From Monticello's garden: at Thomas Jefferson's historic estate, culinary wisdom lives on

"Jefferson was one of the originators of the organic-gardening movement in America," Hatch says as he shows his visitor the sea kale. In one of Jefferson's absences from Monticello, one of his daughters wrote to complain that insects were eating up the garden plants. "Jefferson told her that the problem was not the insects but the poor quality of the soil," Hatch says. "If they were to cover the soil with manure, they would have better soil, which would produce more vigorous plants that would be better able to resist the pests. He wanted to treat the soil to grow stronger plants, not kill the insects with pesticides. This is a holistic view of gardening."

Wildflowers Only

A similar respect for the natural world influenced the choice of plants for the flowerbeds that Jefferson--an accomplished landscape architect as well as horticulturist--designed for the west front of his house. "He selected `species plants'--flowering plants in their wild form--not those that had been bred," Hatch says. Two entire beds were given over, for example, to wildflowers discovered by Lewis and Clark in the West.

Jefferson was constantly experimenting in his gardens, maintaining two nurseries, as he called them, near the vineyards. In the nurseries, he cultivated special seedings of cold-weather varieties of corn, beans and squash, also supplied by Lewis and Clark.

The Jefferson family regularly bought everyday produce such as potatoes and cabbages from garden plots tended by their slaves. The family's cellars stocked olive oil, Parmesan cheese and other exotic items. For less fancy fare, Jefferson purchased foodstuffs stored in the root cellars of the 130 slave laborers who worked on the plantation.

A Rich Ragout

Whether Southern slaveholders learned more about horticulture from their slaves or from native Americans, or vice versa, is a matter of dispute, but they seemed to have taught each other. Corn was unknown to English settlers in the New World, but they learned to eat it and grow it, and they soon brought their own expertise to bear on the British colonies. By the 1700s, William Byrd reported in his 1737 Natural History of Virginia, the colony had been growing European fruits and vegetables for many years. As early as 1705, French viticulturists experimented with Virginia grapes, which "far excell'd their own Country of Languedoc."

Such a rich ragout of culinary influences was evident in meals served at Monticello, though no menus from Jefferson's day exist. "We regularly receive requests from the State Department and other organizations wanting to recreate a `Monticello dinner' for a special occasion," Stein says. "So in the absence of real menus, we rely on the individual recipes that have survived. And it would appear that the foods served here were often what we'd think of as `comfort foods,' rather than dining-out foods. They seem less elegant in the contemporary sense of the word."