We arrived early one morning, bought our tickets and headed up to the house where the guide gave us a warm welcome. As we moved through the house, our guide spun a wonderful story of life at Monticello, telling of the children who lived there and the seemingly endless stream of visitors, and showing us how Jefferson positioned his library, study, and bedroom for a bit of privacy from the excitement. In the parlor, he related how family and guests came together to play music and games or to discuss politics and history. Moving into the dining room, he described the French-influenced meals served there, meals prepared by slaves who had been trained by French chefs and who, in turn, taught their successors the secrets of French cuisine. He told us Jefferson shipped home large quantities of kitchen equipment from Paris, information we have because in 1796 slave chef James Hemings prepared a kitchen inventory that listed 19 copper stew pans with covers, six small sauce pans, two copper fish kettles, four round baking sheets of tinned copper, and four square copper baking sheets, assorted copper moulds, waffle irons, grid irons, spits and jack. This was clearly a list of equipment for a sophisticated kitchen, a dream kitchen. I could hardly wait to see it. We could not move through the Madison guest room fast enough. As I left my wife to say our thank yous, I flew across the terrace, passed the old dairy, smoke house, and cook's room in search of that glorious chapel for food.
When I finally arrived at the kitchen, I stood there, dumfounded. THIS WAS WHERE ALL THAT FRENCH FOOD WAS PREPARED? Something here was very wrong. There was no stew stove. Instead there was an enormous down-hearth fireplace no French chef would have stooped to use. The dishes Thomas Jefferson served never would have made it to the table if his kitchen was like the one at Monticello today.
The Indispensable Stew Stove
Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century stew stoves had roots in the Mediterranean
region where the idea of preparing food in a vessel elevated over charcoal
was well known throughout the Roman Empire. In fact, Jefferson owned a
1709 edition of Apicius Coelius de obsoniis et condimentis, sive arte
coquinaria, a collection of Roman recipes attributed to Marcus Gavius
Apicius (b. circa 25 A.D.) which mentions the use of a device similar to
a stew stove, remains of which were found at Pompeii.
Known to the French as a potager and the Spanish as a cocina de carbon, in modern Greece these stoves are known as tzaki, which is derived from the Turkish ocak (pronounded ojak). In Crete one can still see the tzaki being used indoors while a more primitive arrangement is used outside. Molly Harrison states in The Kitchen in History that the Romans brought the stew stove, and related raised hearth and chafing dishes to Britain but that, after they departed, the Britons immediately reverted to their old down hearth fireplaces.
Meanwhile, the cooks in France began to refine their cooking in the sixteenth century. There, the Roman raised hearth and charcoal braziers gradually evolved into the stew stove which gave the cook greater control and concentration of the heat, permitting the creation of finer sauces and easing the act of sauteing. The stew stove was a waist-high, masonry and brick, counter-like platform punctuated with multiple openings or "stew holes" which were fitted with iron grills or grill baskets and performed much like burners on a modern stove. These grills held charcoal and could be adjusted to control the intensity of heat. Below each stew hole was an ash pit. While most stew stoves were built beneath windows for ventilation, some later models utilized a flue shared with the kitchen fireplace chimney.
Stew stoves became popular in part because of the efficiency of burning charcoal. "The French cooking stoves," explained one observer, "will go farther in cooking (broiling, frying, boiling, stewing and baking) than four dollars in fire wood in a common kitchen fireplace." In addition, until the iron stove supplanted the stew stove, the stew stove was indispensable to cooks who prepared the intricate French cuisine fashionable in Europe and America during the eighteenth century. In the New Orleans area, for instance, building contracts that stipulated kitchens outfitted "in the French style" contained stew stoves.
Stew stoves appeared in architectural pattern books as early as 1715 with the publication of the first volume of Colon Campbell's Vitruvious Britannicus, which illustrated one stew stove as part of the "General Plan of a New Design for the Lord Percival." By the time Volume 5 appeared in 1771, stew stoves with from one to nine holes were illustrated in seven kitchen designs. Pattern books for "gentlemen architects" such as Robert Morris's 1755 Select Architecture and Asher Benjamin's 1806 American Builder's Companion also included stew stoves in kitchen designs. Early nineteenth-century French architecture books offered even more detailed representations of stew stoves. Jean Charles Krafft's 1812 D'architecture civile incorporated them into plans for more than twelve kitchens, while Charles Francois Mandar's Etudes d'architecture civile (1826) included a plate showing a stew stove with seven square grates in three different sizes, as well as a rectangular grate which was used for poaching fish.
By the mid-seventeenth century, cooks trained in the nouvelle cuisine were emigrating from France, spreading the style wherever it could be afforded. As early as Elizabethan times, the English aristocracy employed French chefs, and by the eighteenth century stew stoves were appearing in wealthy gentry kitchens. As living standards rose in the American Colonies during the eighteenth century, those who had been raised on French cuisine and those who had gained wealth in America hired French-trained staff for their kitchens and provided the specialized equipment of their trade: stew stove and copper saucepans. Charles Wilson Peale, for example, wrote Thomas Jefferson in March 1801, stating he had "embraced Count Rumford's ideas, and combined them with other ingenious inventions." Peale's kitchen featured both Rumford's design for a stew stove, and his custom-made cookware. Benjamin Thompson, Count Rumford, had streamlined the design of the stew stove by adding cast-iron doors to enclose the grill baskets and incorporating flues to vent the gasses into the fireplace chimney.
Forgotten History
The rise of Colonial Revivalism and its insistence that virtually every
cook in America squatted beside an enormous (and inefficient) open-hearth
fireplace, obliterated evidence and memory of diverse cooking technologies
throughout America, the stew stove among them. Even the British, symbolically
represented by the Colonial Revival hearth, did not bring identical
cultures and technologies to America, while the Germans arriving in the
Shenandoah Valley and elsewhere brought with them a long tradition of a
cuisine produced on a raised hearth with small fires and embers, to cite
just two examples.
By the time the practical iron cook stove was introduced in the 1830s,
there were hundreds of stew stoves in use in America. Stew stoves survive
at a handful of sites. At other sites, documentary evidence of French-
trained staff or the preparation of French-style menus supports the prior
existence of a stew stove. Likewise, the presence of copper cookware in
an inventory implies a certain amount of experience on the part of the
cook and suggests the kitchen was equipped with a heat source such as a
stew stove where cooking temperatures could be adjusted. Today, owners
of historic houses, preservationists, and historians face the challenge,
and pleasure, or re-examining the reinterpreting stew stoves and the
French connection in America.