Abraham Lincoln in the Kitchen Read online

  I walked away from the visitor center across the large open mall toward the American flag flapping on a tall pole. It didn’t take long to climb the gentle flight of steps to the top of the hill. A quick step left onto the path through the trees and I was next to the pioneer cemetery, on what used to be a neighbor’s farm, where Lincoln’s mother, Nancy, is buried. Years after the president’s death, the handsome marble marker was placed over what was thought to be her actual gravesite. Young Abraham and his sister, Sarah, wouldn’t have needed a marker; they would have known just where she lay. Although Sarah (also called Sally) Johnston came to be their warm, kind, and generous stepmother just fourteen months later, seeing the relationship of the cemetery to the farm reinforced in my mind that Lincoln’s “angel mother” was never far from his thoughts.

  It took me just six minutes to walk down the fairly steep slope, across a small gully and onto Lincoln’s land, the cabin reconstruction, and the farm fields. The cabin is on the high point of the land, situated nicely to capture the lightest summer breeze, yet protected from sharp, scouring winds of winter by the cemetery hill. This reconstructed cabin is just a few yards from the original cabin site. Workers for the WPA found the hearthstones in 1931. Today bronze replicas of those stones glimmer faintly at one end, assembled to represent the hearth of the spectral cabin. Others inside the high stone wall outline the footprint of the Lincolns’ 22-x-16-foot home.

  On an early winter day, the historic site is far enough off the beaten tourist path and highways to almost shut out the mechanized hum of modern life. But this silence is misleading. The Lincoln farm was not a shrine frozen in time. There would have been smells and sounds and people. And it was a dynamic place, changing rapidly during the years the family lived there.

  For all the thousands of pages written about Lincoln’s life, the Indiana and earlier Kentucky years are not well documented. Lincoln wrote less than half a page in a seven-page 1860 autobiography, giving scant details beyond his work with an ax and a bit about hunting. Neighbors’ memories collected by William Herndon, Jesse Weik, Ida Tarbell, and others describe daily life, including foods. I’ve resigned myself to the realization that, with the exception of those few specifics mentioned in memoirs, I will never know what Abraham Lincoln ate for the more than fifteen thousand meals cooked on those hearthstones.

  Certainly he would have been eating a lot. As his cousin John Hanks remembered, “Abraham was a hearty eater. Loved good eating. His own mother and step-mother were good cooks for the day and time.”

  My visit to the cabin site was one of those times I really wished I had a time machine. I got so close to feeling the sense of the place while I was walking there alone. I could almost smell the wood fires from neighborhood fireplaces and smokehouses curing meat, hear the thwack of an ax splitting logs, the laughter of children, the voices of cows, horses, chickens—the noises of settled farm life. But wishing alone isn’t enough.

  I began considering as I walked toward the cabin reconstruction. The setting looked well civilized. The cabin and small barn are set neatly near the kitchen garden patch and close to a six-acre field ready and waiting for spring planting. There are other outbuildings in the yard, a clear indication of self-sufficiency and prosperity: smokehouse, corncrib, and a carpentry shop, especially important for Thomas Lincoln’s work as a skilled carpenter who built homes and crafted fine furniture for the Little Pigeon Creek neighborhood. This is the successful farm of 1824 to 1830, near the end of their time in Indiana, “when the Lincolns planted ten acres of corn, five of wheat, two of oats and an acre left to meadow,” as Dennis Hanks told Herndon.

  The trees of “unbroken forest” they encountered in 1816 were gone. So were the “many bears and other animals still in the woods.” Life for the Lincolns on the Hoosier frontier was a time of rapid change. I wanted to find a food approach that would help explain those changes. I have a great many recipes from pioneer sources. Though pioneer cabin cookery is important to understanding the period and the dishes are delightful to taste, there is a much larger story from those fourteen years in Indiana than a set of recipes from hearth and home alone could convey.

  On the way back to the car and the twenty-first century, I considered what I had read in the Herndon memoirs, nineteenth-century agricultural journals, and cookbooks. I realized that three foods—pawpaws, honey, and pumpkins—tell the story of growth from frontier life into established settlement. Each presents a key aspect of the way settlers interacted with nature and how the community and Lincoln grew.

  When the Lincolns hacked their way through the vines and saplings to reach the small clearing and lean- to shelter Thomas had prepared, they were the first settler family on that section of land and one of the first in what would become Spencer County.

  The Lincoln and Hanks families had settled on new land before. Ancestors on both sides arrived in America during the seventeenth century. They had known the challenges and hardships of breaking new territory. Later, as children in Kentucky, both of Lincoln’s parents lost their fathers. Thomas continued to live with his widowed mother. He learned carpentry and farming skills while working for friends and relatives. In 1803 he purchased his first farm. He was twenty-seven years old. Three years later he sold 2,400 pounds of pork and 494 pounds of beef in Elizabethtown trade. Clearly he had learned his lessons well.

  After Nancy’s father died, her mother remarried, and Nancy was raised in the “pleasant and comfortable” home of her elderly maternal uncle and aunt, Richard and Rachael Berry, going to school and learning how to spin and weave. Upon their deaths, she continued to live in the household then headed by her cousin, Richard Berry, Jr. The elder Berry’s tax records and will showed how successful he had become. He had six hundred acres of land, horses, cattle, furniture, and kitchen goods—plates, dishes, pots, kettles, and a Dutch oven. He also owned three slaves—a woman named Nan, her daughter, Hannah, and a boy, Fill.

  So, when Thomas and the family moved into the new state of Indiana, they were drawing upon their own successful pioneering heritage to gain a foothold in a free state of limitless promise. In another poem, “The Bear Hunt,” written about the same time as the lines beginning this chapter, Lincoln described the wildness of that early settlement:

  When first my father settled here.

  ’Twas then the frontier line:

  The Panther’s scream, filled the night with fear

  And bears preyed on the swine.

  Nancy Lincoln’s aunt and uncle, Elizabeth and Thomas Sparrow, with their ward Dennis Hanks, arrived sometime in the fall of 1817. These new Hoosiers, descendants of hardworking farmers, had skills and knowledge to live off the land before their farms were in production. When they left Kentucky for the Indiana frontier, they left behind the possibility of shopping in Elizabethtown, Nancy bartering her eggs for flour, her peaches for spices, or Thomas buying sugar or molasses with coins received for furniture he made and sold. For the first months on the Indiana farmstead, the Lincolns, Sparrows, and their few neighbors would have been pretty much self-sufficient, by necessity living a real lesson in eating locally and seasonally until they could clear farmlands and plant their crops. In short, they were gathering and hunting their food, rather than planting and growing it.

  But what food it was! Reading early Hoosiers’ lists of wild fruits, game, and fish, I was struck by the diverse and healthful supply of food and how much of it I’ve had the luck to eat. Some of the meats common in Lincoln’s forest, such as bear, are virtually impossible to find, and even if you do, according to recent Centers for Disease Control research, bear meat is infested with parasitic trichinous and unsafe to eat. However, you can find rabbit and duck, along with pheasant and venison, even if you aren’t friends with someone who hunts or fishes. Markets carry those meats and a few of the fish as well, especially in the Midwest. Among those freshwater fish listed by Hoosier neighbors were catfish, perch, carp, bass, skipjacks, black fin, suckers, pike, garfish, shovel fish, sturgeons, minnows,
sunfish, eels, and soft-shelled turtles.

  Certainly there was plenty of protein in those first years. Various neighbors recalled Abraham’s skills obtaining it. A. H. Chapman, a neighbor, told Herndon that Lincoln “never cared much for hunting or fishing yet when a youth was successful as a hunter and a fine shot with a Rifle.” E. R. Burba, a neighbor from Kentucky, recounted settlers’ memories of Lincoln and reported that he combined his hunting and woodsman skills. Burba said that Lincoln had a “fondness for fishing and hunting with his dog & axe. When his dog would run a rabbit in a hollow tree he would chop it out.” Transplanted Londoner James Woods described the same behavior. “Rabbits are tolerably plentiful.… They do not burrow in the earth, but when hunted run into the hollow trees so that an axe is necessary in rabbit hunting.”

  J. W. Wartmann, an old Lincoln neighbor, wrote a list of the fruits of the forest there for the gathering: mulberries, hickory nuts, hazelnuts, chestnuts, black walnuts. Elizabeth Crawford, another neighbor, expanded the list: winter grape, fox grape, wild plums, wild cherry, black haw, red haw, crab apple, blackberry, raspberry, gooseberry, dewberry, strawberry, persimmons, and the pawpaw.

  The pawpaw, sometimes called the “Hoosier banana,” is an unusual fruit with a complex, rich, and fragrant flavor, packed with vitamins, minerals, and even amino acids. Pawpaws ripen over a four-week period from August to October depending on where they grow. Ripe fruit is soft and keeps for only two or three days. I’ve tried to imagine the impact this richly flavored fruit would have on a pioneer’s taste. It is the only fruit Dennis Hanks mentioned in his interviews.

  Certainly there were other sweet fruits. Peaches were grown in southern Indiana orchards. Pineapples had been used as the welcome sign in cities along the Gulf and Atlantic coasts since the colonial period. Miss Leslie of Philadelphia has a recipe for preserving pineapple in her 1828 receipt book. Other tropical fruits flourished in Florida in the 1820s as one southern traveler described: “The banana, the plantain, the pine apple [sic], the cocoanut [sic] and most of the tropical fruits flourish.… Figs, oranges, limes, lemons and all varieties of citrons … thrive.” For all this bounty, I’ve not seen any evidence that those fruits could have been common, or even known, in the Mississippi and Ohio River valleys in the 1820s.

  The imperative chorus of an old folk song demonstrates the joy of pawpaws—children run “way down yonder to the pawpaw patch … pickin’ up pawpaws, put ’em in your pockets.” Beyond nutrition, exotic flavor, and delight in eating, I see the pawpaw as a horticultural metaphor for pioneer settlement. One plant’s success becomes the foundation for many more. A single pawpaw sends out runner roots, matting the sub-surface of the soil. These roots send up new trees (technically branches from the same original tree), and soon the single pawpaw has become a patch.

  One settler, James A. Little, wrote in 1905, “We can never realize what a great blessing the pawpaw was to the first settlers.… Well do I remember sixty or more years ago my father would take his gun and basket and go to the woods and return in the evening loaded with pawpaws, young squirrel, and sometimes mushrooms of which he was very fond. There will never be a recurrence of those which were the happiest days of my life.”

  Abraham Lincoln expressed yet another view of pioneer life. He wrote succinctly, “I was raised to farm work, which I continued till I was twenty-two.” He also wrote that his father put an ax into his hands when they arrived in Indiana. Fellow Hoosiers remembered his skill. “His ax would flash and bite into a sugar tree or sycamore, down it would come. If you heard him felling trees in a clearing, you would say there were three men at work.”

  Dennis Hanks recalled those early days, too. “In the winter and spring we cleared ground, made a field of about 6 acres on which we raised our crops. We all hunted pretty much all the time. Especially when we got tired of work—which we did very often, I will assure you. We did not have to go more than 4 or 5 hundred yards to kill deer, turkeys & other wild game. We found bee trees all over the forests.”

  Honey from those bee trees stands in my mind as symbolic of the second stage of settlement. Gathering pawpaws and other fruits and nuts simply made use of nature’s gifts. Harvesting honey from bee trees marked the intrusion and impact of settlers on the land. Honey bees were not native to the United States. Early colonists brought beehives over from Europe. As settlements advanced away from the Atlantic coast, bees flew ahead, staking their own claims, protected from natural predators, in the hollows of dead trees. To reach the honey, bee tree hunters simply chopped the tree down. They shattered and destroyed months, even years, of work by the bee colony in just a few strokes of an ax. Some bee hunters captured the bees as well to establish farmyard hives to pollinate gardens and provide a handy honey harvest.

  I wondered what the honey from those wild and later farm-tended hives tasted like. For years the only honey I ate came from the grocery store. Highly filtered and heated during processing, it’s sweet and almost cloying. I have to confess it has not been my favorite sweetener. Certainly the honey the Lincolns and their neighbors enjoyed would have been different. Then two summers ago my neighbor, Tim, set up a hive in his backyard. Now bees harvest pollen and nectar from my flowers, pear tree, and even the basil plants. I see them all summer long. Sometimes the rubber mat outside my back door is covered with bees harvesting the morning dew. Tim says they need a lot of moisture in the spring and fall. You could say that unheated, lightly filtered honey from Tim’s bees has vintages. Summer honey is light and beguiling, almost with a hint of mint from the linden tree pollen and clover. End-of-season honey is dark and rich with heady floral overtones. The Lincolns must have enjoyed these kinds of honey. And they could have had a lot of it, too. Tim gets about eighty pounds a year from his hive. Those eighty pounds yield twenty-six quarts. Bee trees would have yielded much more.

  Washington Irving wrote about wild bees in an essay published in 1848. He asserted that the “Indians consider them the harbinger of the white man, as the buffalo is of the red man; and say that, in proportion as the bee advances, the Indian and buffalo retire. We are always accustomed to associate the hum of the bee-hive with the farm house and flower garden and to consider these industrious little animals as connected with the busy haunts of man, and I am told that the wild bee is seldom to be met with at any great distance from the frontier.”

  The Lincolns’ Little Pigeon Creek community in Spencer County did grow quickly, pushing back the frontier forest. In 1818, newly married to Thomas Lincoln, Sarah Johnston and her three children moved to Indiana. She brought furniture and household goods from her Elizabethtown city home to civilize this “country that was wild and desolate.”

  By the 1820 census, four years after the Lincolns arrived, there were nine families, including the Lincolns, living within a mile of their farm with forty-nine children: fifteen boys and thirteen girls under seven, and twelve boys and nine girls between seven and seventeen. In another mile radius there were six more families with thirty-four more children. That’s nearly 120 people in the neighborhood, with more and more arriving every year. In 1818 James Gentry moved to the county and set up the first store in the Little Pigeon Creek community. The market community was starting to build, too.

  As the neighborhood changed, so would the food. Farm-produced surpluses of milk, butter, and eggs meant ingredients for baking and extra to barter or trade with merchants for foodstuffs—sugar, spices, coffee, tea—that could not be produced on the farm. Importantly, the community grew by socializing, a national trait that intrigued Englishman Woods:

  Americans seldom do anything without having [a frolic]. They have husking, reaping, rolling frolics. Among the females they have pickling, sewing, and quilting frolics. Reaping frolics are parties to reap the whole growth of wheat etc. in one day. Rolling frolics are clearing wood land when many trees are cut down and into lengths to roll them up together so as to burn them and to pile up the brushwood and roots on the trees. Whiskey is here too, upon request, and they ge
nerally conclude with a dance.

  Lincoln neighbor Elizabeth Crawford recalled some of the foods served at church celebrations. “In the wintertime they would hold church in some of their neighbors houses at such times they were always treated with the utmost kindness. A bottle of whiskey, pitcher of water, sugar and a glass, or a basket of apples or turnips or some pies or cakes.”

  Crawford’s list of special foods told me what was highly prized as a sign of hospitality: whiskey, possibly made in the host’s or a neighbor’s backyard still from local corn mash. Sugar was definitely a purchased item, and the glass used to serve it and the whiskey was a very special piece of tableware, quite a change from hollowed-out gourds or tin cups for everyday drinking. Apples were rare in the early Indiana settlement days. It took three to five years, or longer, for an apple tree to bear fruit. The crisp white flesh of a peeled mild turnip is not that different from a tart apple, if you think about it. Then there were the pies and cakes. Not only were apples in short supply, wheat flour was, too. Cornmeal and corn breads were common, and cake recipes used a mixture of wheat and cornmeal.

  As more and more forest fell to ax and plow, there was less area for wild fruits and nuts to thrive and more people vying to gather them. Game animals would have retreated farther away from the danger of man. Now that the farms were established, the Hoosiers depended upon their cultivated lands to supply food for themselves and their animals. The pumpkin was one of those important foods. Lincoln even recalled that it was his job on the Kentucky farm to plant the pumpkin seeds in every third hill of corn his father planted. Pumpkin vines running among the corn hills gave two crops on the same land.

  This was a new vegetable for Englishman James Woods and one that, for me, is indicative of the maturing of farm life from the wilds of the frontier. Woods wrote for his readers back home, “Pompions are another highly prized production of this country. They often grow to an immense size and weigh from 40 to 60 pounds.” As Woods explained, “Cattle of all descriptions, pigs, poultry are fond of them, but they prefer the inside and seeds to the outside.”