Thomas Jefferson's Crème Brulée: How a Founding Father and his Slave James Hemings Introduced French Cuisine..".

Analyse de livre par Adriana Hunter

 

Adriana était notre  «Traductrice du mois d'août ». Une des œuvres qu'elle a traduite, « Garçon, un cent d'huîtres ! : Balzac et la table » (Balzac's Omelette : A Delicious Tour of French Food and Culture with Honoré de Balzac), a été écrite par Anka Muhlstein, qui nous a adressé le commentaire suivant :

« Adriana est une remarquable traductrice parce qu’elle est une lectrice si attentive et si exigeante. Elle saisit la moindre nuance, mais elle remarque aussi la moindre inconsistance, la moindre obscurité et, qualité inappréciable, si elle a le moindre doute, elle pose la question à son auteur. »

À notre demande, Adriana a bien voulu analyser un autre livre qui conjugue l'histoire, la biographie et la cuisine française. Cette fois, il s'agit de "Thomas Jefferson's Creme Brulee: How a Founding Father and His Slave James Hemings Introduced French Cuisine.."., redigé par Thomas J. Craughwell (Quire Books, 2012).

En lisant cette critique, nos lecteurs seront sans doute vivement impressionnés par le style infiniment lucide et élégant, ainsi que par le talent littéraire de celle en qui la célèbre écrivaine Anka Muhlstein voit une "lectrice si attentive [qui]  saisit la moindre nuance".

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          In Thomas Jefferson’s Crème Brûlée, Craughwell, an experienced writer of mostly historical non-fiction, has produced a beautifully presented and thoroughly researched book exploring a lesser known aspect of the great man’s achievements. Lurking behind the catchy, slightly flippant title is a far more profound and far-reaching slice of American and European history than that title implies. In fact, the book’s subtitle (How a founding father and his slave James Hemings introduced French cuisine to America) left this reader feeling spoiled by the book’s far greater scope, but also cheated by the paucity of documentation supporting this key theme.

            The opening chapter is a useful exposé of American life in the early 1780s when Jefferson was appointed to travel to Paris and join the American commission for negotiating commercial treatise with European countries in general and France in particular. We follow Jefferson and his elder daughter on their lengthy journey to Paris before a similar exposé of the historical background in France. The author is good at establishing just how unsophisticated America was in comparison with Europe: Jefferson, a respected powerful man who cut a fine figure in his native Virginia, felt hopelessly outclassed by the finery of Parisian aristocracy, and was quick to acquire an entirely new wardrobe for himself and his daughter. Craughwell also makes good use of the occasional amusing anecdote: when the French agronomist Parmentier tried to introduce the potato to France and met with suspicion and resistance, he countered this problem by putting a twenty-four-seven armed guard around a field of potatoes on the outskirts of Paris. As he had hoped, intrigued locals started stealing this “precious” crop, and it was only a matter of time before it became the invaluable staple that it is to this day.

            One key difference between France and America was in their attitudes to slavery. Although the French were slave traders and slavery was vital to the economy of her colonies, slavery was not tolerated in any form on the French mainland, while it was commonplace and perfectly legal in America. Now, Jefferson was keen to take his slave James Hemings to France with him and to have him trained as a chef, but he had to go through a number of legal loopholes and to be evasive with the truth in order to continue owning Hemings while in France. In many ways Jefferson was an enlightened and benevolent slave owner, giving Hemings a generous wage, financing his apprenticeship as a top-flight chef and promising him his freedom if he trained up another slave as a chef when they returned to his Virginia home, Monticello. But he was the product of his age, viewing it as his right to own other human beings, and he selfishly manipulated the terms of his agreement with Hemings to serve his personal interests.

            Once the Jefferson household is settled in Paris the reader starts to wonder when the fun is going to begin, when Hemings will make his first crème brûlée and how it will be received by the folks back home… but that is not really what this book is about and, frustratingly, much of  the book’s central tenet regarding Hemings is necessarily based on speculation; many sentences are loaded with those evils of non-fiction “sadly no record remains”, “scholars believe”, “probably” and “would have”. There is, for example, an interesting description of the Paris slums in all their squalor and crime; fascinating it may be but it does little to drive this book forwards and is included on the spurious grounds that Hemings “may have” strayed into these dark and dangerous places.

            Far better documented is Jefferson’s comprehensive grand tour of France when he studied different crops and farming methods, and took a genuine interest in humble people’s living conditions. Jefferson loved much of what he saw and tasted, and he never lost sight of his ambition to help his own country in every way possible by sending home seeds and making extensive notes, sometimes supported by complex illustrations. At one point he even traveled over the Alps by mule to investigate how rice was cleaned in Italy, only to find that Italian rice simply withstood the cleaning process better than American varieties because it was a superior grain jealously guarded by the Italian authorities. He then took the bold step of smuggling Italian rice (a hanging offence) back to Virginia, but these imports were regarded with suspicion and it was decades before excellent grade Italian rice was widely accepted and grown in the United States.

            Interestingly, much the same can be said for the exquisite cuisine and exotic ingredients that Jefferson and Hemings took home to Virginia at the end of Jefferson’s term of office when Paris was lurching towards bloody revolution. However persuasively the author argues that Jefferson and Hemings “introduced French cuisine to America”, the evidence does not satisfactorily support this assertion. The book even strains to make the point that Jefferson must have served excellent French food and wine at his historic dinner for James Madison and Alexander Hamilton in July 1790, but no record remains of the meal and historians have merely conjectured on the “likely menu”. Yes, Jefferson himself cherished his olives and eggplants, he adored his fine wines and was the first to introduce champagne as a celebratory drink in the United States, but much of what he was offering to baffled American dinner guests was falling on untrained palates. He did not start a great trend, in fact he was way ahead of his time; Americans continued to rely on their familiar simple cuisine until the late nineteenth century, and it was not until the intervention of Julia Childs in the 1960s that Americans truly took French cuisine to their hearts.

 

        Thomas J.        Craughwell

It seems fair to level these rather petulant criticisms at Craughwell’s book only because – apart from some slightly lop-sided structuring and occasional repetitiveness – it is an intelligent, lucid and fascinating read. Craughwell brings Jefferson to life in all his complexity: a charming yet modest polymath who could display unbearable grief at the loss of a child one minute and political acuity the next, a man who never forgot his duty to his beloved country but recognized the merits of other nations and their politics, and a “foodie” who took an interest right down to the different varieties of obscure crops, and was not averse to getting soil under his own fingernails despite his standing. If this book were a wine, then, it would be illuminating and refreshing with plenty of body… but just not what it says on the label.