Lewis & Clark

Lewis as Foodie: The President’s Table Travels to Clatsop

by Don Snow, July 2020

Food was a constant concern for the Corps of Discovery.  As the grueling weeks of the twenty-eight-month-long expedition wore on, hardly a day goes by in the journals without reference to the pursuit and acquisition of things to eat.  The captains and crew were constantly on the lookout for fresh foods to supplement their packaged stores – some seven tons of provisions including barrels of corn and flour, salt pork, sugar, and Lewis’s notorious “portable soup.”  Wild meat was the main thing, with George Drouillard and other hunters being constantly dispatched to collect deer, bison, elk, antelope, beaver and game birds, whatever they could find, but fish were also mainstays in the Expedition diet, thanks to the angling skills of Silas Goodrich and the bounty of salmon later provided by fishing tribes of the Northwest.  Plant foods, too – edible wild roots, berries, and greens – entered the stream of provisions as the Corps slogged its way up and over the Rockies in search of an easy passage to the Pacific.  The journey at large became a panorama of the continent’s culinary ecology, and the captains’ writings on food offer fascinating glimpses into their personalities – Lewis’s in particular.

Young Meriwether had gained a substantial culinary education during the two years he spent in the President’s House as Thomas Jefferson’s personal secretary.  Jefferson’s dinner parties with up to a dozen guests were nearly daily affairs in his first four years in office, and he spent lavishly to provision them – fifty dollars a day on food and wine, according to Étienne Lemaire, the president’s head of household.[i]  All of this can be traced to Jefferson’s five years in Paris as American consul, when he paid serious attention to French cuisine.  In late 1789, Jefferson returned to Monticello with a trained French chef – his domestic slave James Hemings – and eighty-six crates of kitchen ware, food, and wine (680 bottles!).[ii] When he occupied the President’s House in 1801, he hired a French immigrant chef, Honoré Julien, to prepare meals of a kind never seen by early American statesmen.

Secretary Lewis, with his boyhood roots in rural Virginia and the Georgia wilderness, took his meals at the president’s table and must have sat wide-eyed at many sumptuous feasts, some featuring ingredients and beverages that had to have been shipped from Europe.  Among them, olive oil (Jefferson adored it), French-style mustard (Jefferson’s favorite brand, Maille, is still available today), macaroni and cheese (a staple at the president’s table – Jefferson may have brought the dish to America), and Champagne, literally the toast of Paris made fashionable by the duke of Orléans in the early 1700s.[iii]

Delightful passages in the journals provide hints that Lewis had picked up the rudiments of a charming, and sometimes playful, food vocabulary.  On May 8, 1805, at the mouth of the Milk River in present-day Montana, Lewis pauses to take note of an important wild food plant, Psoralea esculenta, which he identifies as the whiteapple.[iv]  He spends a full page describing the plant’s anatomy, and then turns to a lengthy discussion of how its starchy root is used as “a considerable article of food by the Indians of the Missouri.”  He ends with this:

 the white apple appears to me to be a tasteless insipid food of itself tho’ I have no doubt but it is a very healthy and moderately nutricious food. I have no doubt but our epicures would admire this root very much, it would serve them in their ragouts and gravies in stead of the truffles morella.[v]

The term “truffles morella,” by any measure, would have been a rather obscure reference to the appearance of Spanish truffles on an American table.  But Lewis may have seen them, even eaten  them, in the President’s House.  One dish Jefferson favored was a galantine of turkey served with a sauce of truffles, cream, and Calvados, the apple brandy of Normandy.

It might have amused Lewis to realize that President Jefferson was not the only Virginian who enjoyed the talents of a French chef.  Toussaint Charbonneau, the French-Canadian husband to Sacajawea and a sometimes-useful member of the expedition, apparently possessed substantial skills in the kitchen.

On May 9, 1805, just a day after waxing poetically on the gourmandish merits of the pomme blanche, Lewis pens perhaps the most hilarious passage in the journals.  The Corps is here making its way through the heart of buffalo country, and bison are in abundance – although they are not altogether “in good order” as to fatness.  The past winter had been hard, and many animals were starved down to lean flesh draped upon bones.  Lewis on this morning kills a cow buffalo, which he finds “in tolerable order.”  And then comes this:

 We saved the best of the meat, and from the cow I killed we saved the necessary materials for making what our wrighthand cook Charbono calls the boudin blanc . . . ; this white pudding we all esteem one of the great delicacies of the forrest, it may not be amiss therefore to give it a place. About 6 feet of the lower extremity of the large gut of the Buffaloe is the first morsel that the cook makes love to, this he holds fast at one end with the right hand, while with the forefinger and thumb of the left he gently compresses it, and discharges what he says is not good to eat, but of which in the sequel we get a moderate portion; the mustle lying underneath the shoulder blade next to the back, and fillets are next saught, these are needed up very fine with a good portion of kidney suit [suet]; to this composition is then added a just proportion of pepper and salt, and a small quantity of flour; thus far advanced, our skilfull opporater C–o seizes his recepticle, which has never once touched the water . . . and tying it fast at one end turns it inwards and begins now with repeated evolutions of the hand and arm, and a brisk motion of the finger and thumb to put in what he says is bon pour manger; thus by stuffing and compressing he soon distends the recepticle to the utmost limits of it’s power of expansion . . . .  When . . . all is completely filled with something good to eat, it is tyed at the other end . . .; it is then baptised in the missouri with two dips and a flirt, and bobbed into the kettle; from whence after it be well boiled it is taken and fryed with bears oil untill it becomes brown, when it is ready to esswage the pangs of a keen appetite or such as travelers in the wilderness are seldom at a loss for.– [vi]

 As to the construction of fatty French sausages, Jefferson’s Honoré Julien could not have said it better.

By the end of July, the Corps has endured the month-long portage around the Great Falls of the Missouri (and the last of the whiskey) and is now nearing the head of the basin.  Lewis is rightfully sensing the end of buffalo habitat as the expedition is about to cross the mountains.  On July 24, 1805, as they approach the Three Forks area of the upper Missouri, he writes:

from the appearance of bones and excrement of old date the buffaloe sometimes straggle into this valley; but there is no fresh sighn of them and I begin to think that our harrvest of white puddings is at an end, at least untill our return to the buffaloe country.[vii]

Lewis is here anticipating the moment when turf meets surf.  Within the next few days, on the west side of the towering mountains, he will encounter the first Indians he has seen since the Mandan villages, 1,100 miles downstream: Sacajawea’s people, the Lemhi Shoshone.  On August 13, 1805, camped along the Lemhi River with the band led by Cameahwait, Sacajawea’s long-lost brother, Lewis will write this:

on my return to my lodge an indian called me in to his bower and gave me a small morsel of the flesh of an antelope boiled, and a peice of a fresh salmon roasted; both of which I eat with very good relish.  this was the first salmon I had seen and perfectly convinced me that we were on the waters of the Pacific Ocean.[viii]

Thus began the Corps’s extended experience with Pacific salmon and steelhead – proteinaceous foods as vital and iconic to tribes of the Northwest as bison were to Plains Indians.  By mid-winter, 1805-06, hunkered down for the season in Fort Clatsop, captains and crew will be glutted with salmon, and more than wearied of elk, the common deer species of the far Northwest, which they have found almost impossible to preserve in the dense rainy atmosphere of the coast.  On January 3, 1806, Lewis pens an entry which opens with a comment on whale blubber (the produce of a large blue whale which had beached and died nearby), and then moves into a fascinating confession:

Chief . . . Conia and six Clatsops . . . brought for sale some roots buries and three dogs also a small quantity of fresh blubber. . . .  this blubber the Indians eat and esteeme it excellent food.  our party from necessity having been obliged to subsist some length of time on dogs have now become extreemly fond of their flesh. . . .  for my own part I have become so perfectly reconciled to the dog that I think it an agreeable food and would prefer it vastly to lean Venison or Elk.[ix]

            Two days later, Lewis gets the chance to sample the flesh of the whale when a group of “Killamucks” arrive with a small portion:

it was white & not unlike the fat of Poark, tho’ the texture was more spongey and somewhat coarser. I had part of it cooked and found it very pallitable and tender, it resembled the beaver or the dog in flavour.  It may appear somewhat extraordinary tho’ it is a fact that the flesh of the beaver and dog possess a very great affinity in point of flavour.[x]

Perhaps the President could recommend an appropriate wine for small plates of le chien, le castor, et la baleine.  For young Virginia countrymen, exotic fare indeed.

Endnotes:

[i]. “Dining at the President’s House,” https://www.monticello.org/site/research-and-collections/.

[ii].  Thomas J. Craughwell, Thomas Jefferson’s Creme Brulee (Philadelphia: Quirk Books, 2012), 157.

[iii].  Ibid., 80.

[iv].  Gary E. Moulton, ed., The Definitive Journals of Lewis and Clark, Volume 4 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1987), 125 [emphasis in original].

[v].  Ibid., 126.

[vi].  Ibid., 131.

[vii].  Ibid., 423.

[viii].  Moulton, ed., The Definitive Journals of Lewis and Clark, Volume 5, 83.

[ix].  Moulton, ed., The Definitive Journals of Lewis and Clark, Volume 6, 162.

[x]. Ibid., 166.