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.”
Source: Meet Hercules, One of America’s Early Celebrity Chefs – Gastro Obscura
