Abraham Lincoln in the Kitchen (25 page)

Reports from
Springfield, Illinois, are less complete than those from Lincoln's youth. Springfield store records show the Lincolns purchased
turnips. Alas, the White
House information is just as sparse. There aren't any cook's notes or menus, but visitors did report that Lincoln enjoyed spinach,
cabbage, and
baked beans.

Lincoln did recognize the economic importance of vegetables as he used a farmer's crop of vegetables and fruit in an argument he developed on the impact of tariffs shortly before he took his seat in Congress in December 1847. He named “radishes, cabbages, Irish and sweet potatoes, cucumbers, water-melons and musk-melons, plumbs [
sic
], pears, peaches, apples and the like; all these are good
things” which could be
traded with a neighbor producing iron tools.

Then there is the statement of his friend and law partner, William Herndon. In describing
Lincoln's eating habits Herndon wrote, “He loved best the vegetable world generally … and especially did he love apples.” Not only did Abraham Lincoln eat his vegetables, he loved them “best.” There's a sentence to warm the heart of any mother trying to encourage her children to eat healthfully. “Eat your veggies and you can be president, not only president, but perhaps the best one the country ever had.”

As my father would have said, these incidental descriptions “didn't amount to a hill of beans.” There isn't enough to build a narrative chapter, but I do think these side dishes provide interesting clues. They, and the research that rounds them out, present insights into culinary and gardening practices in the middle of the nineteenth century and add a bit of relish to the Lincoln story.

We'll start with the fruits. Early midwestern settlers delighted in discovering locally growing fruits:
wild plums,
pawpaws, strawberries, and
other berries. Newcomers to an area often planted fruit trees.
Thomas
Lincoln planted peach trees in Kentucky and peach and apple trees in Indiana. The practice continued as communities grew. Springfield newspapers and agricultural journals were filled with nursery advertisements listing dozens of apple, peach, and other fruit trees and bushes. Abraham and Mary had a pair of apple trees growing in their yard. Apparently it was some kind of late-summer or early-fall apple, maybe a Jonathan, a popular variety from the 1850s we still enjoy today.

Springfield's winter climate limits the availability of homegrown fruits, but all was not lost for those who wanted fresh fruit in the fall, winter, and early spring. The November 1856 Springfield newspapers bragged of fresh and exotic produce as they offered customers tastes from far away and out of season. Meyers's grocery declared: “Just received by express, 200
pineapples, fresh and in splendid order. Two barrels sweet oranges from New York.” Mr. John Snelling's advertisement provided the full transportation details of his fresh citrus: “Just arrived from Havana via New York lemons and oranges.”

A short report in the St. Louis
Valley Farmer
, quoting the
New York Times
, explained why Meyers emphasized the quality of his fruit. “Pineapples furnish the palate with perpetual illusion. You lay hold of one, and its
delicious flavor promises great pleasure to the palate, but it seems to fail of meeting the demand exactly, and though you stuff with the woody fibrous body of the [pine]apple till your judgment forbids any more, you still experience a craving for it. They are not worth what they cost to common folk.”

Whereas Mr. Meyers asserted that his pineapples were fit to eat, period cookbooks offered ways for unfortunate shoppers to transform the “illusionary” ones into jams and jelly. I have to confess that I've used nineteenth-century recipes from time to time to make pineapple preserves with modern pineapples that were less than perfect.

Preserving foods was an important part of nineteenth-century homemaking. Every period cookbook had a chapter or two or three covering the basics of jams, jellies, pickles, including the end-of-season garden relish
piccalilli, and “store sauces,” ketchups and other bottled concoctions that cooked down pecks of vegetables into pints of sauce ready to add savory and sharp flavors to winter meals.

Francis & Barrell's store advertised that they had “new pattern preserving glass
jars” for sale on September 10, 1858, just in time for the ladies of Springfield to put up fruit for winter and prepare their entries for the state fair. In a remarkable achievement, or endorsement of the jar's effectiveness,
Mrs. Simeon Francis, the merchant's wife, took away first place for her peaches, currants, gooseberries,
strawberries, apples, crab apples, pears, and red raspberry jelly.

Homemakers were not the only ones to preserve seasonal goodness. By the middle of the nineteenth century, commercial canneries were “putting up” jellies, jams, fruits, and even some vegetables, in glass jars sealed with corks or in cans with soldered-on lids for sale across the country and around the world. As early as 1847, tomatoes were commercially canned in Pennsylvania.

In June of 1858, Lavely's Springfield market advertised some of those canned tomatoes along with currant jelly and “peaches and fresh strawberries in cans.” Back in January 1858, Wilson & Curry's market had offered “Tomato sauce—something new” and “Apple butter—a choice article.”

Uncanned fresh fruits arrived in Springfield, too, shipped in on the railroad before local
crops ripened.
Stores offered peaches, pears, quinces, strawberries, blackberries, cherries, and damsons (plums). On
July 5, 1856, Francis & Barrell store shouted: “TOMATOES just received from the South. Lovers of these delicious and esculent foods will find a large supply.”

Fruits may have been available “fresh in cans” throughout the year, but vegetables, with the exception of tomatoes, were largely home- and locally grown. The Lincolns had ready access to the freshest locally grown fruits and vegetables. The Market Square at Ninth and Market Streets, just two blocks from their home, was filled from spring through fall with fresh farm produce.

As to the Lincolns' own backyard
garden efforts, recollections differ. Certainly, Lincoln knew how to grow vegetables; he was raised on a hardworking farm. Back in Indiana settlement days, maintaining a substantial vegetable garden would have been essential. Now, in the mid-1850s, for the Lincolns and many
Springfield
residents,
gardening was more of a hobby. Magazines of the day promoted gardening not so much as an essential source of foods but as a useful enterprise for city dwellers. “No professional man, nor any other one confined to in-door employment, who has the command of a rod of ground, ought to be without the exercise and the exertion required for keeping in good order a small garden.… A garden, in fact, is essential to the health, comfort, and well-being of the mechanic and day-laborer; and it may also be said to be essential to the comfort and enjoyment of individuals of every class.”

I know something of gardening in the Midwest. I grew up in Indiana, went to college in Iowa, and then moved, over the course of thirty years, to Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, and Minnesota, with Virginia, New Jersey, and Alabama in between. So, although I'm familiar with the culture of the South, the Deep South, and the East Coast, I've always been a midwesterner.

There is a midwestern worldview, one that in Lincoln's time was categorized as “western,” because, of course, Illinois and the Mississippi River were the western edge of the United States, California notwithstanding. Then, as now, crops and food were an important part of the midwestern psyche. We can't escape their influence. We're surrounded by millions of acres of bounty-filled fields. And most of us, given half a chance, will grow some kind of vegetable garden, even if it's only a cherry tomato plant in a pot on the back deck.

Back in Lincoln's backyard, neighbor James Gourley told Herndon, “He once—for a year or so—had a garden and worked in it.” But Lincoln's niece,
Harriet Hanks Chapman, said that she “never knew him to make a garden, but no one loved flowers more.” Mary Lincoln's sister Frances Todd
Wallace noted that Mary wasn't much of a gardener either, reporting, “She never made a garden, at least not more than once or twice.” Whether or not the Lincoln family raised their own vegetables, the now-huge persimmon tree still standing in the neighbor's yard to the north of the Lincolns' home must have witnessed gardens growing all around the neighborhood with plenty of produce to share.

Businessman and newspaper editor
Simeon Francis provided a valuable window into
Springfield's gardening culture. In addition to Francis and Burrell's store, Francis operated a nursery selling a variety of fruit trees and other landscaping trees and shrubs. He sold flower and garden seeds, too. His March 1859 ad in
Illinois Farmer
offers a mostly alphabetical listing of popular vegetables. Beginning with beans and ending with tomatoes, the list (see next page) provides insights into popular
crops for Springfield farmers and backyard gardeners.

Just look at it—seven different kinds of snap beans, seven kinds of cabbage, and five of pole beans. To satisfy early fresh vegetable hunger, there are four kinds of cucumbers and radishes, and three varieties of lettuce. And then there are the two kinds of
rhubarb. One of the earliest crops up in the spring, rhubarb is one part vegetable—you eat the stalks; one part fruit—you cook those stalks with sugar like a dessert; and one part tonic—my grandmother used to say it was “just the thing to clean your blood.” The
Tennessee Farmer
was more precise: “No head of a family who regards the health of his offspring should be without some dozen plants in his garden as in them he will have a sure and certain curative for [digestive diseases].”

To keep the tables filled with delicious vegetables during the winter, there are the root crops perfect to put down in the root cellar next to the bushels of potatoes. Carrots, turnips, parsnips, beets, and onions all keep well sheltered under a blanket of straw.

Nineteenth-century gardening and cookbooks suggest letting the flavors of these varieties shine on their own. The recipes and preparation instructions in book after book are mostly simple: boil and top with a bit of butter. But there are a few intriguing ideas. I discovered a simple way to season Brussels sprouts with vinegar, butter, and nutmeg. Eggplant is fried, and its taste explained as “nearer to that of a very nice fried oyster than, perhaps, any other plant. Lettuce is described as an agreeable salad, but also as a “useful ingredient in soups.” Homemakers cooked
cucumbers, too. As for tomatoes, although in her 1860 cookbook Mrs. Putnam does offer a recipe for “tomatoes raw,” dressing the slices with pepper, salt, and vinegar, it appears most tomatoes were cooked rather than sliced. There are recipes for baked tomatoes, tomatoes sliced on tarts, stewed for soups and sauces, and preserved for winter use like ketchup. The edition of Miss Eliza Leslie's cookbook owned by Mary Lincoln notes, “Tomatoes require long cooking, otherwise they will have a raw taste, that to most persons is unpleasant.”

Though the recipes for cooking all kinds of vegetables may be simple, the varieties of the vegetables themselves were not. The market for native American-grown seeds was slow to develop. Through the middle of the nineteenth century, seed sellers trumpeted their stock of imported seeds. According to an 1840 Rochester Seed Company advertisement, “The present stock of imported seeds is very extensive; they were selected with great care among the best growers in England and Scotland.… The stock of American seeds is also very large.” Even in the 1850s, some advertisers still described their stock as coming from England or France.