Abraham Lincoln in the Kitchen (18 page)

BARBECUE, BISCUITS, AND BURGOO

B
arbecue has long been the bread and butter of American politics. Today a political handshake or information often comes from a tweet over a smartphone, rather than a meeting over a plate of ribs or a hot dog. But picnic grounds and meeting halls can still pack in activists when the cause is important or the politician of interest.

Abraham Lincoln went to a lot of barbecues, picnics, and rallies during his thirty-five years in public life. He
campaigned for the state legislature, his seat in congress, on behalf of other candidates, in the Lincoln-Douglas debates, and in 1859 as he began to think about running for the presidency. Many who saw him at these events and heard him address the crowds wrote about it. As I looked back at those long-ago gatherings, I found a clear understanding of the power of Lincoln's presentations and a not-so-clear explanation of the foods. It is a lot easier to get a feel for how Lincoln served up his ideas than it is to get a taste for the food that the crowd chewed.

Lincoln's good friend
Joshua Speed attended many of his early speeches and wrote of their impact. He admired how Lincoln could present an idea and then support it when attacked by the opposition. “I have never heard a more effective
speaker. He had all the party weapons of offense, and defense seemed to be entirely under his control. The large crowd seemed to be swayed by him as he pleased.”

Lincoln's speeches often contained anecdotes in which “his own enjoyment was so genuine, his realization of a situation was so keen, that
it exercised a power almost hypnotic over his hearers. Even the dullest saw the scene as he did. While describing it, his expressive face showing every emotion in turn. Then when the climax was reached he would lead the laughter with a heartiness that seemed to convulse his whole body.”

Journalist Jonathan Birch described
Lincoln's attire in 1858, the summer of cross-Illinois campaigning including the seven
debates with
Douglas. “He usually wore … a linen coat, generally without any vest, a hat much the worse for wear and carried with him a faded cotton umbrella which became almost as famous … as Lincoln himself.”

A newspaper reported his speaking style at
Cooper Union in New York. Lincoln began his speech in a high-pitched tone which lowered as he warmed to his topic, tossing his head with “vim this way and that.”
William Herndon, who witnessed many of Lincoln's speeches, said that although Lincoln stood still on the speaker's platform, not moving about or making broad gestures, as did most other orators of the day, “his little gray eyes flashed in a face aglow with the fire of his profound thoughts.”

And, much to my delight, one man described what Lincoln ate at a pre-speech
barbecue on September 24, 1858, during the Urbana, Illinois, agricultural fair. That fall was in the middle of the seven debates between Lincoln and Douglas held across the length of Illinois, and three months after he delivered his “House Divided” address accepting the Illinois Republican nomination to run for the U.S. Senate.

Years after Lincoln's assassination, James O. Cunningham, a well-known Urbana attorney, recalled the event:

I am somewhat skeptical of the whole story, but I'll accept the food detail. People of all classes did mingle at outdoor public celebrations and political events. The Fourth of July in particular was a day when Lincoln celebrated with the joyful, hungry hordes.

In 1839 Lincoln was the assistant marshal for the Springfield parade that ended at the newly completed State House. The Globe Tavern accommodated a hundred people at a noon dinner. Six years later the 1845 celebrations began with “reveille sounded from the state house cupola followed by a 13 gun salute at 3 in the morning.” Lincoln delivered the oration of the day at two o'clock in the afternoon. Later he spoke to a Sunday school picnic. “The fire-pit in which the sheep and the ‘young ox, tender and good' were roasting was uncovered, and the contents served by ready and willing hands to the children and adults seated in long rows on the grassy slopes that were made cool by the shadows of the trees and the gentle breezes that played among the leaves.”

Very few reports provide even as much of a menu as did the Sunday school picnic article. However, in the scattering of images and narratives, memories and reports, one phrase keeps repeating, “an old fashioned Kentucky
barbecue” or simply “an old fashioned barbecue.” I hadn't given the topic much thought until I read a modern book in which the author extended the leap made in an 1870s newspaper article suggesting that the food served at these various 1850s events was
burgoo, a mixed-meat-and-vegetable, single-pot meal. Depending on the cook and the region, burgoo can be the consistency of a good, rich stew, or thick enough to stand the cooking spoon upright. I simply could not figure out how such an inherently untidy dish could be fed to crowds of ladies and
gents before the era of paper napkins and disposable plates, so I started following the crumbs.

The barbecue celebrating the Kentucky
wedding of Lincoln's parents, Nancy Hanks and Thomas Lincoln, on June 12, 1806, in Henderson sounded like quite a party. Hosted by Thomas Lincoln's family and John H. Parrott, who signed the
marriage certificate as Nancy's guardian, although he may have just been the witness, it was described by former
neighbor Dr. C. C. Graham in a letter written after Lincoln's death. The menu is long on meat and
whiskey. “We had bear meat, venison, wild turkey and ducks, eggs wild and tame (so common that you could buy them at two bits a bushel), maple
sugar strung on a string to bite off for coffee and whiskey,
syrup in big goards [
sic
],
peach-and-
honey, a sheep that the two families barbequed whole over coals of wood burned in a pit and covered with green boughs to keep the juices in and a race for the whiskey bottle.”

Graham's detail of the pit at the Lincoln nuptials, coupled with the Sunday school picnic article, turned on the light bulb and focused my thinking. I didn't see any mention of the huge cast-iron burgoo-cooking cauldrons, nor did it make a lot of practical sense to prepare a dish that must be stirred constantly or it will scorch. Of course! Those “old fashioned barbecues” were not the high-heat charcoal-briquette or gas-fired grilling we all do in our backyards. They would have been the slow, dug-deep-in-the-earth pit barbecue, where logs burn all night, transforming into a bed of long-lasting, consistent embers. The meat is slow roasted all the next day under some kind of wet, protective greenery to keep it from drying out as it cooks to slow, tender perfection. Pit barbecues involve a fair amount of set up, but then they cook themselves.

Even though I understood what it was, replicating it is another story. There are three major obstacles to a re-creation of these dishes: kind of meat, size of meat, and most important, cooking medium. The key question: How close to the experience can we get? There are pit barbecues and reenactments from time to time around the country where whole sheep or sides of beef are cooked all day in a simple pit. But I wanted to find a way to make this a more common experience. These events were things of legend, and the food might just be legendary, too.

It has been some time since I've cooked over a Girl Scout or Boy
Scout campfire, but I still remember those experiences. These recipes and methods would work for folks who go camping and are experienced cooking over a long-burning wood fire. There is a huge difference between the kind of heat produced from flaming logs and that from well-established embers. Embers hold a gentle, yet significant, heat for long periods of time, as anyone who has cleaned out a fireplace twenty-four hours after a weekend-long Yule-log fire knows … when he or she foolishly shovels the ash into a paper grocery sack.

I've done a lot of inventive backyard cooking over the years. I've built small wood fires in my Weber kettle and grilled over aromatic cherry, hickory, and apple branches. I've tantalized neighbors with the smells coming from
pork,
beef, chicken, and turkey cooked in a simple upright charcoal-fueled smoker. (I did share.) But Lincoln's barbecued meats were not smoked. Clear coals produce heat and maybe a bit of smoke caused by fat dripping into the fire. This is not the same as aromatic smoke made by damp wood or wood chips.

Not even I am adventuresome enough to dig a pit in the backyard to test these recipes, but I did the next best thing—dig into the period cookbooks. As providence would have it, Mrs. Lettice Bryan wrote how “to barbeque a shoat or beef” in
The Kentucky Housewife
. What better source for a Kentucky barbecue could I find? Even better, her method suits the home cook because it doesn't require digging a pit. Mrs. Bryan calls for cooking the meat slowly for several hours “on a large gridiron over a bed of clear coals.”

The straightforward recipe looked simple, but I still had questions: the first, how big a piece of meat to barbecue? Here, too,
The Kentucky Housewife
differs from the period picnic descriptions of the “whole young ox” or “sheep.” Mrs. Bryan called for a “shoat.” A shoat is a pig on the way to becoming a hog, and it can be a fairly large animal. In one period source, examining the economics of fattening pork on corn, the farmer started with “a small-sized shoat weighing 92 pounds.” Two months later the animal weighed 146 pounds and dressed out to 118 pounds of meat.

The other meat Mrs. Bryan mentioned in the recipe title—beef—is really vague. I can imagine anything from a five-pound rump roast to half a calf. Her cooking process does, however, give a few hints to the meat's size. She tells us to rub the meat with salt, pepper, and molasses,
let it stand, and then rinse it off. She also has the cook baste the meat with only salted water and turn it as it “cooks slowly for several hours.” The meat is cooked over coals on the ground, so the side not on the heat would cool while the other side is over the coals. A bed of coals would not retain heat like the walls of a pit. The only way I can think this method would be an effective way to cook would be to have some sort of flat piece of meat. A split carcass would work, especially if the cook had help with the basting and turning.

Considering Abraham Lincoln simply ate a turkey leg, according to Mr. Cunningham's account, and that I was doing this alone, I decided to start with chicken thighs. They are small and have a high bone-to-meat ratio, making them less dense and faster to cook than a boneless pork loin. I figured I could handle the vagaries of cooking them completely over a low heat in my covered grill. I set the usual grill and lid aside and began the experiment. I just had to get enough slow, long-lasting coals to do the job. After several experiments trying to make enough wood coals without taking all day, I developed a compromise method of building a fire with some large kindling-size sticks, about one and a half inches in diameter and small enough to fit in the basin of my grill. I mixed in a few old half-burned pieces of charcoal to help sustain the heat.

I built this fire in the center of the basin and propped two bricks on either side to support a “gridiron,” in this case a flat, perforated sheet made for cooking vegetables on the grill. When the small bed of coals was hot enough for me to hold my hand about five inches above for about six seconds before it was uncomfortable, I placed the gridiron and chicken on the bricks and started cooking, turning, and basting. About ninety minutes later, I had some of the best chicken I've ever made. The significant difference between this and what we commonly call barbecue is that the meat cooks slowly without smoke, or barbecue sauce mopping and sopping.

Not everyone has a grill, and when it is ten below zero, I don't much like using mine. So I tried cooking another batch of chicken in the oven at 300°F. I also slow cooked a beef brisket in the oven following the same technique. Cooked on the grill, the meat is moist with a rich browned coating. The oven-roasted version is equally good but not quite as browned. Chicken, pork, or beef, the meat tastes simply wonderful.