Back of the house: Monticello’s kitchen works
Dish had a chance recently to enjoy a bite to eat in Thomas Jefferson’s renovated kitchen, and to visit his restored wine cellar, projects that are part of a new exhibition at Monticello called “Crossroads,” which will attempt to bring to life the cellar-level intersection between Jefferson’s day-to-day life above and the lives of the enslaved servants, chefs, and house mangers below.
The new kitchen features an elaborate stew stove along the front wall, an idea Jefferson brought back from France, which features eight individual “burners,” much like a modern cooking range, with only embers below as the heat source. There’s also lots of copper cookware, a prep bench, and many task-specific items, like a long, rectangular pot used exclusively for fish.
“This was Jefferson’s idea of a modern kitchen,” says Leni Sorensen, Monticello’s African American Research Historian, who also happens to be a culinary historian and pretty good hearth chef. “The trick to this kind of cooking was to move pots around, or shift the embers, to get the right amount of heat,” she says....
Read entire article at The Hook (VA)
The new kitchen features an elaborate stew stove along the front wall, an idea Jefferson brought back from France, which features eight individual “burners,” much like a modern cooking range, with only embers below as the heat source. There’s also lots of copper cookware, a prep bench, and many task-specific items, like a long, rectangular pot used exclusively for fish.
“This was Jefferson’s idea of a modern kitchen,” says Leni Sorensen, Monticello’s African American Research Historian, who also happens to be a culinary historian and pretty good hearth chef. “The trick to this kind of cooking was to move pots around, or shift the embers, to get the right amount of heat,” she says....