James Hemings

James Hemings was born in 1765 at the Charles City County, Virginia plantation of John Wayles, the son of Elizabeth Hemings — an enslaved woman of mixed African and English descent who was the property of John Wayles — and the white planter John Wayles. He was therefore the half-brother of Martha Wayles, who married Thomas Jefferson in 1772.

He was inherited by Thomas Jefferson at the death of John Wayles in 1773 — with his mother Elizabeth Hemings, his sister Sally Hemings, and the wider Hemings family — and was moved with the Hemings family to the Jefferson plantation at Monticello, Virginia.

He was selected by Jefferson in 1784 — at nineteen — to accompany Jefferson to Paris on Jefferson's appointment as American Minister Plenipotentiary to France. He arrived at Paris in August 1784 and was apprenticed by Jefferson to the principal Parisian chef Combeaux at the Hôtel d'Orléans on the rue de Richelieu — and subsequently to the principal chef of the Prince de Condé at the Château de Chantilly across 1787 and 1788.

He was named the principal chef de cuisine of Jefferson's household at the Hôtel de Langeac on the Champs-Élysées at Paris in 1788 — at the conclusion of his Parisian apprenticeship.

He returned with Jefferson to the United States in October 1789 — and held the principal chef de cuisine position at Jefferson's Philadelphia presidential cabinet household and at Monticello from 1789 to February 1796.

He was emancipated by Jefferson on the fifth of February 1796 — at the conclusion of the formal manumission agreement of September 1793 under which Hemings was required to train his brother Peter Hemings as the principal Monticello chef de cuisine before his own emancipation.

He was the principal introducer of French haute cuisine to the United States — and the principal introducer of crème brûlée, macaroni au gratin, ice cream, and the principal French confectionery and patisserie traditions to the American culinary canon.

He died at Baltimore, Maryland in October 1801 of complications of suicide, at thirty-six.

He is honored here as the principal introducer of French haute cuisine to the United States.