was a potential weapon: in June 1776, Americans sympathetic to the British planned to assassinate Washington by poisoning a dish of his favorite Long Island peas; alerted, the general had the plotters arrested, and hanged one of them “as a warning.” Meals were often an integral part of funereal mourning during the war and, of course, victory celebrations.
In September 1783, Great Britain signed the Treaty of Paris, which officially brought the American Revolution to an end. George Washington’s scruffy volunteers had sent the most powerful military force in the world packing. With that, Americans laughed, danced, cheered, and sang in a full-throated, cathartic release. The unaccustomed plenitude of food and drink represented a victory in its own right and renewed a sense of hope, prosperity, and grace in daily life.
Even the stoic general was not immune to the emotion of the moment. Exhausted and relieved, Washington lodged at Fraunces Tavern, a four-story brick building that still stands at the corner of Broad and Pearl Streets in lower Manhattan. The proprietor, Samuel Fraunces, was a mixed-race West Indian nicknamed Black Sam. An instinctual host with a flair for the dramatic, Fraunces wore silk knee britches and white ruffled shirts and carefully powdered his black hair. He ensured the footmen provided a “bountiful and elegant” table, Washington wrote. “Besides being an excellent cook, he knew how to provide genteel dinners. He gave aid in dressing them, prepared the dessert, made the cakes and did everything appreciatively.”
In December 1783, Washington resigned his commission as commander in chief and eagerly returned to Mount Vernon, his sprawling plantation in Virginia. The house and its farms were a personal obsession, a constant work in progress, the place that defined him. But he had visited only once in the past eight years. With tears streaming down his cheeks, the general bade his officers farewell over a splendid dinner at Fraunces Tavern with a menu of more than twenty dishes ranging from crab claws with dill and mustard sauce washed down with Fish House punch, to sorrel soup with sippets (toast), poached striped bass with white wine, beef and kidney pie, roast lamb, smoked country ham, rice ragoo, green beans, watermelon pickles, pear honey, Tipsy Squire tansy pie, whiskey nut balls, chocolate truffles, tobacco, coffee, and many glasses of port.
Admiring his voluntary abdication of power at the height of his success, Americans compared Washington to Cincinnatus—the Roman farmer who was called to war, given absolute power, triumphed in battle, then voluntarily retired to his farm—as a paragon of civic virtue. King George III deemed his foe “the greatest character of the age.”
The best glimpse into George Washington’s mind and palate can be found at Mount Vernon, near present-day Alexandria, Virginia. The plantation was originally built by his great-grandfather in 1674, and through a series of land purchases, Washington built a 7,600 acre property. Like other Virginia planters, he used a hundred slaves to grow tobacco, which he traded for food, wine, furniture, and farm equipment. After a poor crop left him in debt, Washington diversified into wheat, corn, and many other plants. He also bred horses and kept a thousand head of sheep, cows, and pigs, brewed beer, and became a successful whiskey distiller. Which is one way to say that the Father of Our Country was intimately familiar with the production, sale, and consumption of food and drink.
The main house at Mount Vernon is a tall, handsome structure with red roofs, colonnades, outbuildings, and extensive grounds situated on a bluff overlooking the Potomac River. As was common, the kitchen was housed in its own building, set apart from the main house as a precaution against fire and to mitigate the heat and smell of the hearth; it also physically segregated white owners from their Black slaves. In 1775, Washington expanded the kitchen to include three rooms on the first floor: a larder to hang meats and store and cool food; a scullery to prepare food and wash dishes; and a central workroom, with a brick-lined fireplace equipped with five long spits for roasting, a collection of skillets, pots, and pans, a toaster, pewter ice cream pots, and the like. The cook slept in a loft on the second floor.
The day at Mount Vernon began at five in the morning, when Washington rose to read and correspond. At seven, a slave summoned the household by ringing “the great bell” for a breakfast of tea, coffee, or hot chocolate and a plate of sliced ham or tongue with bread and butter.
One of Washington’s favorite things to eat was hoecakes—fried cornmeal patties—also known as johnnycakes, cornpone, spider bread, or bannock. Originally a Native American dish, hoecakes earned their name by being cooked on the blade of a hoe. They became popular with European immigrants and slaves, and the recipe spread from New England to the Deep South. (The poet Joel Barlow celebrated the dish in his 1793 poem “The Hasty Pudding.”) Washington might have been fond of hoecakes because they were soft on his gums, and he especially enjoyed them “swimming in butter and honey.” And who wouldn’t?
The main meal of the day was dinner, a late lunch served at the stroke of three in the afternoon. Washington was a stickler for propriety and would sternly rebuke those who were ill-dressed or, especially, late to the table. “The cook is governed by the clock and not by the company,” he’d say. His step-grandson, George Washington Parke Custis, recalled, “Precisely at a quarter before three, the industrious farmer returned, dressed, and dined at three o’clock. At this meal he ate heartily, but was not particular in his diet, with the exception of fish [especially baked shad or cod], of which he was excessively fond, partook sparingly of dessert, drank a homemade beverage, and from four to five glasses of Madeira wine….[W]ith old-fashioned courtesy he drank to the health of every person present, and then gave his toast—his only toast—all our friends.”
Washington was not a big drinker, and when he did imbibe, he usually favored wine or beer over hard beverages. Like many in the Anglicized gentry, he liked to raise a glass to toast the health of his tablemates. Known as “healths,” these toasts revealed Washington’s dual nature.
During the revolution, the Marquis de Chastellux, the chief liaison between French and American forces, noted that after a camp dinner “apples and a great quantity of nuts were served, which General Washington usually continues eating for two hours, toasting and conversing all the time.” Later, a light evening supper was served, with more toasts of Madeira or Bordeaux wine. These healths made Chastellux uncomfortable. A diner would hold up his glass and address each person, even if there were twenty or thirty people at the table, intoning, “Sir, will you permit me to drink a glass of wine with you?” before drinking “to their health.” Like most Frenchmen and Puritan Americans, Chastellux considered the English custom “an absurd, and truly barbarous practice.” He recalled, “The actor in this ridiculous comedy is sometimes ready to die with thirst….The bottle is passed to you, and you must look your enemy in the face, for I can give no other name to the man who exercises such an empire over my will; you wait till he likewise has poured out his wine and taken his glass; you then drink mournfully with him.” Eventually, Chastellux discovered the secret to healths: “You have very small glasses, you pour out yourself the quantity of wine you choose…and the toast is only a sort of check in the conversation, to remind each individual that he forms part of the company.”
Though he had a politician’s knack for remembering names and faces, Washington was bad at small talk and could not land a joke to save himself. One day he mentioned how a gust of wind had swept the toupee off the head of a reverend and sent it spinning into the Potomac. His companions could not guess if he was being humorous or simply reporting an odd fact.
At home, Washington dressed well but simply and greeted his guests with a solemn bow but never a handshake. When Senator William Maclay visited Mount Vernon, he declared it “the most solemn dinner ever I sat at…scarce a word said until the [table] cloth was taken away. Then the president…with great formality drank to the health of every individual by name round the table. Everybody imitated him, charged glasses, and such a buzz of ‘health, sir,’ and ‘health, madam,’ and ‘thank-you, sir,’ and ‘thank-you, madam,’ never had I heard before.”
The Washingtons welcomed a near-constant stream of visitors to Mount Vernon and “entertained in a very handsome style,” a guest recalled. The general demurred, describing his mansion as “a well-restored tavern,” and saying, “My manner of living is plain, and I do not mean to be put out by it. A glass of wine and a bit of mutton are always welcome. Those who expect more will be disappointed.”
Despite his self-deprecation, Washington’s artfully composed table might feature a boiled pork leg at the head and a roasted goose at the foot; the first course could include roast beef, boiled beef, mutton chops, hominy cabbage, potatoes, pickles, fried tripe, and onions. With that done, three servants would clean “the cloth” and lay out a second course of mince pies, fruit tarts, and cheese. The general enjoyed a pint of beer and two or three small glasses of wine, which subtly lightened his mood.
Supper, a light evening meal, was offered at about six thirty. Custis recalled that Washington usually had nothing more than a cup of tea in the evening. He would sip it while leafing through newspapers and reading aloud “passages of peculiar interest, making remarks upon the same.” At nine o’clock, the general would retire to bed.
Washington loved the “domestic felicity” of Mount Vernon, but it proved short-lived. Though he did not actively pursue the presidency, he understood the value of socializing with constituents—at weddings and cockfights, in taverns, or at Quaker, Catholic, and Presbyterian services—and enjoyed the attention. “The chief part of my happiness,” he wrote in 1755, is “the esteem and notice the country has been pleased to honor me with.”
On April 30, 1789, George Washington was inaugurated in New York City as the Republic’s founding president. For months afterward, citizens praised him as “the Hero of the Revolution” at numerous high-spirited parties. On September 14, for instance, he was feted in Philadelphia by the Light Horses, a cavalry corps that had wintered at Valley Forge. That night, fifty-five “gentlemens” celebrated at City Tavern, the framers’ unofficial pub near Independence Hall, with lively music, dinner, and forty-five gallons of alcohol—including sixty bottles of claret, fifty-four bottles of Madeira, twenty-two bottles of porter, twelve bottles of beer, eight bottles of cider, and seven large bowls of punch. (The nine musicians imbibed an additional twenty-one bottles of wine.) The tab for the party came to 89 pounds, 4 shillings, and 2 pence—equivalent to about $15,400 in current dollars. Line items in the bill noted broken wineglasses, tumblers, and decanters, along with candles and cigars, though it is unlikely the levelheaded president was responsible for any of the shenanigans.
When the Washingtons moved to Manhattan, the nation’s temporary capital, they rented a mansion at 39 Broadway, near current-day Bowling Green. To prepare for official entertaining, they installed a staff of twenty, including seven slaves, and hired Samuel Fraunces as their steward.
The United States was raw, young, and vigorous at that point, but lacked standardized social customs. As a rising tide of friends, pols, curious citizens, and opportunists trooped to his door, Washington found himself overwhelmed and snappish, which left some of his visitors confused. This raised an aspect of nation building that people don’t generally consider: the role of table manners (rules of polite behavior and speech), etiquette (a broad code for social conduct), and protocols (approved behavior in governmental and diplomatic settings) in building social cohesion and a common identity. It is easy to dismiss these things as fussy leftovers from the past, but rules of social engagement are practical tools that help people of diverse backgrounds get along.
Some of our rawer citizens did not know how to use a fork, ate with their fingers, and spat at the table, for instance. Others, including President Washington, relied on ornate British norms that dated to the seventeenth century. As newly empowered revolutionaries, most Americans rejected these old-world strictures as antiegalitarian, but they didn’t have ready replacements—or, more precisely, they had a confusing mishmash of ideas about how to behave.
President Washington began the long, slow process of creating a more identifiably “American” set of social rules for the New World. One of the first things he did was to insist he be addressed as “Mr. President” rather than “His Highness the President” or “His Excellency,” as some die-hard Tories liked to do. When it came to his time and energy, the cabinet ruled that Washington would invite only government officials or people with important business to dinner and would host separate meetings with members of Congress, foreign dignitaries, and the public.
Every Tuesday afternoon, from three to four o’clock, the president held a levee—a political reception (the word derived from the French lever, “to rise,” or welcome visitors)—for ambassadors and “strangers of distinction.” At four o’clock every other Thursday, he hosted a congressional dinner, to which he invited an equal number of northern and southern legislators. And every Friday, Mrs. Washington hosted a public reception in her drawing room. These changes were not universally popular, but they created a new framework for social situations and helped to create a common identity for the nation.
In the meantime, chatelaines like Martha Washington (who also wore dentures, incidentally) transcribed their “receipts” (recipes) into books. The first cookbook printed in America was The Compleat Housewife, by E. Smith, in 1742. It consisted of basic instructions for roasting meats over the fire, making pottages (soups or stews) and ketchups (any number of combinations of vinegar, mushrooms or oysters, and spices), baking bread, and making marchpane (marzipan) and cakes. In 1747, Hannah Glasse published The Art of Cookery in England, which supplanted traditional dishes—such as meats with fruit, sugar, and spices—with new ones that included exotic spices such as Indian curry, turmeric, ginger, and black pepper and refined pastries, cakes, and ice creams.
Amelia Simmons, author of American Cookery in 1796, and Lydia Maria Child, author of The American Frugal Housewife of 1832, included distinctly American recipes for turkey with cranberry sauce, baked beans, chowders, soft gingerbreads, Indian pudding, and pumpkin pies. Mary Randolph’s 1824 magnum opus, The Virginia House-Wife, gives instructions for making barbecued shoat (young pig), fried chicken, okra, sweet potatoes, beaten biscuits, and “Dough Nuts,” along with Spanish dishes such as gazpacho, French dishes such as boeuf à la daube (beef stew), and no fewer than fourteen recipes using tomatoes—including tomato ketchup, tomato marmalade, and tomato soy. (Randolph was a cousin of Thomas Jefferson’s, and her book has continued to influence modern chefs, including James Beard and José Andrés.)
With no refrigeration or modern preservatives at hand, colonial cooks relied on fresh, flavorful ingredients, such as “new layd eggs,” thick cream, fresh chicken or trout, carrots and lettuces, apples, and honey from the comb. People experimented with whatever additives were at hand, including ambergris (a sperm whale secretion) or musk from the musk flower.
These are some of the exotic ingredients found in Martha Washington’s family cookbook. The original is a sheaf of 531 handwritten recipes, bound together in two sections, A Booke of Cookery and A Booke of Sweatmeats. (The original is kept at Mount Vernon, but its contents have been reprinted in numerous editions; they were annotated by the food historian Karen Hess in 1981 and are available in print or online.)
Each book opens in 1749—a year before eighteen-year-old Martha Dandridge married her first husband, the wealthy, thirty-eight-year-old plantation owner Daniel Custis (he died in 1757; Martha married George Washington two years later). They run through 1799, when Martha bequeathed the heirlooms to her granddaughter Nelly Custis. A Booke of Cookery begins with “How to stew a neck or Loyne of muton,” runs through “To boyle Pigeons,” “stew Sparrows,” “make Pullpeches,” “dress whittings codlings or haddocks,” “pease porrage of greene pease,” and “a dish of mushrumps,” and ends with sweets like “a whipt possit” and “pepper cakes yet will keep halfe a year.” A Booke of Sweatmeats explains ways to clarify sugar syrups, flies through two hundred recipes for fruit and flower preserves, and lands with ninety recipes for medicinal waters, spirits, and powders using herbs, spices, sugar, and treacles (“panacean electuaries”).
Though Mrs. Washington knew more about arranging menus and supervising the kitchen than most women of her class, and was especially proud of her smoked ham, she rarely, if ever, took to the stove. It is likely that she read recipes aloud to her illiterate slaves, but it was they who did the cooking.
Among the three hundred and seventeen men, women, and children the Washingtons owned, most of whom Martha brought to the marriage, none were as central to their lives as the head cook. One man in particular remains the object of fascination for his culinary skill and mysterious disappearance.
In December 1790, the Washingtons moved into the Robert Morris house, a rented mansion at Sixth and Market Streets in Philadelphia, America’s second temporary capital. The president used the move as an excuse to fire his cook, Rachel Lewis, whose “dirty figure” did not suit his vision for “the principal entertaining rooms of our new habitation.”
For unknown reasons Samuel Fraunces’s employment ended in 1789, and finding qualified, reliable staff for the Washingtons’ new home proved a challenge. The First Couple tried out a French chef and then a Baltimorean cook who could not bake a cake, a fatal flaw in the eyes of the First Lady, who prized baked goods, especially a Great Cake—a white edifice made with forty eggs, five pounds of flour, five pounds of fruit, four pounds of butter, four pounds of sugar, mace, nutmeg, wine, and brandy, and five and a half hours of baking—at Christmastime.
Eager to entertain, President Washington demanded that his slave cook Hercules be brought from Mount Vernon. A compact and dapper man, Hercules (a.k.a. Uncle Harkless) was born in Virginia around 1754, trained under Samuel Fraunces, and became an integral part of the Washington household in Philadelphia.
Fraunces and Lewis notwithstanding, Hercules was the nation’s first true First Cook, a job now titled executive chef (an innovation of Jackie Kennedy’s). It is only a slight exaggeration to say that the reputation of President Washington, his family, and the United States itself, rested in Hercules’s hands.
He consulted with the First Lady on menus and was largely responsible for the planning, shopping, and making of the family’s meals. Like a modern pitmaster, he cooked over open flame, which required experience, patience, intuition, and skill. A wizard at flaring and banking fires, Hercules roasted mutton and game on spits and simmered vegetable stews in iron cauldrons. He used an extensive batterie de cuisine—copper pots and cast-iron pans, knives, spoons, and whisks—to produce course after delectable course of soups, starches, vegetables, fruits, and desserts.
Though married with children, Hercules was bound to presidential food production nearly twenty-four hours a day. He lived next to the kitchen and rose before dawn to light the fires, bake bread, and prepare breakfast. Mid-morning, he strolled Philadelphia’s outdoor markets, shopping for fruits and legumes and arranging for the delivery of fish and meat. In the afternoon he salted meats, monitored the wine and ice supply, and catered late afternoon dinners that included anywhere from two to thirty guests and could stretch for hours. In the evening, Hercules was often called on to fix a quick supper for impromptu guests—a midnight snack of ham, biscuits, and brandy for a weary traveler, say.
In the tradition of chefs immemorial, Hercules appears to have been a dexterous, intelligent, mercurial perfectionist who cared deeply about taste, texture, and flavor—“a capital cook…a celebrated artiste…as highly accomplished a proficient in the culinary art as could be found in the United States,” recalled George Washington Parke Custis. Hercules was also an exacting manager, Custis wrote: “Under his iron discipline, wo[e] to his underlings if speck or spot could be discovered on the tables or dressers, or if the utensils did not shine like polished silver. With the luckless wights who had offended in these particulars there was no arrest of punishment, for judgment and execution went hand in hand….His underlings flew in all directions to execute his orders, while he, the great master-spirit, seemed to possess the power of ubiquity, and to be everywhere at the same moment.”
This description would suit many top chefs today. And like them, Hercules’s gastronomic prowess granted him special privileges. When his wife, Alice, died in 1787, Martha Washington gave the chef three bottles of rum to help “bury his wife.” And she gave Hercules and Ona Judge—Martha’s favorite slave, who laid out her clothes and plaited her hair—money to attend plays or circuses on their own, an unusual privilege. Like the French chefs working in America, Hercules was allowed to sell slops—extra food, animal skins, tallow, used tea leaves—and keep the proceeds. He made $100 to $200 a year this way, much of which he spent on fine clothing.
Mid-height, with dark brown skin and a face described as “homely,” Hercules fashioned himself into a “celebrated dandy” who dressed in silk finery, a waistcoat with a gold watch chain, and a black hat and carried a gold-tipped cane as he strolled through Philadelphia’s markets like a celebrity. Yet he was enslaved.
When Hercules requested that his adolescent son, Richmond, join him in Philadelphia as a scullion (kitchen helper), the president hesitated. The City of Brotherly Love was an abolitionist hotbed, where adult slaves who resided in the state for six consecutive months could demand their freedom. Several slaves had attempted to escape Mount Vernon, and a few had succeeded. If he allowed Richmond to join Hercules, Washington worried, then father and son might attempt to escape. Yet in deference to the cook, he brought Richmond to his father.
In May 1796, Ona Judge slipped away from the Washingtons’ house in Philadelphia while they ate dinner. With the help of an abolitionist ship captain, Judge made her way to Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Martha Washington was furious and pushed her husband to recapture her favorite slave. They tracked Judge to Portsmouth, but authorities there cautioned that abducting the runaway could touch off a riot. The president backed down, but was determined to prevent another escape.
To ensure that the all-important Hercules remained in place, Washington resorted to subterfuge. Every time slaves were taken out of Pennsylvania and returned, a six-month clock of enslavement would reset. Using this loophole, the president began to rotate servants between Philadelphia and Mount Vernon. When Hercules discovered the ruse, he was “mortified to the last degree to think that a suspicion could be entertained of his fidelity,” a secretary reported.
As his second term neared its end, Washington looked forward to retirement and in November 1796 sent his most valued house slaves—the cook Hercules, the butler Frank Lee, and the waiter Cyrus—to Mount Vernon, where they were kept hard at work to “keep them out of idleness and mischief.” By then, the plantation encompassed eight thousand acres, including five farms that housed 316 slaves. In early 1797, Hercules was sent outside to work alongside field slaves digging enough clay for a hundred thousand bricks, spreading manure, and smashing stones into sand. The proud cook was forced to give up his fine silks for rough woolens, his prized kitchen tools for rakes and hammers.
On February 22, 1797, George Washington turned sixty-five and prepared to retire. In Philadelphia, thousands paraded by the presidential mansion, paying tribute to the Father of the Nation. That evening, the guests at his birthday ball were so resplendent that the room “appeared like a grove of moving plumes,” a newspaper reported. But as the partygoers sipped punch and whirled in the capital, Hercules slipped away from the plantation and disappeared into the Virginia countryside. Rainy days and snowy nights followed. Travel was arduous, and it took days to reach Alexandria, where he likely boarded a schooner to Baltimore. Incensed again, Martha Washington dispatched slave catchers to find the runaway chef, but his trail had gone cold.
When Louis-Philippe, the future king of France, visited Mount Vernon, he asked Hercules’s six-year-old daughter, “Are you deeply upset that you will never see your father again?”
“Oh! Sir, I am very glad,” she replied. “He is free now.”
In 1801, Hercules was spotted on a Manhattan street, and authorities alerted Mrs. Washington. But she had hired a white woman to cook by then and declined to pursue him. Wherever he landed, it is likely that Hercules lived as a free man and was well compensated to cook for a discerning household.
Hercules’s skill at cooking in an open hearth was the result of centuries’ worth of human development that stretched back to the moment Homo sapiens learned to harness flame and cook meat and vegetables. This was one of mankind’s greatest evolutionary leaps, a skill that distinguished humans from other creatures and led to the development of brains that are larger than other primates’.
“We are the only species that controls fire and consumes cooked food on a regular basis,” notes Richard Wrangham, an emeritus professor of biological anthropology at Harvard. “It is one thing that makes us unique.” His colleague Rachel Carmody, an assistant professor of human evolutionary biology at Harvard, writes that cooking food essentially predigests it—by loosening starch bonds, swelling legumes, unwinding proteins—which allows our enzymes to access calories with less work than if food is raw. In other words, cooking changes food physically and chemically. By softening and breaking down vegetables, starches, and meaty proteins, cooking makes it easier and faster to consume them.
Cooked food often tastes better, and provides more energy (digestible calories), than raw food. And Carmody has found that the gut microbiome reacts differently to cooked versus raw food. Plants that grow in the ground, like potatoes or beets, produce antimicrobial compounds to protect themselves: eating tubers raw is not very tasty, takes time, and is hard work for the body; cooking them breaks down compounds and reduces the “metabolic cost” of eating. Today’s “raw food diet” does not provide enough calories for healthy development over the long term; it can lower your body mass index (or weight-to-height ratio) and causes over 50 percent of women to stop menstruating, which hinders reproduction.
“Cooking completely transformed our biology,” says Wrangham. “It was an evolutionary change.” Though no one knows exactly when this step occurred, he believes it took place sometime between 1.6 and 1.9 million years ago, when Homo erectus emerged. (Others disagree, with some saying fire was controlled 40,000 years ago, and others saying it was 400,000 years ago.) Wrangham maintains that cooking caused our mouths and guts to shrink and our brains to grow. Further, it seems that cooking altered man’s relationship to time.
While many animals graze on the move, and it takes half a day for a gorilla to digest enough calories, humans can cook and eat a meal in about an hour. This gave early hominids the time to develop language, define gender roles—men hunted, women foraged and cooked—and create social groups that evolved into complex societies. “Fires draw people together,” Wrangham explains. The Latin root of “fireplace” is “focus,” and “if you do not participate in the group, you will be excluded.” In other words, cooking helped define us as human beings. “We are the people of fire.”
In 1791, George Washington and the French engineer Pierre L’Enfant searched for a site for the nation’s permanent capital city. Their solution was a compromise, achieved with the help of Jefferson’s Dinner Table Bargain: a sixty-five-acre plat of land on the north bank of the Potomac River donated by Maryland and Virginia. (Despite persistent rumors that the city was built in a swamp, only 2 percent of the city’s area is considered swampy.) To avoid further turf wars between North and South, the municipality was designated a “federal city,” meaning it was not controlled by any one state. The commissioners in charge of the capital named it Washington, in honor of the president, and added “District of Columbia,” the feminine form of “Columbus,” a poetic name for the United States.
The Irish architect James Hoban designed the President’s House as a grand Georgian mansion in the Palladian style, which he likely based on the neoclassical Leinster House in Dublin. On October 13, 1792, Washington laid the mansion’s cornerstone, and keenly followed the framing, bricklaying, and sandstone masonry work, much of which was done by immigrant craftsmen and free or enslaved Black laborers. But George Washington never set foot inside the cherished building.
In December 1799, he toured Mount Vernon in chilly rain and snow and returned to the house just before his three o’clock dinner. Though cold and soaked, he insisted on eating at the stroke of 3:00. The next day he had a sore throat, but again tramped through snow. His throat grew raw and constricted, and doctors applied a blister of cantharides—a.k.a. Spanish fly, a mixture of ground beetles—to his neck, to draw out the inflammation. It didn’t work. They asked him to inhale a vinegar-water steam, but he choked. And when they fed him a molasses-butter-vinegar paste, he gagged. That concoction was the last thing the Father of the Nation consumed. He died of acute laryngitis on December 14, at age sixty-seven.
In many ways, Washington’s food and entertaining choices helped define his presidency. He was a farmer who led a revolution sparked by dinner table conversations; he saved the revolution by providing enough food to sustain his army in the winter of 1777; he helped forge a national identity by consuming a hybrid American cuisine and establishing social codes that reflected egalitarian ideals. He also relied on slaves as cooks and plantation workers, perpetuating a system that contradicted the ideals that he and the nation stood for. In the end, George Washington seemed to accept the good and bad of the table he had set for the nation with equanimity. As he passed away, he muttered, “ ’Tis well.”