At first I thought this was satire:
I ran across that one in One More Page Books, a good Arlington independent bookstore which oddly no one had told me about. It’s a bit out of the way in west Arlington, almost at Falls Church, right off Rt.29.
Humorous titles
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Yelp is your friend
http://www.yelp.com/biz/one-more-page-books-arlington
And the correct title is Thomas Jefferson’s Crème Brûlée…
What else has no one told you about?
It’s almost perfect:
Thomas Jefferson’s Diet Creme Brulee: How a Founding Father and Sally Heming’s Son Introduced the French Woman’s Weigh-Loss Plan to America.
‘At first I thought this was satire’
Why?
Virginia has a long and proud history – the majority of it involving legal enslavement. No need to whitewash or fence off any of it. One of the more interesting things about racism in America is how white people prefer not to refer to it all – or think something as banally accurate as that title is satire.
I know, right? If only we had had ovens and a highly efficient rail system.
Why? Virginia imported slaves for the tobacco trade, mainly – at least that is what I learned growing up in Fairfax Country in the early 1970s. And ships were the main form of transportation then – pretty much everything involving large amounts of field slaves at that point was export oriented, such as sugar, tobacco, and cotton. Virginia, with its fairly large number of rivers and coast was perfectly suited for such trade.
This is very simple history – no need to get confused when a native Virginian remains mystified at how the transplants from the North seem unaware of the Commonwealth’s long history. Especially someone from the North who has explicitly noted that Jefferson was a slave holder.
After all, so was George Washington (probably the largest slave holder in Fairfax County), George Mason (probably the second largest in Fairfax), James Madison, and James Monroe. To name three of the first five presidents of the United States, and the namesake of the university I graduated from.
What this has to do with ovens and railroads is completely beyond me.
And if I was to talk about the history of Marblehead and Salem (and Peabody, and Swampscott, and Beverly, and Lynn) from my mother’s side, then the entire triangular trading system was taken for granted. Again, having nothing to do with ovens or rail – it was all sailing ships, including apparently some of the finest ships ever built, if local boasting is to be believed in such books, able to sail rings around His Majesty’s ships. Or for that matter, in the book ‘No Ship May Sail,’ rings around federal gunboats due to Jefferson’s self-embargo, His Majesty’s naval ships, corsairs, not to mention Napoleon’s ships (with Spanish crews? – it has been a while). I think that is a complete list – but anyone interested in reading a book from 1942 is welcome to visit Amazon – http://www.amazon.com/ship-may-sail-Charles-Haywood/dp/B0007FCU6A
You may be being deliberately obtuse (sometimes it’s hard to tell with you), but he probably thought it was satire because the notion of creme brulee being the entree of french cuisine to America is funny.
So, what if TJ really did agonize over blacks not being able to function in society. It would be both a self-fulfilling prophesy and therefore a perfectly understandable position. Toss in a small portion of fast brain evolution and voila`.
Courtesans and Fishcakes: The Consuming Passions of Classical Athens [Paperback] James Davidson (Author) – is a book on food and sex in ancient Greece (I’ve not read it) – proving you can consume history through food, by reading a book.
Did Jefferson call them “Freedom Fries”?
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