Abraham Lincoln in the Kitchen Read online

  In this case, the Todd family was largely silent on the ups and downs of the couple’s three-year courtship. Springfield friends offered theories. Hints abound—broken engagement, flirtations with others, melancholy, and even a duel. There is much to be discovered about the truth of the cake recipe and the reality of Mary and Abraham’s relationship. So I decided to weave the two together and explore their story while I tested cake recipes. By the end I hoped for something to chew on … and some food for thought.

  I first encountered the almond cake recipe attributed to Mary Todd while casually flipping through a cookbook of presidential favorites. I have to admit that I was surprised. The recipe didn’t make any sense for an 1840s cake. Some of the ingredients were wrong, the method suspect, and the history tenuous.

  I’ve spent countless days along with barrels of flour, bushels of cornmeal, several firkins of butter, gallons of molasses, and clutches of eggs, cooking from nineteenth-century recipes. I’ve learned a thing or two along the way, and when I saw baking powder listed as an ingredient in what would have been a pre–Civil War recipe, I knew it could not be the real deal.

  Baking powder was invented before the war. Some sources date it to the late 1840s. But it wasn’t commonly called for in cookbook ingredients until the 1870s. There may have been a lag between appearing in print and typical home use, but baking powder didn’t show up in the lists of available products in midwestern grocery store newspaper advertisements either. Other commercial leavening ingredients—starting with saleratus, then baking soda, and finally cream of tartar—showed up with regularity beginning in the 1840s. When home cooks stirred the latter two ingredients together into their batters, they made the equivalent of baking powder.

  Period cookbooks specified other homemade ways to make cakes light: yeast sponges left over from bread baking mixed in with sweet ingredients; pearl ash, made by filtering water through fireplace ashes and then concentrating it (as I discussed in Chapter 2); and the much simpler and faster technique of using well-beaten egg whites.

  It is no wonder that baking powder in that ingredient list incited my curiosity. I looked in a few other modern presidential recipe collections and online. The same almond cake recipe kept showing up in the Lincoln section. Always with the same provenance. The recipe was one prepared by famed Lexington confectioner Monsieur Girard in 1825 when General Lafayette came through town. The stories said that the Todd family so enjoyed the cake that Monsieur Girard shared the recipe with them. Sorry, not even a French caterer in the sophisticated town of Lexington would have had access to baking powder in 1825. The recipes I kept seeing could not be authentic.

  So, if Mary served such a cake to Mr. Lincoln, as she always called him in public, what would it really have been like? How could I make an authentic almond cake today?

  After my disappointing foray into modern sources, I hoped my favorite early-nineteenth-century cookbook author would have the answer. Miss Eliza Leslie wrote several cookbooks. Of the three I own, one is a very handy reprint of Miss Leslie’s first book, Seventy-Five Receipts for Pastry, Cakes, and Sweetmeats. Published in Philadelphia in 1828, it was just the right place to start. Miss Leslie offered two possible almond cakes. One of them was even called “French Almond Cake.” For good measure I consulted Mrs. Lettice Bryan’s 1839 The Kentucky Housewife. Mrs. Bryan offered an almond cake similar to Miss Leslie’s version and an almond pound cake that seemed almost foolproof.

  All four of these recipes are what we Minnesotans call “spendy.” They use expensive ingredients and lots of them: sweet and bitter almonds, the finest loaf sugar. When I first looked at the recipes I was skeptical. One called for fourteen eggs, another used twenty-two, and neither one of them had a lot of flour. But then I realized these were essentially early versions of angel food or chiffon cakes. I also reminded myself of my cooking-from-period-sources mantra: Always trust the original recipe. I am certainly glad I did for these cakes.

  These are rich people’s cakes, just the sort of thing you would expect to find in the Edwards home. The stately home of Ninian Edwards and his wife stood with a few others on a hill overlooking the village of Springfield. These houses were described by an 1840 visitor as being “showy edifices, the principal expense of which seems to have been their decoration, standing rather proudly apart from the throng of neat but humble mansions.” The Edwards family stood apart as well. Ninian, son of the late first governor of Illinois, was an attorney and a member of the Illinois State Legislature. His wife, Elizabeth, Mary’s sister, was the eldest child of Robert Todd, a wealthy Kentucky banker and Whig party political activist. Both Elizabeth and Mary were well educated, encouraged to participate in the political functions that filled their childhood Lexington home and to speak their minds.

  In Illinois the Edwards home was filled with the best of Springfield society. After the city became the state capital, Ninian and Elizabeth Edwards served as hosts for the legislators, judges, and state officers at four receptions a year. They regularly entertained friends, relatives, and everyone who was anyone in town.

  As early as 1831, grocery stores in Springfield carried a wide range of luxury goods, just what the community needed to serve the very best at all those parties. Hosts could take their entertaining inspirations from national magazines. William Manning’s bookstore sold subscriptions for magazines including the Saturday Evening Post and, all-important to the women in the Edwards/Todd family, Godey’s Lady’s Book. By 1835 mail from St. Louis arrived every day. By 1840 progress and prospects continued to improve. Springfield cooks had their choice of staples and fancy groceries from a score of merchants.

  Even though the streets were paved in thick, sticky mud instead of gold every time it rained, people continued to pour into town. More than a hundred new buildings were built in the summer of 1840 and again in 1841. The air would have been filled with the sound of banging hammers and scented with sweet, fresh sawdust and acrid, drying plaster.

  Springfield in the 1840s was a community of contrasts, and those differences complicated the Lincoln-Todd courtship. From their hilltop mansion Ninian and Elizabeth Edwards could look down on Springfield—literally and figuratively. And that lofty perspective may have created problems for Mary and Abraham. Mary could have known her plans for marriage lay with Abraham Lincoln and he could have seen in her a woman who could challenge him and be his intellectual partner. But the Edwardses might only have seen a backwoods legislator and lawyer who was not Mary’s equal. She spoke French and loved fine things. He was reserved in society and his clothes seldom fit properly. Still, the attraction was evident and powerful. Elizabeth Edwards described their interaction when Abraham came calling on Mary. “I have happened in the room where they were sitting often & often Mary led the conversation. Lincoln would listen & gaze on her as if drawn by some superior power, irresistibly so: he listened—never scarcely said a word.”

  It appears that Lincoln came calling on Mary frequently, joining the other eligible men of Springfield society in the home on the hill. The quantity of letters she received during her 1840 summer visit with her Uncle David in Columbia, Missouri, amply demonstrated the diligence of many of her suitors. Lincoln was out of Springfield for much of the spring and summer of 1840, too. He traveled among the communities along the central Illinois court circuit and gave political speeches for Whig candidates in the southern counties of the state. Mary and Lincoln met once during the summer when he stopped in Columbia during his speaking tour, and reading between the lines of Mary’s letter to her best friend, Mercy Levering, suggests that Abraham was one of her correspondents whose letters may have been unexpected as they “were entirely unlooked for.”

  The entreaties of various distinguished beaux introduced by relatives didn’t sway Mary. She wrote Mercy, “My hand will never be given, where my heart is not.” Elizabeth Edwards recounted another of Mary’s opinions on the man she would marry. “I would rather marry a good man—a man of the mind—with a hope and bright prospects ahead
for position—fame & power than to marry all the houses—gold & bones in the world.”

  In the fall, when the Illinois legislature opened its session on November 23, 1840, Lincoln and Mary were both in town and, the history suggests, keeping serious company, for by the end of the year the two were known to be engaged. Lincoln was nearly thirty-two and launched on his political and legal career. Mary, who had just turned twenty-two years on December 13, 1840, clearly demonstrated that she knew her mind, what she wanted, and how to get it.

  Some writers have called Mary’s almond cake a “courting cake.” It may well be that the delicate texture and light almond flavor with a hint of lemon loosened Lincoln’s tongue enough for him to speak of his deep feelings. If so, this was a cake that was definitely worth the expense and the time to make it.

  Certainly the bakers in the Edwards household could have afforded and could have found the ingredients for a fancy almond cake such as Miss Leslie’s French almond cake. Having the time and the energy to make it was another matter. In 1840 Ninian and Elizabeth Edwards were raising two children under five. There isn’t any clear indication that Elizabeth had household help other than her sister Mary. There were not any live-in women other than family documented in the 1840 census. The 1850 census did show an Irish girl, Alice Fogerty, in the home. Mrs. Edwards may have had hired day help with laundry, cleaning, and other chores essential to keeping house and entertaining. Elizabeth was recognized as a good cook. I think she and Mary would have made this special almond cake.

  Following Miss Leslie’s almond cake recipe was a two-day process, beginning with preparing the almonds. Both the sweet and bitter almonds needed to be blanched by dipping them in boiling water, then cooling them so the brown skins could be slipped off easily. Next Miss Leslie instructs the baker to pound the nuts to a paste, preferably one at a time in a mortar and pestle. She suggests, “Prepare them, if possible, the day before the cake is made.”

  The Kentucky Housewife pound cake is easier to make as it is much like a standard cake recipe today: cream the butter and sugar, add the dry ingredients alternating with wet ones. But Miss Leslie’s and the other egg-dependent recipe in Kentucky Housewife are for expert cake makers. For the 1840s novice baker, risks of failure were high. Miss Leslie cautioned, “Unless you are provided with proper and convenient utensils and materials, the difficulty of preparing cakes will be great, and in most instances a failure; involving disappointment, waste of time and useless expense.” In short, if the effort of whipping the egg whites into stiff peaks didn’t give you the vapors, uncertainty about baking temperatures and times was likely to result in a case of the fantods.

  Reinforcing the precision and difficulty of these almond cake recipes, the ingredients are listed by weight, not cups, or by approximations commonly found in period recipes such as “butter the size of an egg.” Both of these almond cake recipes specify types of baking pans, rare for cookbooks of this era. The French almond cake is to be baked in a turban mold, while The Kentucky Housewife version specified a square pan and a brick oven. One could bake the pound cake in a Dutch or reflector oven on the fireplace hearth, but the fancier versions relied on stiffly beaten egg whites to make a light, lovely cake. If this cake were hit by the slightest draft while baking, the egg whites would fall and cause the cake to collapse. Care was taken when cooling the cakes as well, or they would sink even though they were perfectly baked.

  Clearly not only did the period cook need to be an expert baker with a set of scales, she needed a kitchen with a brick oven at the very least. The Edwardses might have installed one of the new cast-iron stoves that Springfield newspapers advertised. One old-time Springfield resident, Judge Samuel D. Lockwood, recalled these innovations in a letter written about this time. His family in the neighboring town of Jacksonville installed “a new invention today, my dear Mary [his wife], called a cooking stove; it is said to be a panacea for all evils, but in my opinion it will not work.”

  Fortunately, I have a lovely electric oven, can buy my almonds already blanched, and can use my food processor to turn them into a paste. Not having arms strengthened by beating carpets, riding horses, churning butter, or stirring up cakes, I use my electric mixer to whip egg whites and mix batters.

  But what about those bitter almonds? I’ve watched enough mysteries to know that when the detective sniffs around the mouth of the murder victim, he is likely to mutter something along the lines of, “Aha! A faint smell of almonds. Must be poison.” Bitter almonds are, in fact, poisonous and cannot be sold in the United States. Their flavor is much stronger than that of the sweet almonds we can buy. Extract companies do have a process to safely make flavoring from the bitter almond. I used pure almond extract when testing the recipes, while increasing the amount of sweet almonds to maintain the balance of wet and dry ingredients.

  My friends have had to eat dozens of slices of almond cake in an effort to determine which one fits the description Abraham Lincoln gave Mary Todd’s cake, “the best cake I ever ate.” They didn’t complain. In the end I couldn’t decide and included recipes for Miss Eliza Leslie’s French almond cake and Mrs. Lettice Bryan’s almond pound cake at the end of the chapter.

  Sometime in the late fall of 1840, Mary and Abraham had made their decision, too. They became engaged. But the engagement was short lived. Something happened on New Year’s Day 1841 to change the course of their romance. In Springfield the New Year’s Day custom was to exchange house visits of celebration. As their friends and neighbors gathered in the Edwards parlor, it would have been natural to announce wedding plans, or at least to toast the happy couple. Instead Abraham Lincoln was to call it “that fatal first of Jan’y.”

  The engagement was broken off, perhaps because of an insecurity on Lincoln’s part that he could give Mary the life she deserved, perhaps because of Mary’s possible flirtations with other suitors. Perhaps there was anger between them, or family pressure from Elizabeth, and especially Ninian Edwards, who was Mary’s legal guardian. Mrs. Edwards suggested family concerns as the cause of the rupture in her terse interviews with William Herndon. “Mr. Edwards & myself after the first crush of things told Mary & Lincoln that they had better not ever marry—that their natures, mind—education—raising etc. were so different they could not live happy as husband and wife.”

  Lincoln became immediately despondent, so much so that his friends feared for his sanity. He soon apologized for his behavior, saying, “I have within the last few days, been making a most discreditable exhibition of myself.” Lincoln returned to his responsibilities in the legislature after a week, although he continued in a melancholy state of mind.

  We know less of Mary’s true feelings. She seemed to have carried on, holding her head high through the winter social season. However, from her words in the letter she wrote to Mercy Levering in June, Mary suffered from the dissolution of the engagement, too. She wrote that she “was left in the solitude of my own thoughts, and some lingering regrets over the past, which time alone can overshadow with its healing balm.”

  Even though Mary and Abraham didn’t see each other during all of 1841 and into the following year, they were aware of events in each other’s lives. In March 1842, Lincoln was still deeply affected by the estrangement, but he expressed relief that Mary seemed, at long last, to be of glad heart. “I cannot but reproach myself for even wishing to be happy while she is otherwise. She accompanied a large party on the Rail Road cars to Jacksonville last Monday; and on her return, spoke, so I heard of it, of having enjoyed the trip exceedingly.”

  Springfield was a small town and the social circles of Mary Todd and Abraham Lincoln were even smaller. By the spring of 1842 mutual friends of the two decided it was time to bring them together again. Mrs. Simeon Francis, wife of the Sangamo Journal editor, cleverly invited both Abraham and Mary to her home without telling them, or anyone else, that they would meet. The couple must have picked up where they had left off eighteen months or so earlier.

  More than twenty y
ears later, six months into her widowhood, Mary Lincoln wrote about an incident during that secret engagement period. Josiah Gilbert Holland had sent her a copy of his book The Life of Abraham Lincoln. In it he had revealed very publicly the event the Lincolns had pledged never to discuss in public—the duel Abraham Lincoln nearly fought, in part, to protect Mary Todd. The event is instructive. It highlights Mary’s political interest and involvement and Lincoln’s devotion. It was a bit of youthful and political fun gone awry, and Lincoln’s actions demonstrate both the consequences of his youthful, sometimes careless, wit and the price he was willing to pay to correct it.

  In February 1842, the state bank of Illinois collapsed, making the paper currency it had issued worthless. When state taxes came due, James Shields, the Democratic state auditor, refused to accept that currency, saying the taxes must be paid in silver. Lincoln, a member of the opposing Whig Party, saw this declaration as an opportunity to make political points and to poke some fun at Shields, an intemperate dandy who also fancied himself as a ladies man.

  Springfield newspapers commonly published letters written in the character of rural, unsophisticated voters to make political points. Lincoln, adopting the voice of “Rebecca,” a semiliterate widow who lived in “Lost Township,” sent in a letter to the Sangamo Journal. Writing of the troubles her farmer neighbor would have paying his taxes, Rebecca then attacked the character of Shields, ridiculing him as “a conceity dunce” for whom “truth is out of the question.” In the letter Lincoln also “quoted” Shields’s conversation with a group of young women. “Dear girls. It is distressing, but I cannot marry you all. Too well I know how much you suffer; but do, do remember, it is not my fault that I am so handsome and so interesting.”