Abraham Lincoln in the Kitchen Read online

  Text © 2013 by Rae Katherine Eighmey

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  Edited by Lise Sajewski

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  Illustrations on 3.1, 3.2, 3.3, 7.1, 7.2, 8.1, 8.2, 8.3, 9.1, 9.2, and 12.1

  courtesy of The Florida Center for Instructional Technology.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Eighmey, Rae Katherine.

  Abraham Lincoln in the Kitchen : a culinary view of Lincoln’s

  life and times / Rae Katherine Eighmey.

  pages cm

  Includes bibliographical references.

  eBook ISBN: 978-1-58834-460-1

  Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-58834-455-7

  1. Cooking, American—History—19th century.

  2. United States—Social life and customs—19th century.

  3. Lincoln, Abraham, 1809-1865.

  4. Presidents—United States—Biography. I. Title.

  TX715.E3368 2013

  641.5973—dc23

  v3.1

  In memory of F. C. E.

  With thanks for his library of Lincoln books

  where this work began

  And to four remarkable young men—

  Justin and Jack

  Nicholas and Jonah

  May you spend a lifetime of learning,

  especially while reading under trees

  with corn dodgers or gingerbread men at hand.

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Introduction

  CHAPTER 1

  Abraham and Mary Lincoln Corn Dodgers and Egg Corn Bread

  Corn Dodgers

  Egg Corn Bread

  CHAPTER 2

  Lincoln’s Gingerbread Men

  Gingerbread Men

  Tennessee Cake

  Vinegar Sauce

  CHAPTER 3

  Life on the Indiana Frontier Pawpaws, Honey, and Pumpkins

  Gooseberry Pudding

  Pumpkin Butter

  Pumpkin Pie with Honey

  CHAPTER 4

  Journeys of Discovery New Orleans Curry and New Salem Biscuits

  New Orleans Curry Powder

  New Orleans Chicken Curry

  New Salem Saleratus Biscuits

  CHAPTER 5

  Bacon and Black Hawk

  Batter Pudding

  Apees

  Pint Cake

  Jumbles

  Bacon-Basted Militia Chicken

  CHAPTER 6

  Courtship and Cake The Lincolns’ Romance and Mary Todd’s Almond Cake

  French Almond Cake

  Almond Pound Cake

  CHAPTER 7

  Eating Up Illinois Politics Barbecue, Biscuits, and Burgoo

  Slow-Cooked Barbecue

  Peach and Honey

  Short Biscuits

  Bread Sauce

  Cucumber Salad

  CHAPTER 8

  “Salt for Ice Cream” Springfield Scenes from Diaries and Grocery Ledgers

  Strawberry Ice Cream

  Chicken Salad

  Nutmeg Doughnuts

  Mutton Harico

  Beef Cakes

  December Sausages

  Corned Beef and Cabbage

  White Fricassee of Chicken

  CHAPTER 9

  Piccalilli: Of Fruits and Vegetables

  Piccalilli

  Pineapple Preserves

  Cucumber Catsup

  Rhubarb Spring Tonic

  Tomato Ketchup

  Tomato Tart

  Baked Beans

  Mock-Mock Turtle Soup

  Apple Butter

  CHAPTER 10

  Talking Turkey Clues to Life in the Springfield Home

  Forcemeat for Stuffing Turkey Craw

  Roast Turkey

  Cranberry Sauce

  Mushroom Sauce

  Soused or Barbecued Pigs “Feet”

  CHAPTER 11

  At the Crossroads of Progress Irish Stew, German Beef, and Oysters

  Irish Stew

  German Beef with Sour Cream

  Minced Beef the Portuguese Way

  Oyster Stew

  CHAPTER 12

  Inaugural Journey Banquets and Settling into the White House

  Brunoise Soup

  Filet of Beef à la Napolitaine

  Peas à la Française

  Cranberry Pie

  Christmas Shortbread Cookies

  CHAPTER 13

  Summer Cottage, Soldier’s Bread

  Soldier’s Bread

  CHAPTER 14

  Cakes in Abraham Lincoln’s Name

  Lincoln Cake

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Index

  INTRODUCTION

  “Abraham Lincoln cooked!”

  The words leapt off the pages of my sixty-nine-year-old copy of Rufus Wilson’s Lincoln among His Friends. I could hardly believe what I was reading.

  Yet there it was. Phillip Wheelock Ayers, whose family lived three doors down from the Lincolns’ Springfield home at the corner of Eighth and Jackson, described how Abraham Lincoln walked the few blocks home from his Springfield law office, put on a blue apron, and helped Mary Lincoln make dinner for their boys. Other neighbors’ homey reminiscences told of Abraham shopping for groceries and milking the family cow stabled in the backyard barn with his horse, Old Bob. There must be more to this part of the Lincoln family story! The joyful prospect of research with books, pots, and pans immediately drew me in.

  For me, food is the stuff of memory and of discovery. The cultural studies label is “foodways,” but I think the best word is “cooking.” And for the past two decades, cooking with century-old recipes, then eating meals made from them, has been my path for understanding and interpreting social trends and historical events.

  Everyone has a favorite meal that brings forth a vivid memory or a dish that captures a moment in time: A taste of homemade peach ice cream immediately conjures up a summertime front porch. A holiday sweet-potato casserole Aunt Minnie always made brings memory of her to the table when she no longer comes. Sometimes the memory begins with food preparation. Just about every time I sit with a mixing bowl full of fresh green beans, I recall the blue-and-white bowl on my grandmother’s lap as we sat in the screen porch snapping beans forty—no, fifty—years ago. I can almost see and hear the rowdy Tobias boys next door running around to the side yard, their Boston bulldog chasing them as fast as its stocky legs could carry it, and the porch swing squeaking as my grandfather sat, reading the paper and waiting for dinner.

  I also remember vividly the first “antique” recipe I made, and the delight that drew me into this area of study. I had been struggling to understand everyday life for the Jemison family in 1860s Tuscaloosa, Alabama. I was doing public relations and fund-raising for the restoration of their antebellum town home. The elegant Italianate structure had many stories to tell—arc
hitecture, state-of-the-art engineering, political and Civil War history—all of it well documented. But I was searching to find a way to reach the lives of Robert Jemison, his wife, Priscilla, and their daughter, Cherokee. Then I found Mrs. Jemison’s pencil-scrawled household notebook in the archives at the University of Alabama.

  Mrs. Jemison had written down two recipes. The recipe for a “jumble” intrigued me. I’ve baked and cooked since I was ten. It was obvious this was some kind of cookie, biscuit, or muffin. The mostly familiar ingredients were listed. Measurements were sketchy in the style common to mid-nineteenth-century cookbooks. There were no directions. Several days of research among the century-old cookbooks in the library stacks and dozens of test versions baked in my kitchen later, I had the perfect reconstruction of Mrs. Jemison’s jumbles. One friend, whose family had Alabama roots five generations deep, gave me the highest compliment: “They taste just like my great-grandmother’s tea cookies.”

  My rediscovered jumbles were a crisp, not-too-sweet doughnut-shaped cookie. From them I was able to construct a life incident. I imagined Mrs. Jemison made a batch in the modern “range” she had in the basement kitchen and packed them in a tin for her husband to take with him as he rode off from Tuscaloosa to take his seat in the Congress of the Confederacy, meeting in Richmond.

  Jumbles were just the beginning. Several other recipes had caught my attention as I carefully leafed through the fragile cookbook pages seeking jumble-like treats: cakes, breads, meats, vegetables. I began making some of them, too, just to see what they were like. They were wonderful! And I was hooked on this adventure of tasteful discovery. Now, thousands of recipes and five books later, I wondered: Could an expertise that began with the study of a family from the Confederacy ironically lead to an introspection of the man who dedicated his life to saving the Union? I began reading, thinking, and cooking.

  The joy of studying history through cooking is that foods provide a complex sensory immersion into the past. This study, and the eating that follows it, is time travel at the dinner table and the only common experience that engages all the senses. An essay by food writer M. F. K. Fisher highlights the special power food memories have. In a 1969 book she recalled a dish of potato chips with lasting and real physical impact: “I can taste-smell-hear-see and then feel between my teeth the potato chips I ate slowly one November afternoon in 1936 in the bar of Lausanne Palace.… They were ineffable and I am still being nourished by them.”

  Food has the added benefit of being accessible. Everyone has to eat, and most of us cook to one degree or another. The most committed non-cook interacts and prepares food, even if simply pouring milk into a bowl of cereal. And, cooking is largely the same as it was in the nineteenth century.

  On the face of it, that similarity seems an unlikely idea, but in my experience it is true. Of course there have been significant changes in the application of heat and cold for cooking and storing food, but to my mind, the essentials of cooking are unchanged from Lincoln’s kitchen to mine or yours. Knives, forks, mixing spoons, and bowls; frying pans and stewpots—I still use the same tools as 1820s Hoosier pioneers or 1850s sophisticated Springfielders did. Butter, flour, eggs, milk, cheese; chicken, beef; carrots, turnips—we all still cook with the same ingredients. Mixing, stewing, braising, frying—the basic methods are the same as well. What’s more, cooks across the country use those basic hand tools and those primary ingredients. In fact, cooking is the only task where doing things the old-fashioned way can be seen as practical, if not entirely modern.

  Some other occupations continue to use traditional tools: carpenters still use hammers and nails, seamstresses use needle and thread. But if a carpenter used just a hammer and nails instead of a nail gun on a construction site, or if a seamstress made a dress entirely by hand sewing, each would be considered archaic, an artisan, or impractical. In the garden and kitchen, it is commonplace to grow and cook food by hand, using shovels, trowels, and rakes; pots, bowls, knives, wooden spoons. For a great many recipes it is, in fact, easier to chop the vegetables with a knife rather than get out the food processor, or to blend the butter, sugar, and flour with a fork rather than an electric mixer.

  As to finding a recipe link to a specific time and place, luck has a lot to do with success. For my jump across time into Lincoln’s kitchens, it would be wonderful to have a cookbook from Lincoln’s mother with notes written among the recipes by his stepmother and another one from his wife, Mary, with menus describing what they ate and recipes for how they cooked it. But we don’t. In fact, information about Lincoln’s life is sketchy for the Springfield years and even sketchier for the log cabin days of his youth in Indiana.

  The only body of sound evidence is Lincoln himself. During those growing years he must have eaten well. By the time the family left Indiana for Illinois, twenty-one-year-old Abraham was six feet four inches and weighed between 160 and 220 pounds depending upon who told the story. I’ve raised a teenage boy who grew to over six feet, and, as anyone who has fed teenage boys knows, the refrigerator and pantry seem to empty themselves just after they’ve been filled.

  Known facts about Lincoln’s diet and food habits are about as scanty as the provisions on those pantry shelves. I found some foods mentioned by name in some of the biographies. Anyone who reads broadly about Lincoln’s early life and courtship runs into them, but these are, to use a food phrase, simply serving suggestions. I’ve run across some recipes and menus connected to Lincoln without reliable historical sources. Based on my research, some of them make sense and some of them don’t. In writing an accurate portrayal of Lincoln’s life through food, I’ll put these suggestions in perspective. The real meat of the menu—a look at the foods, or even diet, of his time and place—presents trickier mysteries to figure out.

  There is one excellent, comprehensive source—Herndon’s Informants. Shortly after Lincoln was assassinated, his law partner and friend, William Herndon, set out to talk or write to everyone who knew Lincoln, especially during his youth. These interviews, finally published in full in 1998, began to point my way. As I read these primary source interviews in their entirety instead of excerpts quoted in Lincoln biographies, I found enough clues to focus my research. Others who knew Lincoln, quoted in Rufus Wilson’s book, Lincoln among His Friends, and the work for McClure’s magazine by Ida Tarbell, brought more ingredients into the mix. I happened upon a wonderful book that put me less than seventy-five miles from Lincoln’s Indiana farm in 1820, three years after his family began homesteading. James Woods wrote Two Years’ Residence on the English Prairie of Illinois for his friends in London to give a comprehensive explanation of his farm life in the New World. The book transported me as well with detailed descriptions of crops, wildlife, and American customs.

  Yet, we must take even these voices with a grain of salt. Memory, especially when linked to an important event or martyred president, can be seasoned with an intrusive personal perspective. Communications theorist Dr. James Carey wrote of the inclination people have to put meaning, or themselves, into the narration of events: “They say what they say because they have purposes in mind. The world is the way it is because individuals want it that way.” These evocative first-person narratives need to be sifted, mixed with other voices and with other period primary sources, tempered with reason or leavened with insight.

  It is the same with recipes. I’ve worked with nineteenth-century recipes long enough to develop my own ways of translating their imprecise measurements, unwritten methods, and sometimes unfamiliar or unobtainable ingredients into a form that works in a modern kitchen. I try to get as close as I can to experiencing the flavors and textures of the past without driving myself—or anyone else—to distraction.

  The best parts of these journeys through time are the fabulous flavors I’ve rediscovered. Even though ingredients and mixing and cooking methods may be essentially the same, the flavors are not. Wonderful, unexpected tastes and textures from the recipes of the past—molasses lemon cake, apple ketc
hup, and beef à la mode, to name a few—have surprised me time and time again. I am delighted with the dishes I’ve found from this adventure in the land of Lincoln: corn dodgers, almond cake, pumpkin butter, slow-cooked barbecue, and many more.

  So, please, pull up a chair at my kitchen table. Its old round oak top is littered with notes; photocopies from agricultural journals, newspapers, grocery account ledgers; and stacks of old cookbooks. Herndon’s Informants and biographies of Lincoln are here, too, along with my ring binder filled with pages of once neatly typed recipes now covered with penciled corrections and spatters of batter, the results of sampling and experimentation. Although this is a culinary exploration of Lincoln’s life, not a cookbook, I’ve adapted the period techniques and recipes for cooking in today’s kitchens and noted the sources. There is value in seeing the original recipes as historical documents, but I believe that value is outweighed by the enjoyment of preparing and eating foods that come as close to these culinary-heritage dishes as our stores and stoves can bring us. A biscuit made with soured milk and baking soda is a world of difference from one that pops out of a refrigerated tube. It profoundly changes the perception of what a biscuit can be.

  I want readers to enjoy these foods. I’ve spent years figuring out how to make them from the scanty descriptions, incomplete measurements, and nonexistent instructions. In some cases, I’ve had to develop the recipe from just a description: you’ll see “Re-created from period sources” under the titles of those dishes. For the recipes described as “Adapted from period sources,” I’ve simply standardized the measurements to those used in today’s kitchens, clarified the ingredients and put them in proper order, and written the method for preparation.

  This book is organized generally as a biography following Abraham Lincoln’s life from his childhood through his presidency. In some of the chapters, I describe my process for unraveling the historical clues to get to the flavors and textures. In others, I delve more deeply into Lincoln’s biography and show how food brings new considerations to an understanding of his life, marriage, and time as president. All of the chapters have recipes at the end so you can undertake these explorations in your own kitchen. I promise these dishes are unlike anything we eat today. Delicious, evocative, and well worth the small efforts to prepare.