Thomas Jefferson Foundation/National Portrait Gallery

Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello garden was a revolutionary American garden. One wonders if anyone else had ever before assembled such a collection of vegetable novelties, culled from virtually every western culture known at the time, then disseminated by Jefferson with the persistence of a religious reformer, a seedy evangelist. Here grew the earth’s melting pot of immigrant vegetables: an Ellis Island of introductions: 330 varieties of 89 species of vegetables and herbs, 170 varieties of the finest fruits known at the time. The Heritage Harvest Festival at Monticello continues the Jefferson legacy in championing vegetable cuisine, plant experimentation, and the value of sustainable agriculture.

Thomas Jefferson liked to eat vegetables, which “constitute my principal diet,” and his role in linking the garden with the kitchen into a cuisine defined as “half French, half Virginian” was a pioneering concept in the history of American food. The Monticello kitchen, as well as the table at the President’s House in Washington, expressed a seething broil of new, culinary traditions based on these recent garden introductions: French fries, peanuts, Johnny-cakes, gumbo, mashed potatoes, sweet potato pudding, sesame seed oil, fried eggplant, perhaps such American icons as potato chips, tomato catsup, and pumpkin pie. The western traditions of gardening – in England, France, Spain, and the Mediterranean – were blended into a dynamic and unique Monticello cookery through the influence of emerging colonial European, native American, slave, Creole, and southwestern vegetables.

Thomas Jefferson Foundation/Mary Porter

Jefferson, according to culinary historian Karen Hess, was “our most illustrious epicure, in fact, our only epicurean President,” and his devotion to fresh produce, whether in the President’s House at a state dinner, or at Monticello for the large numbers of celebrity tourists who crowded the retired President’s table, remains a central legacy of Jefferson’s gardening career. Jefferson also promoted commercial market gardening. The remarkable calendar he compiled while President, delineating the first and last appearance of 37 vegetables in the Washington, D.C., farmer’s market, is among the most revelatory documents in the history of American food. As well, it was Jefferson himself who obtained new vegetable varieties from foreign consuls, passed them on to Washington market gardeners, and ordered his maitre ‘d to pay the highest prices for the earliest produce.

While serving as Secretary of State in Philadelphia, Jefferson received a letter from his daughter, Martha, complaining about the insect-riddled plants in the Monticello Vegetable Garden. His response is a stirring anthem to the organic gardening movement. “We will try this winter to cover our garden with a heavy coating of manure. When earth is rich it bids defiance to droughts, yields in abundance, and of the best quality. I suspect that the insect which have harassed you have been encouraged by the feebleness of your plants; and that has been produced by the lean state of the soil.” Jefferson’s rallying cry on the remedial value of manure and the horticultural rewards of soil improvement has inspired gardeners of all kinds.

Thomas Jefferson Foundation/Mary Porter

Jefferson’s gardening and food legacy continues today. Michelle Obama’s White House Kitchen Garden is planted with seeds and plants of his favorite vegetable varieties: Tennis-ball and Brown Dutch lettuce, Prickly-seeded spinach and Marseilles fig. An admirer of Jefferson and inspired by a visit to the Monticello garden, White House chef and Coordinator of the White House Food Initiative, Sam Kass, reserved a discrete section of this garden in honor of the third president. This legacy is not a mere historical curiosity, but is a compelling force in the movement toward a more sustainable agricultural future. Buy Fresh, Buy Local!