The enslaved man who popularised mac and cheese

The baked dish is one of the US’s most popular foods, but its rise can likely be traced back to an enslaved Black chef who worked for Thomas Jefferson.

This year, as millions of families in the US sit down to celebrate Thanksgiving, many will tuck into one of the most quintessentially “American” foods: macaroni and cheese. But while some sources trace the baked dish’s mysterious origins to Italy or Switzerland, the dish as Americans know it today may have been popularised in the New World via an unlikely figure – an enslaved chef named James Hemings.

In 1784, long before he became president, Thomas Jefferson was appointed US minister to France and brought Hemings with him. Jefferson wanted the young man to be trained as a chef so he could preside over the kitchen at Monticello, his plantation estate in Virginia. But Hemings was more than just Jefferson’s potential chef; he was also the half-brother of Jefferson’s first wife, Martha, and the brother of Sally Hemings, the enslaved girl who looked after Jefferson’s daughter and later bore six of his children.

“[Hemings’] relationship with Jefferson is very interesting,” said Nicole Brown, a historian at Monticello, noting that this familial connection may have given Hemings certain opportunities denied to other enslaved people. “He [was] constantly negotiating and renegotiating with Jefferson in ways that you might not traditionally think of an enslaved person being able to do.”

In Paris, Hemings trained as both a chef de cuisine and pastry chef. “[Hemings was] not only one of the first French-trained chefs from the United States, but certainly one of the first Black French-trained chefs,” Brown said.

After five years in Paris, Hemings brought his new skills back to the US and served as Jefferson’s head chef at Monticello, as well as in New York and Philadelphia, until he was able to negotiate his own freedom in 1796. Using French techniques such as braising, poaching and sautéing, he created delicate dishes that would have been almost unheard of in 18th-Century America, including the “snow egg”, a poached meringue served floating in crème anglaise. Since pasta baked with cheese had become a popular dish in France by the time Hemings trained there, he likely learned this there and brought it back to the US as well.