This is the memory palace.

I'm Nate Demayou.

The dinners were so very Jefferson.

The food, the mix of continental and distinctly new world that mixed at Thomas Jefferson

claimed as distinctly American.

Virginia Hams, sweet potatoes, corn and okra, crisp pippin apples, prepared with a French

flair.

Tarkaside and flambéid, techniques and recipes, sauces he'd so enjoyed during his years in

Paris as an envoy of the newly-United States.

Prepared alongside French ingredients, almonds and anchovies, cheese and raisins and nectarines

and mustards of varying shades in tang, dinner at Monticello would start at four.

The guests would often find their host already in the dining room, its walls painted chrome

yellow.

Jefferson would be reading a book pulled from the shelves by the fireplace.

On philosophy, zoology, architecture, religion, politics, the natural sciences, it was so

very Jefferson.

The contents of the books would spill out into the dinners themselves.

He loved a lively table, free flowing conversations, tales well told, vigorous debate, ideas presented

and refined, all helped by the wine that flowed freely too, shipped over from Europe,

or do's and mederas, kionties, reaslings from grapes that grew on fog hung hills that

rolled down to the Rhine.

The pictures on those yellow walls, copies of old masters, grand European landscapes alongside

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