Abraham Lincoln in the Kitchen (2 page)

My rediscovered jumbles were a crisp, not-too-sweet doughnut-shaped cookie. From them I was able to construct a life incident. I imagined Mrs. Jemison made a batch in the modern “range” she had in the basement kitchen and packed them in a tin for her husband to take with him as he rode off from Tuscaloosa to take his seat in the Congress of the Confederacy, meeting in
Richmond.

Jumbles were just the beginning. Several other recipes had caught my attention as I carefully leafed through the fragile cookbook pages seeking jumble-like treats: cakes, breads, meats, vegetables. I began
making some of them, too, just to see what they were like. They were wonderful! And I was hooked on this adventure of tasteful discovery. Now, thousands of recipes and five books later, I wondered: Could an expertise that began with the study of a family from the Confederacy ironically lead to an introspection of the man who dedicated his life to saving the Union? I began reading, thinking, and cooking.

The joy of studying history through cooking is that foods provide a complex sensory immersion into the past. This study, and the eating that follows it, is time travel at the dinner table and the only common experience that engages all the senses. An essay by food writer
M. F. K. Fisher highlights the special power food
memories have. In a 1969 book she recalled a dish of potato chips with lasting and real physical impact: “I can taste-smell-hear-see and then feel between my teeth the potato chips I ate slowly one November afternoon in 1936 in the bar of Lausanne Palace.… They were ineffable and I am still being nourished by them.”

Food has the added benefit of being accessible. Everyone has to eat, and most of us cook to one degree or another. The most committed non-cook interacts and prepares food, even if simply pouring milk into a bowl of cereal. And, cooking is largely the same as it was in the nineteenth century.

On the face of it, that similarity seems an unlikely idea, but in my experience it is true. Of course there have been significant changes in the application of heat and cold for cooking and storing food, but to my mind, the
essentials
of cooking are unchanged from Lincoln's kitchen to mine or yours. Knives, forks, mixing spoons, and bowls; frying pans and stewpots—I still use the same tools as 1820s Hoosier pioneers or 1850s sophisticated Springfielders did. Butter, flour, eggs, milk, cheese; chicken, beef; carrots, turnips—we all still cook with the same ingredients. Mixing, stewing, braising, frying—the basic methods are the same as well. What's more, cooks across the country use those basic hand tools and those primary ingredients. In fact, cooking is the only task where doing things the old-fashioned way can be seen as practical, if not entirely modern.

Some other occupations continue to use traditional tools: carpenters still use hammers and nails, seamstresses use needle and thread. But if a carpenter used
just
a hammer and nails instead of a nail gun on
a construction site, or if a seamstress made a dress entirely by hand sewing, each would be considered archaic, an artisan, or impractical. In the garden and kitchen, it is commonplace to grow and cook food by hand, using shovels, trowels, and rakes; pots, bowls, knives, wooden spoons. For a great many recipes it is, in fact, easier to chop the vegetables with a knife rather than get out the food processor, or to blend the butter, sugar, and flour with a fork rather than an electric mixer.

As to finding a recipe link to a specific time and place, luck has a lot to do with success. For my jump across time into Lincoln's kitchens, it would be wonderful to have a cookbook from Lincoln's mother with notes written among the recipes by his stepmother and another one from his wife, Mary, with menus describing what they ate and recipes for how they cooked it. But we don't. In fact, information about Lincoln's life is sketchy for the Springfield years and even sketchier for the log cabin days of his youth in Indiana.

The only body of sound evidence is Lincoln himself. During those growing years he must have eaten well. By the time the family left Indiana for Illinois, twenty-one-year-old Abraham was six feet four inches and weighed between 160 and 220 pounds depending upon who told the story. I've raised a teenage boy who grew to over six feet, and, as anyone who has fed teenage boys knows, the refrigerator and pantry seem to empty themselves just after they've been filled.

Known facts about Lincoln's diet and food habits are about as scanty as the provisions on those pantry shelves. I found some foods mentioned by name in some of the biographies. Anyone who reads broadly about Lincoln's early life and courtship runs into them, but these are, to use a food phrase, simply serving suggestions. I've run across some recipes and menus connected to Lincoln without reliable historical sources. Based on my research, some of them make sense and some of them don't. In writing an accurate portrayal of Lincoln's life through food, I'll put these suggestions in perspective. The real meat of the menu—a look at the foods, or even diet, of his time and place—presents trickier mysteries to figure out.

There is one excellent, comprehensive source—
Herndon's Informants
. Shortly after Lincoln was assassinated, his law partner and friend,
William Herndon, set out to talk or write to everyone who knew Lincoln,
especially during his youth. These interviews, finally published in full in 1998, began to point my way. As I read these primary source interviews in their entirety instead of excerpts quoted in Lincoln biographies, I found enough clues to focus my research. Others who knew Lincoln, quoted in Rufus Wilson's book,
Lincoln among His Friends
, and the work for
McClure's
magazine by
Ida Tarbell, brought more ingredients into the mix. I happened upon a wonderful book that put me less than seventy-five miles
from Lincoln's Indiana farm in 1820, three years after his family began homesteading. James Woods wrote
Two Years' Residence on the English Prairie of Illinois
for his friends in London to give a comprehensive explanation of his farm life in the New World. The book transported me as well with detailed descriptions of crops, wildlife, and American customs.

Yet, we must take even these voices with a grain of salt. Memory, especially when linked to an important event or martyred president, can be seasoned with an intrusive personal perspective. Communications theorist
Dr. James Carey wrote of the inclination people have to put meaning, or themselves, into the narration of events: “They say what they say because they have purposes in mind. The world is the way it is because individuals want it that way.” These evocative first-person narratives need to be sifted, mixed with other voices and with other period primary sources, tempered with reason or leavened with insight.

It is the same with recipes. I've worked with nineteenth-century recipes long enough to develop my own ways of translating their imprecise measurements, unwritten methods, and sometimes unfamiliar or unobtainable ingredients into a form that works in a modern kitchen. I try to get as close as I can to experiencing the flavors and textures of the past without driving myself—or anyone else—to distraction.

The best parts of these journeys through time are the fabulous flavors I've rediscovered. Even though ingredients and mixing and cooking methods may be essentially the same, the flavors are not. Wonderful, unexpected tastes and textures from the recipes of the past—molasses lemon cake, apple ketchup, and beef à la mode, to name a few—have surprised me time and time again. I am delighted with the dishes I've found from this adventure in the land of Lincoln: corn dodgers, almond cake, pumpkin butter, slow-cooked barbecue, and many more.

So, please, pull up a chair at my kitchen table. Its old round oak top is littered with notes; photocopies from agricultural journals, newspapers, grocery account ledgers; and stacks of old cookbooks.
Herndon's Informants
and biographies of Lincoln are here, too, along with my ring binder filled with pages of once neatly typed recipes now covered with penciled corrections and spatters of batter, the results of sampling and experimentation. Although this is a culinary exploration of Lincoln's life, not a cookbook, I've adapted the period techniques and recipes for cooking in today's kitchens and noted the sources. There is value in seeing the original recipes as historical documents, but I believe that value is outweighed by the enjoyment of preparing and eating foods that come as close to these culinary-heritage dishes as our stores and stoves can bring us. A biscuit made with soured milk and baking soda is a world of difference from one that pops out of a refrigerated tube. It profoundly changes the perception of what a biscuit can be.

I want readers to enjoy these foods. I've spent years figuring out how to make them from the scanty descriptions, incomplete measurements, and nonexistent instructions. In some cases, I've had to develop the recipe from just a description: you'll see “Re-created from period sources” under the titles of those dishes. For the recipes described as “Adapted from period sources,” I've simply standardized the measurements to those used in today's kitchens, clarified the ingredients and put them in proper order, and written the method for preparation.

This book is organized generally as a biography following Abraham Lincoln's life from his childhood through his presidency. In some of the chapters, I describe my process for unraveling the historical clues to get to the flavors and textures. In others, I delve more deeply into Lincoln's biography and show how food brings new considerations to an understanding of his life, marriage, and time as president. All of the chapters have recipes at the end so you can undertake these explorations in your own kitchen. I promise these dishes are unlike anything we eat today. Delicious, evocative, and well worth the small efforts to prepare.

Come along. We'll see what directions food can take us as we travel to capture the flavor of Lincoln's times.

CORN DODGERS AND EGG
CORN BREAD

B
oth Abraham Lincoln and Mary Todd ate corn bread as children. He ate it from necessity; she ate it from tradition. The circumstances of their
childhoods produced very different recipes. As adults, they continued to enjoy corn bread. Abraham relished it, eating corn bread and corn cakes “as fast as two women could make them,” and for Mary there was no food more comforting. Years after Lincoln's death, in 1879, she was
recovering from an illness during her four-year stay in Europe and wrote from France to her Springfield nephew of her longing for “a taste of … good food—waffles, batter cakes, egg corn bread—… all unknown here.”

As in colonial states, corn was the predominant
crop in pioneering Kentucky, Indiana, and Illinois. It provided food for the people who lived on farms and for the horses, cows, and pigs as well. Although tedious to plant by hand, it grew reliably. The Lincolns grew mostly corn on their Indiana farm with some wheat. Beans or
pumpkins commonly shared the corn patch, so farmers could get two, or even three,
crops from one cleared acre. The pumpkin vines ran freely on the ground between the cornstalks and helped keep the weeds down by shading the soil to limit germination. Beans climbed the cornstalks for support. And corn, made into
whiskey in a backyard still, could be turned into cash or used as an important barter good.

Abraham's father, Thomas Lincoln, did raise successful
corn crops. When the family moved to Indiana, he had to leave behind forty bushels
of corn stored in a neighbor's loft. Some biographers suggest Thomas took several barrels of
whiskey to Indiana as well. Corn mash converted into whiskey through the alchemy of the still magically transformed corn into a desirable, highly portable cash crop.

I've worked with a lot of old
cornmeal recipes over the years. Most of them are fairly straightforward and easily adapted to our kitchens and ingredients. From the Pilgrim days, our corn was referred to as “Indian” corn to differentiate it from wheat, which the English settlers called “corn.” Many nineteenth-century recipes use that name. Despite their value and good taste, cornmeal dishes fall out of favor and are “rediscovered” as good food just about every generation. I've read articles in scores of nineteenth-century ladies' magazines, travel narratives, and agricultural journals preaching cornmeal's benefits. As
Henry Andrews testified on the value of cornmeal in the March 1842 edition of the leading farming magazine of the day, the
Union Agriculturist
: