Abraham Lincoln in the Kitchen Read online

  Lincoln’s gingerbread recipe is one Nancy would have known in her heart and her hands. Abraham would have known it, too. Growing up in a one-room log cabin he was, essentially, raised in the kitchen. Not only would young Lincoln have watched food being cooked, he would have harvested and prepared some of the ingredients and probably learned to cook for himself, too.

  However, I did need a recipe, so I consulted several period cookbooks, using Lincoln’s description as a guide. I have three cookbooks by Miss Eliza Leslie of Philadelphia, perhaps the most well-known early- to mid-nineteenth-century cookbook writer. Some of her books are available as modern reprints or online. I do have two original volumes, one the same 1845 edition Mary Lincoln purchased. Mrs. Lettice Bryan’s The Kentucky Housewife, published in 1839, has recipes with their origins right in Lincoln country. I pulled other resources off my bookshelf and from the stacks of photocopies of magazine and agricultural journal pages dating from the 1830s through the 1860s.

  The ingredients Lincoln didn’t mention are as important as the two he did. We’re used to gingerbread as a mixed-spice cake. I usually make gingerbread flavored with ginger, cinnamon, and cloves. Some gingerbreads have nutmeg or mace; even allspice may turn up in the recipe. Almost all have molasses as the syrupy sweetener. I had hoped to find a period recipe using just ginger and sorghum. I did find a couple that were simply spiced with ginger, but none called for sorghum.

  Miss Leslie’s 1828 recipe for “Common Gingerbread,” from her first cookbook, seemed like the best one to try. It is closest to the time period, uses very simple ingredients, and is spiced only with ginger. She made her gingerbread with flour, butter, milk, a hint of brown sugar, ginger, pearl ash, and molasses.

  Lincoln specified sorghum, which is different from molasses. The flavor it brings is subtle, sweet, and aromatic without dominating. As my southern friends say, it is “truly fine.” Sorghum would nicely balance the single spice, ginger.

  Sorghum syrup, which you can usually find next to molasses in larger grocery stores, comes from the tall, broad-leafed sorghum plant that looks somewhat like corn when it is growing in the fields, only without the ears. For someone with a bit of time and a very big kettle, the syrup is relatively easy to make. Sorghum stalks are crushed, releasing the juice, which is strained to remove impurities and then cooked down in large kettles, evaporating excess water much like maple sap is made into syrup. It takes about twelve hours to make syrup from the juice. An acre of sorghum can produce 150 gallons of syrup.

  Although sorghum is a farm product, it was rare in the United States before the 1850s. Farmers grew some sorghum in the South beginning in the 1700s, when seeds were imported from Africa. In 1850 a new strain was imported from France, and the crop took off. I’ve not seen it mentioned in recipes published through the 1850s; they all call for molasses. So Lincoln’s mother’s use of sorghum would have been unusual for the era. The Kentucky Housewife even specifies, “West Indian molasses, not sugar house” for its gingerbread. Most molasses is a by-product of sugar processing. As the juice extracted from the sugarcane is boiled, the pure white sugar crystallizes. In the 1800s the crystals were molded into a cone shape for sale. As the process continues, brown sugar crystallizes, with dark brown sugar having a higher molasses content than light brown. Finally, the remaining molasses is poured off. The last bit of molasses left in the bottom of the barrel, called “black strap,” is the strongest.

  The other ingredient Lincoln said his mother “used to get” was ginger, a product of the Caribbean. Ginger is grown for its tuberous root, used fresh or dried and then ground to make the spice. The first shipment of ginger from Jamaica to northern Europe was in 1585. Recipes for gingerbread published before the 1840s, including the recipe I used from Miss Leslie, require a lot of ginger. “Large spoonful” or a “third of a tea cup” were common measurements. By the 1850s, cookbooks call for far less, more in keeping with today’s amounts measured in teaspoons. One explanation can be found in the instruction Miss Leslie wrote in the 1845 edition of her cookery book: “Ground ginger loses much of its strength by keeping. Therefore, it will be frequently found necessary to put in more than the quantity given in the receipt.” As I was using modern ginger, I adapted the recipe by using a smaller quantity of the spice.

  Pearl ash is a period-specific ingredient in Miss Leslie’s recipe, but it has a readily acceptable substitute—baking soda. I’ve always simply substituted modern baking soda for pearl ash or saleratus, the substance that followed it. These powders react with acidic ingredients, such as molasses or sour milk, to make the batters bubbly and cakes bake up light.

  No one knows if the Lincolns made pearl ash on their farm, but they could have. The raw material, clear-cut trees, was all around them. Six generations ago, before the Revolutionary War, my Scots-Irish relatives emigrated from Donegal, Ireland, settling on the western Pennsylvania frontier. Then in 1840, great-great-grandparents John and Mary Fails moved farther west to the Pennsylvania-Ohio state line. There, like the Lincolns, they settled on a heavily wooded farm. And there the Fails made “black salts,” the first step to making pearl ash.

  The process for clearing a forested farm hadn’t changed much from colonial days. Whether it was the Lincolns or my Scots-Irish ancestors, the job started with the cold, sharp blade of an ax and finished with fire. Abraham and his father cut down trees and set aside logs for building their cabin and outbuildings, turning into furniture, chopping for firewood, or splitting into fence rails. The remaining branches, logs, and stumps were burned. For the Fails family and others of their time, the ashes from those fires were an important source of revenue.

  I have a yellowed and tattered newspaper clipping from the 1920s in the family album describing their pioneering efforts some seventy-five years earlier. “It is a tradition in the family that after a log heap had burned, if even in the night a storm threatened, the family would hasten to gather the ashes least they should become wet and leached and in this way lose their value.”

  As my great-greats in Pennsylvania knew and as the Lincolns in Indiana would have known, the ashes from all those fires held the keys to making fat congeal into soap and cakes rise. Soaking the ashes in hot water leached out the lye essential for turning leftover rendered pork or beef fat into soap. Two more steps produced pearl ash for leavening purposes. Pioneers turned the liquid lye into solid black salts by boiling it until the water evaporated. Further refining the black salts in a very hot fire, perhaps even in a kiln, burned off all the dark carbon bits, leaving a pure, white ash. Fortunately, we can just dip our measuring spoons into the little orange-and-red box of baking soda.

  I felt confident that Miss Leslie’s 1828 recipe was the right gingerbread to test, but I was still struggling with the best way to make the gingerbread men. I was familiar with two kinds of nineteenth-century gingerbread, what cookbooks sometimes labeled “hard” and “soft.” Hard gingerbread is the kind you get in Colonial Williamsburg, rather flat and baked on a sheet like a cookie. That’s a fine process for a settled community with large brick ovens to put baking sheets into. But I didn’t think the frontier Lincoln cabin would have had a brick oven for the first struggling years. I was skeptical, as well, that Nancy would have had a tin cookie cutter. I also figured she might not have taken the time to cut around the shape with a knife.

  Nancy would certainly have had the essentials of cast-iron cooking equipment—in addition to a regular frying pan, she would have had a “spider,” which was a frying pan that had legs so it could stand over hearth coals. She would have stewed meats or vegetables and baked bread, cake, or pies in a Dutch oven. This covered pot may also have had legs. Its cover has a raised rim to hold hot coals in place on top of the pot so foods cook surrounded by heat. Pioneer cooks rarely had reflector ovens, where the foods rested on a rack facing the fire. Mostly used for roasting meats, a polished piece of metal curved around the back of this rack, reflecting and concentrating the fire’s heat on both sides of the cooking food
.

  Soft gingerbread is cake-like and could be baked easily in a Dutch oven or on the hearth. But how would Nancy make a man from that more liquid batter for hearth baking? Would she have carefully poured the batter into a frying pan, drizzling it off a spoon to form arms, legs, body, and head for a pancake-like version?

  Lincoln’s description of how his friend ate the gingerbread men provided more clues. These gingerbread men had to have the strength to hold their shape while Abraham carried them to where he could sit under the tree, and they had to be soft enough so his friend could cram one “into his mouth in two bites.” I felt like the Three Bears—the pancake version was too soft, the hard gingerbread too tough. Once again, Miss Leslie had an answer that was just right. Her directions for common gingerbread suggested that it was somewhere between the soft cake and the hard gingerbread man cookie. It is a deceptively simple solution for the frontier or modern kitchen. “Put some flour on your paste-board, take out small portions of the dough, and make it with your hand into long rolls. Then curl up the rolls into round cakes or twist two together or lay them into straight lengths or sticks side by side.”

  Or make them into men!

  I found this dough as easy to work as children’s clay. It was very simple to form into men three or four inches high. Perfect for pocket, hands, and mouth. The method Miss Leslie specified for mixing the dough was unexpected as well. Rather than creaming the butter and sugar together, she tells us to cut the butter into the dry ingredients. This is just like making piecrust or biscuits. The flour surrounds the small pieces of cold butter, and, as the food bakes, the melting butter forms a pocket, producing a flaky crust, biscuit, or gingerbread. Simply perfect for baking in a reflector oven, Dutch oven, or even a skillet with a lid to hold in the heat.

  I think this approach is about as close as we can get to Lincoln’s gingerbread men. This recipe fits his description of a gingerbread man sturdy enough to stuff into a pocket and soft enough to gobble up in a couple of bites.

  As delicious as this gingerbread is, it still is a bit understated for the kinds of desserts we’re used to. I wondered how it stacked up to other typical treats of the era and the region. I found a recipe for a more rustic cake I’ve taken to calling “Tennessee Cake,” as the recipe appeared in Tennessee Farmer in 1835. It relies on farm products even more than a gingerbread recipe does, with brown sugar as the only purchased ingredient. Eggs, butter, flour, and cornmeal combine with that bit of brown sugar for a cake that tastes best with a sauce. Once you taste the two of them, it is easy to see why Lincoln’s gingerbread would make a lasting impression on flavor alone.

  GINGERBREAD MEN

  Discover the delicate, mellow taste of sorghum. You’ll find the recipe has just enough sweetness to complement the ginger. This easy recipe is perfect for a delightful afternoon of parent-child baking.

  SORGHUM SYRUP: The amazing sorghum plant looks like corn, but without the ears. A native of China and Africa, sorghum or “broom corn” may have been first brought to the United States by Benjamin Franklin in 1757 for, well, making brooms. Nearly fifty years later, John Skinner described the plant’s productivity in the July 2, 1824, issue of American Farmer. “Cultivated in almost every part of the United States … the seeds are made into nutritious flour for feeding people and pigs.… The stalks are crushed to produce a delightful syrup.”

  A decade before the Civil War, a newer variety of sweet sorghum, “Chinese Amber,” was introduced into the United States with the hopes of reducing the nation’s reliance on imported cane sugar. Sorghum syrup production peaked in the 1880s and declined in the twentieth century in the face of competition from cheaper, less labor-intensive sweeteners. Sorghum syrup tastes like fruity honey with a touch of molasses. Pour sorghum syrup over pancakes and waffles; use it to sweeten baked beans or to replace honey in favorite baked goods. You can usually find a few bottles tucked in among the molasses, corn, and maple syrups in grocery stores.

  ½ cup milk

  ½ cup sorghum syrup or light or dark molasses

  3 ⅓ cups unbleached all-purpose flour

  2 tablespoons packed brown sugar

  ½ teaspoon baking soda

  1 tablespoon ground ginger

  ½ cup (1 stick) cold salted butter

  Preheat the oven to 325°F. Lightly grease 2 baking sheets. Pour the milk into a glass measuring cup. Add the sorghum syrup and stir the two together. In a mixing bowl, combine flour, brown sugar, baking soda, and ginger. Slice the butter into small pieces and cut into the flour mixture with a pastry cutter or 2 knives until the mixture looks like coarse cornmeal. Add the milk-and-sorghum mixture and stir well with a fork or spoon.

  To make gingerbread men about 4 inches high, break off a piece of dough a little larger than a golf ball. Place it on the work surface and roll it lightly under your palms to form a pencil-thin rope of dough about 12 inches long. Break off a 4-inch-long piece and set aside; this will become the arms. Fold the remaining rope in half to form a narrow, upside-down V. Grasp at the folded top, pinch together 1 inch down from the top and twist, forming the head and neck. Place the arm piece across the back under the neck. Gently press to secure. Place on the prepared baking sheet. Repeat these steps with the remaining dough.

  Bake until the cookies are lightly browned, about 15 to 20 minutes. Watch closely as the sorghum or molasses in the dough tends to burn quickly.

  Makes about 18 gingerbread men

  ADAPTED FROM “COMMON GINGERBREAD,” MISS ELIZA LESLIE, SEVENTY-FIVE RECEIPTS FOR PASTRY, CAKES, AND SWEETMEATS, 1828.

  TENNESSEE CAKE

  Wheat was a rare crop in pioneer days because it was harder to grow than corn, a grain that provided food for people and farm animals. This lovely yellow cake stretched precious wheat flour with twice the amount of cornmeal.

  4 large eggs, separated

  4 tablespoons (½ stick) salted butter, at room temperature

  ½ cup packed brown sugar

  ½ cup unbleached all-purpose flour

  ½ cup coarse cornmeal, preferably stone-ground

  ½ cup regular cornmeal

  Vinegar Sauce

  Preheat the oven to 350°F. Grease and flour a 7 × 11–inch baking pan. In a large mixing bowl, using grease-free beaters, beat the egg whites until they form stiff peaks; set aside.

  In a medium mixing bowl, cream the butter and brown sugar. Add the egg yolks and mix well. Combine the flour and cornmeals, then add to butter-and-sugar mixture. Gently fold one-quarter of the beaten egg whites into the batter to lighten it, then fold in the remaining beaten egg whites.

  Pour the batter into the prepared pan. Bake for 20 to 25 minutes or until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean. Let cool. Cut into squares and serve with vinegar sauce.

  Makes 14 servings

  ADAPTED FROM “CAKE,” TENNESSEE FARMER, MARCH 1835.

  VINEGAR SAUCE

  Sauces were common in the nineteenth century to serve over typically firm, slightly dry cakes or with boiled or baked puddings. This thin sauce tastes like lemons, but is made from easily available pioneer ingredients.

  ¾ cup sugar

  2 teaspoons flour

  1 ½ cups water

  1 tablespoon cider vinegar

  1 tablespoon butter

  ¼ teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg

  In a small saucepan, whisk together the sugar and flour. Slowly add the water, whisking constantly. Bring to a boil and cook over medium heat for 10 minutes, stirring from time to time. Remove from the heat and stir in the vinegar, butter, and nutmeg. Let cool. Store in the refrigerator for up to 3 days.

  Makes about 1 ¾ cups sauce, enough for fourteen 2-tablespoon servings

  ADAPTED FROM “A VERY CHEAP SAUCE,” MRS. LETTICE BRYAN, THE KENTUCKY HOUSEWIFE, 1839.

  LIFE ON THE INDIANA FRONTIER

  PAWPAWS, HONEY, AND PUMPKINS

  My childhood’s home I see again,

  And sadden with the view;

  And still, as mem’ries
crowd my brain,

  There’s pleasure in it too.…

  [last verse]

  The very spot where grew the bread

  That formed my bones, I see.

  How strange, old field, on thee to tread,

  And feel I’m part of thee!

  —ABRAHAM LINCOLN, 1846

  More than any other president, Abraham Lincoln was a son of the soil. Most of the first fifteen presidents farmed or owned plantations, as did 80 percent of the nation at the time. Millard Fillmore and James Polk were born in log cabins in what could be considered frontier settings—Fillmore in New York and Polk in North Carolina. Only Lincoln took an ax in his hands and helped chop the family homestead out of the forest.

  The Lincolns lived on their farm near the southwest tip of Indiana for almost fourteen years, arriving from Kentucky in December of 1816 and leaving for Illinois in March 1830. Abraham grew up there. He was nearly eight when they arrived and twenty-one when they left. This was the land that formed him. He wrote a long poem, excerpted above, after a visit to his old neighborhood almost twenty years after the family had moved to Illinois. The sight of that land moved him to consider his past. It moved me, too.

  Lincoln’s farm field is still there. From mid-April through September, the National Park Service works the family’s farm as an 1820s interpretive site. In the early afternoon, two days after Christmas, I was the only visitor. When I walked on the farm 162 years after Lincoln’s visit, I was alone with the spirit of the place. There are a great many stories in this land. Standing there in silence, the wind whispered faintly, seemingly calling to me: notice, remember, consider, and imagine.

  It was an unusually warm day, even for southern Indiana. The rich loamy smell of damp soil, not yet mud slick, lingered in the air. Light filtered through the leafless trees densely foresting much of the site. None of the pictures in the scores of Lincoln books adequately convey the sense of the place.