Abraham Lincoln in the Kitchen (21 page)

After the 1860 p
residential nomination and then the election, the Lincolns received political and journalist guests from around the country who wrote their impressions of the Springfield home.
Carl Schurz of the
New York Evening Post
described what he called the “modest frame house” with Lincoln standing at the rear of the front parlor: “tall and ungainly in his black suit of apparently new, but ill-fitting clothes, his long tawny neck emerging gauntly from his turn-down collar, his melancholy eyes sunken deep in his haggard face.” The reporter had kind words about Mrs. Lincoln: “Whatever awkwardness may be ascribed to her husband there is none of it in her. She converses with freedom and grace, and is thoroughly
au fait
in all the little amenities of society.” Frequent mentions were made of her distinguished family, sophisticated
education, ladylike courtesy, ability to speak French fluently, their son's enrollment in Harvard, and her membership in the Presbyterian Church.

Many years later,
Phillip Wheelock Ayers captured evocative scenes when he asked his mother (then
Miss Wheelock) to tell him about her time living as a neighbor: “Mr. Lincoln would help freely in the kitchen. On coming from his office he would take off his coat, put on a large blue apron, and do whatever was needed. At such times the family used sometimes to eat in the kitchen. Happening in, my mother was once invited to share a kitchen luncheon and vividly remembers Mr. Lincoln's large figure against the kitchen wall. To him the matter of food was always one of comparative indifference.… In the numerous social gatherings at Mr. Lincoln's house, Mrs. Lincoln was a very great help to her husband. A lady of
refined tastes with a large social experience, and with considerable political insight she carried the social end of the campaign admirably. She used frequently to ask my mother to assist in passing the refreshments, a service gladly rendered.”

Lincoln's law partner,
William Herndon, told how sometimes Abraham would bring what we might consider a carryout
breakfast into the office. He would “have in his hands a piece of
cheese, or
bologna sausage, and a few crackers, bought by the way.” Period recipes for bologna sausage are different from the common, bland childhood lunchmeat we buy today. Looking at the recipes in a number of period cookbooks and considering the large number of Germans living in Springfield, it makes sense to me that Lincoln's “bologna” was more like the richly seasoned and dryer-textured “Lebanon bologna.”

All the words written about Lincoln, and these descriptions were the closest I could come to
food in the Lincolns' daily lives? Although we know Mary Lincoln
owned a copy of Miss Leslie's
Directions for Cookery in Its Various Branches
, 1845 edition, we don't have her copy with its grease- and batter-spattered pages. Mary did not leave a collection of handwritten recipes tied up with a ribbon. There isn't a diary with highlights of the guests, discussions, and foods served. None of the women who helped in her kitchen shared comprehensive menus.

The charge accounts the Lincolns kept at local stores provide an important clue to the foods they prepared and served. Mary bought a set of cups and saucers and two preserve dishes in January 1845 from Irwin's store. The family also purchased “gun powder tea” and some sugar. From Bunn's store in 1849, the Lincolns bought a half dozen tumblers, candles, sugar, and at the end of September, a gallon of vinegar. We have the extraordinary good luck to have the account books of C. M.
Smith's dry goods store listing the purchases the Lincoln family made in 1859. (Smith was married to Mary's sister
Ann.) Records of a few other Springfield stores have Lincoln purchases, too, but Smith's is a year's worth of records that can be matched with events in the family's life.

That's the good news: these records give a day-by-day accounting of the things the Lincoln family purchased. The not-so-good news: this store is just one of many stores in town where the Lincolns shopped. We know Abraham wrote checks to settle accounts with several dry goods stores, and the family probably paid cash at other merchants. Certainly the newspaper ads of the day are filled with stores selling their goods “at the lowest price for cash.”

With such incomplete information we must take care when making
assumptions. Without knowing all of the Lincolns' purchases, we can only draw a limited picture. This is the story those purchases tell: the groceries available in Springfield were some of the fanciest available in the country, and by 1859 Mary Lincoln was an experienced and sophisticated cook—or she had one in her employment. She bought cream of tartar and baking soda in the proper proportion to make tender cakes and biscuits at a time when most cookbook recipes primarily
leavened with
saleratus or the interaction of soda and sour milk. Twice in January the family bought “Cooper Isinglass” and “red
gelatin.” These items are certainly the ingredients for some kind of fancy molded dessert such as Charlotte Russe or blancmange. Corneau & Diller's store advertised “red, pink and white gelatine” in 1856 Springfield newspapers at a time when articles in national ladies magazines still suggested adding spinach to make desserts green, using cochineal dissolved in a little brandy to color them red and saffron for bright yellow.

Sugar and
syrups are among the most common and regular Lincoln family purchases from the Smith store. In the winter months, the family purchased a gallon of syrup every ten to twelve days. I'm pretty sure this is a plain syrup, a by-product of sugar processing, what the British call golden syrup and similar to table syrup enjoyed in the South today. Just the perfect thing to pour over pancakes or biscuits. Although a gallon sounds like a lot, I did some quick calculations. For the six people living in the house (Abraham, Mary, the three boys, and a live-in household helper), it works out to a quarter of a cup a day. Kids I know could easily pour that much on their flapjacks.

The Lincolns bought regular amounts of sugar, too, about eleven pounds every two weeks. Again, some quick culinary calculations bring this amount into perspective. Eleven pounds of sugar measure out to twenty-two cups, or less than two cups a day. Most recipes for cookies, muffins, or cakes call for at least a cup. A cup of sugar also measures out to sixteen tablespoons. Three adults who put a teaspoon of sugar in a cup of morning coffee would consume a cup of sugar in the two weeks. Two teaspoons per cup or two cups per person would double the amount. So each person in the Lincoln household was consuming about a quarter of a cup of sugar a day. That still sounds like a lot, but I looked at the current national data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. In 2008 the
average per capita sweetener consumption in the United States was 136 pounds, or about three-quarters of a cup a day—three times the amount the Lincolns used.

The Lincolns broke this regular pattern in July 1859, when they bought thirty-three pounds of sugar between July 23 and 25, prime fruit season in Illinois. Strawberries were probably finished, but raspberries, peaches, and plums would have been in full season, as were the summer-bearing apple trees the Lincolns had in their yard. Combine the sugar purchase with the half gallon of vinegar the week before, and it seems obvious that someone in the household is putting up fruit preserves, jams, jelly, or pickles, as they probably did in 1849 when they bought a gallon of vinegar from Bunn's store.

One purchase can even be linked to a specific event. They bought “
salt for
ice cream” on June 9, the same evening Quincy lawyer Orville
Browning made a diary entry, “Went to a party at Lincoln's at night.”

Homemade ice cream was popular. Reviewing a new “patent family ice cream maker” for its readers,
Godey's Lady's Book
noted that ice-cream making was especially important to ladies “residing outside the cities.” By the mid-1850s hand-crank ice-cream machines were readily available, and recipes appeared in cookbooks and magazines, so homemakers could easily convert simple ingredients into family treats or
entertaining delights. As the review explained: “H. B. Masser's Patent Family Ice-Cream Freezer … is a most excellent and useful labor-saving invention enabling a mere novice to make ice-cream equal to the best.… It is said to take less than one-half the usual quantity of ice and salt, and a child can perform the operation.”

Other Lincoln family purchases are more broadly suggestive of social life in
Springfield, where the Ladies' Aid church functions played an important role. Ask any midwestern woman about her community, and you'll hear all about the various fund-raising and social efforts involving food. From 1950s potlucks and cakewalks to twenty-first-century women's club charity sales of nuts for holiday baking, women and food are the engine of social progress.

Life in Springfield in the 1850s was the same.
Caroline Owsley Brown recalled those days in an article about Springfield before the Civil War. “I have heard it said the foundation walls of old St. Paul's … were built on
cakes baked by Mrs. Ninian Edwards, Mrs. William Pope, Mrs. John S. Bradford and Mrs. Antrim Campbell and other good church women. Mrs. Edwards was especially
noted as a cook and the fame of her chicken
salad spread far and wide.… A church supper with Mrs. Edwards's chicken salad, Mrs. Pope's beaten biscuit, and Mrs. Campbell's pound cake was an event to call all society together.… Presbyterians, Methodists, Baptists, … all flocked to eat in the service of a good cause.”

In the first week of October 1859, Lincoln was out of town all week attending both political events and circuit courts. When Mary bought ten pounds of sugar, three-and-one-half pounds of pulverized sugar, and the same amount of crushed sugar along with nutmeg, lemon extract, and a dozen eggs, cakes for a
First Presbyterian social seems the logical conclusion. Similarly, the thirty-two pounds of “Java coffee”
Smith's dray delivered on March 28 could have been for another church function. The price was just over sixteen cents a pound, about half the price the Lincolns usually paid for their regular three- or five-pound purchases. Was this a bulk discount, or reflecting a charitable discount by Mr. Smith?

The family purchased other baking ingredients—cinnamon, nutmeg, almond extract—as well as ordinary groceries, such as coffee, tea, potatoes, and turnips, from Smith's store in 1859. And that's about all we know, hints, but no real information.

My period cookbooks had the opposite problem: too many possibilities. The ones I have stacked at the side of my desk are filled with hundreds of recipes. A few keystrokes and mouse clicks, and a Google Books search makes it so temptingly easy to find specific recipes and ingredients from even more period cookbooks and magazines. Time to make a decision. Even though the Springfield stores did have a wide variety of foods available, I held my choices against the words of Harriet
Hanks, the daughter of Dennis Hanks, Lincoln's cousin. She lived with the family during their first years in the Springfield house and said of Mary that she was “very economical. So much so that by some she might have been pronounced stingy.”

I selected four recipes: a children's treat, an easily prepared family dinner, a simple dish for a late-night supper, and sausage we know Lincoln served to political guests. As you can see from these descriptions,
some of the dishes can be linked directly to life in the house, while others are simply logical choices. As I made
nutmeg doughnuts, mutton harico, beef cakes, and December sausages, the aromas filled my kitchen and later, still lingering, wafted up the stairs embracing me as I sat at my desk. When we ate these dishes, their appearance, textures, and flavors added to the details of the recipes themselves and built layers onto my understanding of the period when the Lincoln family lived in Springfield in a home that was, by all accounts, filled with life.

I had to begin with the children. They filled the home and the Lincolns' lives. Mrs. Lincoln was said to have had cookies or doughnuts on hand for her sons' playmates.

When I saw the name of this 1856 recipe for a nutmeg-flavored doughnut
leavened with cream of tartar and baking soda, I knew it was just the thing. Store records show the family bought quantities of nutmegs on more than one occasion. Mary Lincoln could have made “Extempore Doughnuts” at the drop of a mixing spoon. They mix up and cook much faster than cookies, and hungry children would have gobbled them up by the hands full.

Of course, the recipe was short on directions. The only important clue was to “cut them like Yankee nuts.” Other doughnut recipes of the time do describe cutting the dough into diamonds “with a jagging iron” or a knife. No one knows exactly when the doughnut became a ring rather than a diamond. In the middle of the nineteenth century, the only treat shaped that way is a cookie, a
jumble
, made by joining the ends of a strip of dough into a circle. The clue in the name “doughnuts” suggests a small treat with a nut-like shape made out of dough.

These doughnuts were “extempore” all right. It took me no more than fifteen minutes to make up the dough and fry them in a bit of fat, much faster than the era's typical yeast-raised doughnuts. The spicy nutmeg smell wafting on the sweetness of crispy fried dough called hungry children in for these inch-square treats. Worked on my husband, too.

I can picture the
Lincoln boys careening through the backyard, dashing from the barn shared by the horse, Old Bob, the cow the family kept for milk, and countless cats. The boys roamed around the
neighborhood with friends all about the same ages as Robert born in 1843, Willie in 1850, and Tad in 1853—John and Frank Roll; Isaac Diller; Henry Remann; Johnny Kaine; Fred, Jess, and Lincoln Dubois; Charlie Melvin; and the Sprigg, Wallace, and Wheelock
children, too. I can just imagine some of the children ducking through the bottom sash of the floor-length, double-hung dining room window to shortcut their friends, who came in through either of the two kitchen doors. Fido, the family's yellow mixed-breed
dog, was doubtless chasing them about and begging for crumbs.