African American Food: To The Civil War: Big House Cook

Probably the most distinguished cook at the Big House during the colonial period was Hercules, a slave cook for our first president, George Washington. Hercules was adept at cooking foods that he learned by looking over the shoulders of his kitchen predecessors, that Martha Washington read to him from her cookbook, or that he had learned through his own personal efforts. From historical accounts it appears that neither Martha Washington nor George Washington ever complained about Hercules’s culinary efforts. George Washington Parke Custis, the adopted son of George Washington, the grandson of his wife, Martha Washington, from her first marriage to the wealthy Daniel Parke Custis, was a member of George Washington’s household and was privileged to enjoy and appreciate what Hercules placed before the family every day. In his book Recollections and Private Memoirs of the Life and Character of Washington, Custis stated:

the chief cook would have been termed in modern parlance, a celebrated artiste. He was named Hercules, and familiarly termed Uncle Harkless. Trained in the mysteries of his part from early youth, and in the palmy days of Virginia, when her thousand chimneys smoked to indicate the generous hospitality that reigned throughout the whole length and breadth of her wide domain, Uncle Harkless was, at the period of the first presidency, as highly accomplished a proficient in the culinary arts as could be found in the United States. He was a dark-brown man, little, if any above the usual size, yet possessed of such great muscular power as to entitle him to be compared with his namesake of fabulous history.