Author: Paula Mejia / Source: Atlas Obscura
After a long day in president George Washington’s executive kitchen, chef Hercules hit the streets of Philadelphia with sartorial flair and a keen eye for late-18th century fashion.
Atop his head, the enslaved cook wore a voguish tricorn hat. Bright metal buttons held together his blue velvet-collared coat, a pair of shiny buckles dominated his fastidiously polished shoes, and a long watch-chain dangled from the side of his black silken pants.“Thus arrayed, the chief cook invariably passed out the front door,” as Washington’s adopted son, George Washington Parke Custis wrote several decades after his father’s death. A gold-headed cane firmly in hand, Hercules would then proceed up Market Street, which was, in the 1790s, where fashionable people “did most congregate.” There, he drew considerable attention. While strangers gawked, those who knew him bowed, hoping, as he writes, “to receive in return a salute of one of the most polished gentlemen and the veriest dandy of nearly sixty years ago.”
It’s a testament to both Hercules’s charisma and culinary skills that historians remain as enchanted with him today as his peers in the 18th century were. In recent years, a renewed focus on early African-American cuisine has revived interest in the story of a man who, while enslaved by the Washington family between 1770 and 1797, bested cruel, capricious treatment to become one of the most famous chefs in the early American republic.
According to historian Kelley Fanto Deetz, author of Bound to the Fire: How Virginia’s Enslaved Cooks Helped Invent American Cuisine, Hercules might have been America’s first celebrity chef. “Chef Hercules was a very proud and confident man, whose culinary skills and status were recognized throughout the nation,” she says. “He demanded perfection from his staff in the presidential kitchen, and he commanded attention and respect from the public as well—something unheard of for enslaved laborers of his period.”
Early details of Hercules’s life are limited to brief appearances on tax documents. He first showed up on Washington’s “List of Tithables” in 1771, and subsequent records suggest Washington kept him as a house slave for his first ten years at Mount Vernon. It’s unclear when exactly he moved to the kitchen—though Washington first mentioned him as a cook in a 1786 diary entry. Within three years, Washington promoted Hercules to head chef.
According to Adrian Miller, the James Beard Award-winning author of The President’s Kitchen Cabinet, Hercules likely earned this promotion after mastering contemporary cooking techniques, which required equal amounts of precision and discipline. “The biggest skill that Hercules would have learned is hearth cooking, also known as cooking in a fireplace,” he says. “He would have learned how to tend a cooking fire, what cooking utensils to use, how to change the elevation of cooking vessels hanging in the fire to get the desired cooking effect, and how to cook in warm ashes.”
By the end of Washington’s first year as president, Congress enacted the Residence Act of 1790—a law that not only cemented plans to build a permanent capital along the Potomac, but also temporarily relocated the federal government from New York to Philadelphia. When it came time for Washington to move into his executive mansion on Market Street, he resolved to bring nine enslaved laborers with him, including Hercules.
Though Hercules had little choice in the matter, he had enough sway over the president to lay out one major stipulation: He insisted…
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