Abraham Lincoln in the Kitchen Read online

  Once, settlers had simply turned cows and hogs out to feed in meadows and forage on the forest mast of fallen leaves, fruit, and nuts, a practice with great risk, as Lincoln said in his poem, of the bears feeding on the swine. More important, open grazing was a risk to the health of the community. Milk from cows grazing on wild white snakeroot poisoned Abraham’s mother and many other settlers. Now farm animals, too, needed sustenance from farm-raised food such as pumpkins, rutabagas, and corn. Leaves pulled from still-growing cornstalks were used to feed livestock. To pay a neighbor for a copy of Weem’s Life of Washington borrowed and accidentally damaged in a rainstorm, Lincoln “pulled fodder,” spending three days stripping those leaves.

  Of course, people enjoyed pumpkins. Yet, as anyone who has ever kept a jack-o’-lantern on the porch steps past Halloween or through a freeze knows, pumpkins do not keep for very long. As Woods explained, “They make good sauce and excellent pies and are much eaten here; they are sliced and dried for winter use for pies and sauce.” Some sources say that the children would eat the dried pumpkin as a kind of fruit leather.

  The way pumpkin pie or sauce was prepared depended on the affluence of the cook. I’ve made simple pumpkin butter, sweetened with honey or molasses and just sharpened with a dash of vinegar. The recipe included here calls for a bit of cinnamon or nutmeg. Though the pumpkin, honey, and vinegar would have been readily available, Hoosiers would have had to purchase molasses and spices. As the community grew, those ingredients probably would have been accessible, if not common, and good cooks like Abraham’s stepmother, Sarah Lincoln, would have sought them out. Pumpkin pie recipes in cookbooks of the era are not all that different from the ones we make today.

  Fortunately we can start with canned pumpkin, saving the time to cut up the pumpkin, stew it in a pan with a little water, and pass it through a sieve for a smooth puree, or to soak dried pumpkin to soften it before making it into the paste. Period sources also have recipes for corn bread where the stewed pumpkin stands in for a large part of the liquid in the recipe. I’ve included versions for both pumpkin butter and pie in the recipe section.

  In a relatively short time, the farms of Spencer County would have come to look like the one farmed today by the Park Service. Lincoln’s neighbor A. H. Chapman provided a succinct description. “Lincoln’s little farm was well stocked with hogs, horses, and cattle and … he raised a fine crop of wheat, corn, and vegetables.” Chapman also reported that Thomas had planted apple trees.

  Woods provided a comprehensive description of the vegetables he saw planted on Indiana and Illinois farms. “I’ve seen no sweet potatoes, but Irish or common potatoes grow tolerable in wet season … very few parsnips or carrots, but they are said to do well in wet season … small beans of the kidney kind are cultivated by the Americans. They are generally planted to climb on the corn and are many sorts and different colors … cabbages grow well.” He continued his list: “Onions and shallots, cucumbers grow well. Parsley and radishes thrive and lettuce. We found many morels [mushrooms] in the spring.”

  Another source for varieties of vegetables grown in the United States is the first American cookbook, written in 1789 by Amelia Simmons. She includes recipes for turnips, peas, green beans, beets, spinach, squash, and cooked tomatoes as well as those vegetables mentioned by Woods.

  I was really glad to come across Woods’s list of plants cultivated for seasonings. Capsicum, a member of the hot red pepper family, topped his list for use in soups and stews, followed by “fennel, coriander, peppermint, spearmint—the last two are scarce, sage is extremely plentiful.”

  This was the stuff recipes were made of, and the period cookbooks are full of them. I’m tempering my recipe selection with a goodly dose of common sense. As with the recipes for baked goods, I prefer to work with simple recipes, recognizing that the earliest American cookbooks were published on the Atlantic coast where women had better cooking facilities and more varied ingredients. Woods’s simple listing and the indication that red pepper was “used in soups and stews” may be recipe enough. Sage complements pork and fowl. Fennel leaves and seeds have a wide range of traditional uses from sausage to sauces for ham and pork to giving a sweet accent to vegetables such as potatoes, cucumbers, and cabbage, as well as seasoning vegetable soups. Coriander flavors pea soup, vegetable soup stocks, spinach, sausage, and even biscuits.

  The Lincoln women were considered “good cooks.” They did what anyone who cooks 365 days a year does: they looked at what was in the garden or pantry and pulled together a simple dish that made the best of their local ingredients. It seems sensible that preparation would have been simple, too. Fruits would have been eaten out of hand, simply stewed for a sauce, possibly sweetened with wild honey, or dried to preserve them for winter use. Meats and fish could be roasted, grilled, boiled, or made into a soup or stew.

  Knowing the wild and cultivated foods and even having some recipes from the period gets us close to the flavor of the era. But here, too, a time machine would come in handy, for even if the ingredient names are the same, the flavor of those foods would have been different. I’ve been lucky enough to gather some from the wild. Although specialty markets in big cities may have some of these delicacies from field and forest, even they can’t come close to treasures freshly plucked from secret and not-so-secret places. The pencil-eraser-size wild raspberries I pick each July from a high lake bank are sharper flavored than the ones I grow in my garden or even the ones from the farmers market. Tiny wild strawberries are jewels compared to the huge plastic-wrapped grocery-store varieties. As to mushrooms, you can’t match even the fanciest to a freshly gathered, spongy-looking morel. Hard-traveled red or purple plums from California or Chile can’t stand up to small, flavor-packed wild plums plucked from a creek-side tree. Wild asparagus is a slender, flavorful, condensed version of the cultivated varieties.

  Lincoln’s Indiana neighbors attest to times when the bountiful surroundings and successful farms fell on hard times. Elizabeth Crawford used food in her interviews with Herndon to bring those hard times into focus. She remembered a tale that Lincoln himself may have related. It seems one day there were only roast potatoes for dinner. Thomas Lincoln offered grace, thanking the Lord for these blessings. “When he sat down to eat, Abraham put on a long face and said I call these very poor blessings.”

  Potatoes play a role in Mrs. Crawford’s second remembrance, too:

  It was nothing for people to go 8 to 10 miles for a [church] meeting. In the winter time they would put on their husband’s old over coats and wrap up their little ones and take one or two of them up on their one beast and their husbands would walk and they would go to church and stay in the neighborhood til the next day and then go home. Apples were very scarce them times. Sometimes potatoes were used as a treat. I must tell you the first treat I ever received in old Mr. Lincoln’s house was a plate of potatoes washed and pared very nicely and handed round. It was something new to me for I never had seen a raw potato before. I looked to see how they made use of them. They took a potato and ate them like apples.… They were glad to see each other and enjoyed themselves better than they do now.

  Another verse from Lincoln’s poem brings my experience on the land and in the kitchen full circle. Every time I make the recipes from this chapter, I have in my hands the stuff of dreams and understanding. I can let myself flow onto the stream of memory from pioneers, Lincoln, and even my own past. It is a magical window with a delicious pumpkin pie sitting on the sill, just waiting for me to see, smell, taste, touch, and take a sweet bite out of history.

  O memory! Thou mid-way world

  ’Twixt Earth and Paradise,

  Where things decayed, and loved ones lost

  In dreamy shadows rise.

  PAWPAWS: Fresh pawpaws can be found in late summer and early fall at some eastern, mid-Atlantic, and southern farmers markets. Alas, they don’t grow in Minnesota. Fortunately a Missouri friend of a friend was kind enough to ship me a few of the fragile fruits caref
ully wrapped in paper towels and plastic bags and placed in a cooler. My backyard thermometer was close to 100°F the afternoon the package arrived. The outside of the box was hot to the touch and I feared I’d find only fermenting mush inside. But when I lifted the cooler lid, an almost-tropical sweet fragrance filled the kitchen. Fortunately the cooler had done its job. I chilled the pawpaws for a couple of hours and then it was time to taste.

  Perfectly ripened pawpaws have a rich custardy flesh you can eat with a spoon. Cut down the center and lift out the row of hard, large black seeds before digging in. You can slice the orange flesh of slightly underripe pawpaws and enjoy it like a mango.

  Like fresh apricots, pawpaws are more aromatic than flavorful. When I opened one of the protective bags, the aroma was nearly overpowering. I smelled banana, mango, pineapple, apricot, even brandy. The taste, however, was far subtler, with some of those same fruity flavors. Pawpaws have a pumpkiny richness, but they’re not as earthy. And, although sweet, they are not nearly as sweet as berries.

  As to how the pioneers enjoyed them, the memoirs are as elusive as the flavors. They may have mashed the flesh into a sauce sweetened with a bit of honey or sugar. Or, as the old song suggests, they simply ate them during the short season. Frozen pawpaw puree can be ordered from several online sources. Missouri State University in St. Joseph, Missouri, and Kentucky State University in Frankfort, Kentucky, both have pawpaw propagation projects. Though the Internet is loaded with recipes using pawpaws in a variety of cooked dishes, I think the fruit is best discovered as the pioneers would have enjoyed it, eaten out of hand or as a simple sauce.

  ENJOYING OTHER WILD FRUITS: You may be fortunate enough to live in an area where you can forage for wild berries, grapes, plums, or even mushrooms. My husband remembers picking wild gooseberries growing in the patch of woods behind his boyhood home in northern Iowa. His mother baked them into a pie that he recalls as “very tart.” Luckily gooseberries are one of the heritage fruits that can be purchased. The simple recipe for gooseberry pie printed on the label of Oregon brand gooseberries is very nice—and very tart.

  GOOSEBERRY PUDDING

  Nineteenth-century puddings are not like the sweet, milk-based desserts we enjoy. A Lincoln-era pudding resembles a thickened fruit cobbler in some versions or a dense cake. As with many hearty pioneer recipes, a little serving goes a long way. If you can’t find fresh gooseberries, green grapes make a good substitute.

  1 ½ cups fresh green gooseberries or green grapes, or one 15-ounce can gooseberries, drained

  ½ cup sugar

  2 tablespoons butter, at room temperature

  3 large eggs

  1 ¼ cups fresh breadcrumbs made from grated stale, homemade-style bread

  Preheat the oven to 350°F. Generously butter a 1-quart baking dish. Slice the gooseberries or grapes in half. If using fresh fruit, put in a microwavable container, cover with plastic wrap and cook at half power until tender, 2 to 4 minutes. Set aside to cool. (If using canned gooseberries, continue recipe from this point.)

  Mix the fruit and ¼ cup of the sugar in a bowl. In a separate bowl, cream the butter and the remaining ¼ cup sugar. Add the eggs 1 at a time, beating well after each addition. Stir the sweetened gooseberries and the breadcrumbs gently into the batter. Pour the batter into the prepared baking dish. Bake until the top is golden brown and a knife inserted in the center of the pudding comes out clean, about 65 to 75 minutes. Store any leftover pudding in the refrigerator.

  Makes 4 to 6 servings

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

  PUMPKIN BUTTER

  I’ve adapted this recipe using readily available canned pumpkin. If you have home-cooked pumpkin puree, it will be even better. The pumpkin butter is good on corn bread or even as a not-too-sweet topping for pancakes. It is also quite nice as a relish alongside roast pork or turkey.

  1 15-ounce can pumpkin or 2 cups homemade pumpkin puree (see Pumpkins for Pumpkin Puree)

  ½ cup honey, molasses, or sorghum syrup

  ¼ cup cider vinegar

  ¼ teaspoon ground allspice

  ⅛ teaspoon ground cinnamon

  Combine all ingredients in a heavy saucepan. Cook over low heat until the mixture has thickened, about 20 minutes. Stir frequently to keep the butter from scorching. Cool. Ladle into a clean jar. Store in the refrigerator for up to 3 weeks. For longer storage see home-canning directions.

  Makes about 2 cups pumpkin butter

  ADAPTED FROM PERIOD SOURCES.

  PUMPKIN PIE WITH HONEY

  Easy-to-grow pumpkins played a variety of important roles in pioneer kitchens. Served fresh as a vegetable, dried into a kind of fruit leather as a winter treat, simmered into a long-lasting butter, or blended with honey and treasured spices for a pie, pumpkins were praised by farmers and travelers alike. This pie is rich with pumpkin flavor. A small slice is very satisfying.

  PUMPKINS FOR PUMPKIN PUREE: Choose the smaller pie or sugar pumpkins for making pies and pumpkin butter, not the large, fibrous jack-o’-lantern pumpkins. Cut a 3- to 4-pound pie pumpkin into quarters. Scrape out seeds. Place the pumpkin pieces in a baking dish and sprinkle with 2 or 3 tablespoons apple cider or water. Cover with aluminum foil and bake at 350°F until tender, 60 to 75 minutes. Let cool and scoop out the cooked pumpkin flesh. Mash to a smooth puree. You should have about 4 cups. Pumpkin puree can be frozen for several months.

  ½ of the Double-Crust Pie Dough recipe

  2 cups homemade pumpkin puree or one 15-ounce can pumpkin

  ½ cup milk

  ¼ cup honey, molasses, or sorghum syrup

  1 large egg, lightly beaten

  1 teaspoon ground cinnamon

  ½ teaspoon ground ginger

  Preheat the oven to 425°F. Line an 8-inch pie plate with the pie dough. In a mixing bowl, combine the pumpkin puree, milk, honey, egg, cinnamon, and ginger and whisk until smooth. Pour into the unbaked pie shell. Bake for 15 minutes at 425°F. Then lower the oven temperature to 350°F and continue baking until a knife inserted in the center comes out clean, about 45 to 55 minutes longer.

  Makes an 8-inch pie to serve 8

  RE-CREATED FROM PERIOD SOURCES.

  DOUBLE-CRUST PIE DOUGH: Although fancy puff pastry is mentioned in some recipes, the basic piecrust described in Lincoln-era cookbooks is not very different from the one I learned from my mother and she learned from hers. It is a short crust, where the flour is “shortened” as fat is cut into it. Some of the period recipes specify lard; many others call for butter, which would have been the more readily available, year-round fat on the farm or in the city.

  1 ½ cups unbleached all-purpose flour, plus extra for rolling out the dough

  ⅛ teaspoon salt

  ½ cup (1 stick) cold unsalted butter or ½ cup lard, cut into small chunks

  4 to 5 tablespoons ice water

  Combine the flour and salt in a mixing bowl. Using a pastry cutter or 2 knives, cut the butter or lard into the flour until the mixture looks like uncooked oatmeal. Stir in 3 tablespoons of ice water with a fork. Gradually add more water until the mixture just begins to come together. Divide in half and pat each half into a ball. Sprinkle the work surface and rolling pin with flour. Dust a ball of dough with flour and roll from the center out in all directions to make a circular crust. Repeat for the second crust.

  TIP FOR SUCCESS: For single-crust pies, such as the pumpkin pie, make the full double-crust recipe and put the remaining half piecrust dough in plastic storage bag. It will keep refrigerated for up to 2 days, or freeze for up to a month.

  Makes enough dough for 1 double-crust pie or 2 single-crust pies or tarts

  JOURNEYS OF DISCOVERY

  NEW ORLEANS CURRY AND NEW SALEM BISCUITS

  The great difference between Young America and Old Fogy, is the result of Discoveries, Inventions, and Improvements. These, in turn, are the result of observation, reflection, and experiment.

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nbsp; —ABRAHAM LINCOLN

  LECTURE ON “DISCOVERIES AND INVENTIONS,”

  FEBRUARY 11, 1859

  In the spring of 1830 the entire extended Lincoln family picked up stakes from their established Indiana community and moved to central Illinois to establish a new farm. Moving must have been bittersweet for Thomas and Abraham. They sold the farm they had carved out of the wilderness along with animal stock and crops for more than five hundred dollars. But the pioneering had come at a price. Nancy Lincoln had died from milk sickness and, in 1828, Abraham’s sister, twenty-one-year-old Sarah Lincoln Grigsby, died during the birth of her first child, who did not live.

  The three-family group of thirteen packed up two oxen carts and moved west, settling on the north fork of the Sangamon River about ten miles southwest of Decatur. There, the land was said to be even better for crops. Although now twenty-one years old, the age when most young men were released from obligations to their parents, Abraham stayed at home for another year, helping his father, stepbrother, and cousins clear land and splitting hundreds of rails to fence their new farms.

  In 1831, he set off to find his own place in the world. Abraham Lincoln was more than ready to pick up his own journey to self-education. Over the next eighteen months, from March 1831 through September 1832, he would see and experience more than many Americans of the era. He would begin this journey as an impressionable young man and emerge a budding politician. The foods he encountered underscore the possibilities of the expanded worlds he was discovering. His journey began perhaps unexpectedly when somehow he connected with Denton Offutt, an entrepreneur from Kentucky, who was accumulating a flatboat-full cargo of agricultural products from area farms to take down the Mississippi River to sell in New Orleans.