In the late 18th century, the French Revolution transformed France from sinful glutton to hero in the American imagination. A camaraderie seemed natural between two countries who had shaken off the yoke of the aristocracy. Ironically, the influx of French chefs, eager to escape a homeland where their patrons (the nobility) were the persecuted class, led to the development among Americans of a taste for sophisticated French haute cuisine. Virginian Thomas Jefferson was an early champion of French food. He hired a French chef for his White House (President Clinton is the first since then to serve American food instead of French in the White House), and became involved in the project of combining superior New World ingredients, colonial Virginia cooking, and the age-old wisdom of France. The famous salty hams, the legumes, hominy ground into grits laced with cream and butter, griddle cakes, and the bounty of the sea, worked together with French methods to produce terrapin stew, corn and oyster fritters, grilled rabbit with chestnut spoon bread, crab cakes, or a green tomato tart. "Classic" southern or plantation cooking, then, is French filtered through the New World.