Abraham Lincoln in the Kitchen Read online

  I put the hominy grains in a large bowl and filled it with water. I stirred the grains with my fingers and watched the cracked-off germ bits rise, if not completely to the surface of the water at least to the top of the sinking grains. I was able to whoosh and pick out most of the germ. Now, time to cook!

  There are two cooking steps: swelling the grains and then frying them. I coaxed the hominy to plumpness in a slow cooker, covering the cup of grains with three cups of water and setting it on low. Several hours later the shattered hominy shards were almost back to the size of the original whole kernels. I drained off the remaining water and patted the hominy dry between paper towels. I couldn’t wait to taste. I put some in a bowl with a bit of butter and shared with my husband. He had the best description of its somewhat elusive, delicious flavor and texture: “It’s like liquid popcorn.”

  Frying the hominy in butter until it turned golden added a nice crisp layer to the slightly chewy grains. The flavor is mild and certainly corn-like. There is a subtle sweetness. It is easy to see why pioneers hungered for this hominy and why city folk who happened upon it wrote of its fine qualities.

  Still, making hominy this way is a lot of work. I looked at the sack of coarsely ground cornmeal I used for my corn dodgers and wondered if I could skip the pounding. Would this easily available corn product work? A few hours later I had my answer. By golly, it did. I did have some preparation work to do, however. The cornmeal I use is ground with the hulls on and the germ attached. I sifted the cornmeal through a fairly fine kitchen sieve to remove particles smaller than about one-quarter the size of a grain of long-grain rice, smaller than the cracked corn Lincoln, other pioneers, and I made, maybe half or even quarter the size, depending on how much pestle “oomph” was applied.

  I put the more finely milled cornmeal that had come through the sieve to the side for use the next time I made corn bread or Johnnycakes. I then put about a half cup of the corn remaining in the sieve into a two-quart bowl, filled the bowl with water, and stirred gently with my fingers as I had done with my home-pounded version. The hull chaff and some of the germ floated to the top. I tipped the bowl slightly and whooshed it off. Then I let my slow cooker, filled with water, do the rest of the work. After four hours or so, the grains had swollen up about four times, to about the size of a grain of rice. I drained them and put them in the refrigerator after taking a forkful to test. This version had the same nice light corn flavor, but it had a bit of a bite to it. The texture was starchier, so instead of cooking up easily into individual grains, it could be made into a corn cake that would hold together when carefully flipped. Definitely not mush.

  On Christmas morning I put a dab of butter into my frying pan and patted out a flat cake of my newly made hominy. Crusted golden brown after about ten minutes over a slow fire, I gently flipped it over and browned the other side. It was, indeed, a delight … and the beginning of a new holiday breakfast tradition. As to gifts under the tree, I might just spend some summer afternoons pounding up some posole grains to package for an authentic experience.

  In the fourteen months between Nancy Lincoln’s death on October 5, 1818, and Thomas Lincoln’s marriage to Sarah Bush Johnston on December 2, 1819, Abraham and his sister, Sarah, probably made many pots of hominy as well as other common cornmeal dishes, Johnnycake, hoecake, cornmeal mush, owendow, and various types of simple corn breads made largely from cornmeal. Sometimes, depending on the seasonal produce from the farm, they might have made the bread with eggs, milk, and butter, but seldom would they have used wheat flour. Dennis Hanks reported that on the farm the family raised corn and “sum wheat enuf for a cake on Sunday.”

  Life was very different in the Lexington, Kentucky, household of the Todd family as it faced the same tragedy, the mother’s death. Children had died in both families as well. Lincoln’s younger brother lived three days. Mary’s younger brother died at the age of two, when she was four years old. Two year later, in 1825, Mary’s mother died within days after giving birth to George, her seventh child in twelve years of marriage. In the motherless Todd household, the remaining six children didn’t have the responsibilities that had fallen to Abraham and his sister, Sarah. Mary’s eight-year-old brother, Levi, didn’t have to do chores. Her two older sisters, Elizabeth, age twelve, and Frances, age ten, didn’t have to manage the household or watch over the younger children—Mary, then six, Ann, age one, and the baby.

  The Todd household was affluent and owned slaves. Mary’s maternal grandmother lived in a large house on the same block. By most accounts, Robert Smith Todd, Mary’s father, was largely absent from home. The job of raising his children fell to their grandmother, his sisters, and the slaves who kept the house running. Mammy Sally, as she was called by the family, was part nursemaid and part disciplinarian. A woman called “Old Chaney” was the cook, Nelson served at table and did the marketing, and Jane was another member of the household. Details of life in the Todd household are scarce, but it is not hard to imagine that the children might wander through the kitchen and sit for a spell watching Old Chaney prepare food. There is one suggestion of such closeness. When Mary was thirteen, she rode her new pony out to the home of renowned Whig politician Henry Clay on a lark. Clay had been a visitor to the politically connected Todd home. She is quoted as saying, “Mammy will be wild! When I put salt in her coffee this morning she called me a limb of Satan.”

  Corn-based breads would have been different in the Todd household as well. In a thriving city with fancy bakeries turning out elaborate cakes for society parties and political events, wheat flour would have been a common staple in most upper-class kitchens. As a recipe for “Superior Johnny-Cakes” from Goshen, New York, printed in the Albany Cultivator and reprinted in the Tennessee Farmer in 1836 noted, “The addition of wheat flour will be found to be a great improvement in the art of making these cakes. Those who have not eggs will find it will do very well without.”

  Similarly, the recipe for cornmeal rusk from Farmer and Gardener, also reprinted in Tennessee Farmer, is described as “among the many delicacies in the form of bread, which render the enjoyment of breakfast so acceptable, we know of none more deserving of notice than the one prepared according to the following recipe.”

  Mary’s father eventually remarried. His second wife had all she could do raising her own eight children born between 1828 and 1841. Willful Mary went to a local boarding school and a French academy in Lexington, coming home for the weekends and holidays. Her oldest sister, Elizabeth, was the first to head to Springfield after her 1832 marriage to Ninian Edwards, son of the governor of Illinois, who had come east to study at Lexington’s Transylvania University. The other three daughters from the first marriage, Frances, Mary, and then Ann, joined Elizabeth in the free state and married Illinois men.

  Some of the recipes from Old Chaney’s kitchen may have followed them there to become part of the comfort of home.

  CORN DODGERS

  Texture and taste set the corn dodger apart from ordinary corn bread. When made with stone-ground cornmeal, true dodgers have a crisp crust with a tender interior. The satisfying deep corn flavor makes them wonderful alongside a bowl of soup, or enjoyed just plain.

  CHOOSE STONE-GROUND CORNMEAL: “Stone-ground” cornmeal is ground between two stones, a traditional process that produces a coarser meal with the kernel’s hull and germ mostly intact. Most cooks find that stone-ground cornmeal has a more pronounced “corn” flavor than regular mass-produced cornmeal, which is ground with metal rollers. The nutritious hull and germ have been removed from regular cornmeal and the texture is usually finer. Stone-ground cornmeal is more perishable and should be stored in the refrigerator or freezer.

  2 cups coarse cornmeal, preferably stone-ground

  ½ teaspoon salt

  1 tablespoon melted butter or bacon drippings, plus more for cooking dodgers

  1 ½ cups boiling water

  ⅓ cup regular cornmeal, optional

  Mix the coarse cornmeal and salt in a mixin
g bowl. Make a well in the center and pour in the butter or drippings. Pour the boiling water over the fat and stir carefully and thoroughly. Set aside to cool, 20 to 30 minutes. This should make a loose dough that you can form into dodgers shaped like ears of corn. Cornmeals vary, so you may need to add a bit more water or, if the mixture is too wet, add up to ¼ cup regular cornmeal. In making these additions, begin by adding less than you think necessary.

  TO COOK ON THE STOVETOP: Form the dodgers by placing about 2 tablespoons of dough in the palm of one hand and gently press the dough into an oval about 2 inches long and 1 inch wide. Put an 8- to 10-inch skillet over medium-high heat. When hot, melt about 1 tablespoon butter or drippings in the pan. Carefully place 6 of the formed dodgers in the hot skillet; don’t crowd them. Lower the heat and cook until the bottoms are browned and the tops are firm and dry, about 8 to 10 minutes. Turn over carefully and finish cooking until browned on both sides, another 5 to 7 minutes. Repeat these steps with the remaining dodgers.

  TO BAKE: Preheat the oven to 425°F. Grease a baking sheet well. Form the dodgers as described above. Bake until firm throughout, about 15 to 20 minutes.

  TIP FOR SUCCESS: You can’t rush corn dodgers. Patience will produce better results. You have to allow time first for the cornmeal–hot water mixture to cool and swell and then for the dodgers to cook through in the skillet. I’ve had them take as long as 12 minutes on a side.

  Makes about 18 corn dodgers

  RE-CREATED FROM PERIOD SOURCES.

  EGG CORN BREAD

  This corn bread emerges with a slightly crinkled crust and a moist, yet crumbly texture. The rich, egg taste rounds out the hearty corn flavors for the kind of bread Mary Lincoln would have remembered fondly from her childhood.

  ¾ cup water

  ¼ cup coarse cornmeal, preferably stone-ground

  2 large eggs, separated

  1 cup milk

  1 cup regular cornmeal

  ½ teaspoon salt, or less to taste

  ¼ teaspoon baking soda

  1 tablespoon butter, melted

  In a saucepan, bring the water to a simmer. Gradually stir in the coarse cornmeal and cook over low heat until it thickens, about 10 minutes. Set this cornmeal mush aside until cool, 20 to 30 minutes.

  Preheat the oven to 350°F. Generously grease a deep, 9-inch round baking dish. Transfer the cooled cornmeal mush to a mixing bowl. Combine the egg yolks and milk and stir into the mush with a whisk or fork until the mixture is smooth. Add the regular cornmeal, salt, baking soda, and melted butter. Mix well. Beat the egg whites until they form soft peaks and fold into the batter. Pour the batter into the prepared baking dish.

  Bake until the bread is firm in the center and starts to pull away from the sides of the pan, about 40 to 50 minutes. Loosen the edges from the pan while still warm. Cool before slicing.

  Makes 1 round loaf, to serve 6 to 8

  ADAPTED FROM PERIOD SOURCES.

  LINCOLN’S GINGERBREAD MEN

  In all of his writings, Abraham Lincoln didn’t say much about food, but his evocation of gingerbread men may well have set his national political career on the right path.

  At the first debate with Stephen A. Douglas in 1858, Lincoln used a childhood incident to partially defuse the very ugly Senate campaign tactics. A boisterous and partisan crowd of ten thousand, two-thirds of them hearty Lincoln supporters, filled Lafayette Square in Ottawa, Illinois, on August 21. Douglas spoke first for sixty minutes, then Lincoln for ninety, with Douglas returning to the platform for a thirty-minute rejoinder. As each man spoke, the audience interrupted with “cheers and laughter” and shouts of “yes, yes” and “Go get him.” Douglas addressed the crowd using his typical unctuous style, praising his opponent for his accomplishments to the point of near mockery and then turning the rhetoric to a harsh and misleading attack on Lincoln’s policy positions. When it was Lincoln’s turn to address the crowd, he strongly defended his policy stance but then began telling a gentle anecdote that turned out to be a verbal assault on Douglas with an artfully vigorous “wink and a nod” to the audience so they were in on the joke, too.

  Douglas had misrepresented Lincoln’s stance on slavery, suggesting that he would “set the states at war with one another” over the issue. Rather than counterattack, Lincoln feigned bewilderment that the well-regarded Douglas would so misstate his positions and so he had been blindsided by the compliments Judge Douglas had heaped upon him. “I was not very accustomed to flattery and it came the sweeter to me. I was rather like the Hoosier, with the gingerbread, when he said he reckoned he loved it better than any other man, and got less of it.”

  Reportedly this story about his Hoosier friend wanting to eat gingerbread men charmed that Illinois audience, and also impressed the thousands of readers of the newspaper accounts. Six years later in the White House, Lincoln expanded the gingerbread story, giving a personal context as he recalled an incident from his Indiana boyhood.

  Once in a while my mother used to get some sorghum and ginger and make some gingerbread. It wasn’t often and it was our biggest treat. One day I smelled the gingerbread and came into the house to get my share while it was hot. My mother had baked me three gingerbread men. I took them under a hickory tree to eat them. There was a family that lived near us that was a little poorer than we were and their boy came along as I sat down.

  “Abe,” he said, “gimme a man?”

  I gave him one. He crammed it in his month in two bites and looked at me while I was biting the legs from my first one.

  “Abe,” he said, “gimme that other’n.”

  I wanted it myself, but I gave it to him and as it followed the first I said to him. “You seem to like gingerbread.”

  “Abe,” he said, “I don’t suppose there’s anybody on this earth likes gingerbread better’n I do.” He drew a long breath before he added, “and I don’t suppose there’s anybody on this earth gets less’n I do.”

  Lincoln’s anecdote gives great clues not only to how his mother would have made gingerbread men, but also about life in the early days of Indiana statehood.

  The Lincolns moved to Indiana two months before Abraham’s eighth birthday and just about the time the state was officially admitted to the Union on December 11, 1816. His father, Thomas, had scouted and claimed 160 acres that fall, probably marking the corners of his new farm with piles of brush, as was the custom, and quickly building a lean-to shelter before heading back about fifty miles southeast to fetch his family.

  The move assured that Thomas Lincoln would own this farm in a state newly admitted to the Union. Titles to the two different farms he had purchased in Kentucky had been disputed, with Lincoln ultimately losing the land. Thomas and his wife, Nancy, must have felt that owning land with certainty in a free state was worth uprooting their two children, Sarah, almost ten, and Abraham, nearly eight, from school and community. Lincoln also left behind forty bushels of corn harvested from his productive Knob Creek land near Elizabethtown, Kentucky. It would be some time before the Indiana crops would be as bountiful. The new land was forested. The family even had to cut their way through saplings, trees, and tangles of wild grapevines the last few miles to the farm from the path-like township road.

  Thomas Lincoln’s family was among the first in that section, then two counties east from the southern tip of Indiana, although family would soon follow. Vincennes, sixty miles northwest, was the nearest big city. It would be two years before James Gentry settled two miles west of the Lincoln farm, opening up his store. Eventually the town was named for him—Gentryville. Troy, about fourteen miles southeast on the Ohio River, served as the Lincolns’ market town for the first few years. They took corn there to be ground and traded for supplies they could not make or grow.

  In October 1818 Nancy Lincoln went to help care for her aunt Elizabeth Sparrow, who had become sick on their neighboring farm. While there, Nancy, too, drank the poisoned milk, contaminated when cows grazed on toxic white snakeroot. She died in a few days from the
“milk sickness,” as did her aunt and uncle. A year later Thomas traveled back to Kentucky and returned with his new wife, Sarah Johnston. The two families had known each other in Elizabethtown. Sarah’s husband had died just before the Lincolns moved north. She had three children, two of them about the same ages as the Lincoln children, Sarah and Abraham, now almost thirteen and eleven. It made sense in the pioneer days of the 1810s to combine the families.

  The gingerbread parable is appealing whether Nancy or Sarah made Abraham’s treat. He referred to them both as “mother.” But I’m willing to bet that Nancy made those men. There were just two children during her days at the kitchen hearth. After Sarah moved in there were six children in the household including Dennis Hanks, a twice-orphaned Lincoln cousin whose guardians had been the Sparrows.

  There is a poignancy to the vision of a small boy running to get his share that doesn’t fit as well with an eleven-year-old who was, by most accounts, doing nearly a man’s work in the forest and fields.