Abraham Lincoln in the Kitchen (28 page)

MOCK-MOCK TURTLE SOUP

 

Turtle soup was a rarity, but mock turtle soup recipes, where a calf's head took the place of the turtle, appeared in many of the era's cookbooks. A recipe for bean soup in the October 1855 issue of
American Farmer
takes the mocking one step further, using black beans instead of the calf's head. “It is so like turtle soup that very many, who may eat of it, would smack their lips under the pleasing conceit that they had really partaken of the genuine article.” This is a thin soup, typically served as a first course
.

2 cups small black beans

1 gallon water

2 sprigs fresh thyme

3 hard-boiled eggs, sliced

1 lemon, sliced

2 tablespoons salted butter

Salt and freshly ground black pepper, to taste

1 to 2 cups white or red wine, if desired

Wash and pick over the beans to remove any debris or stones. Soak the beans overnight or do a quick soak, following package directions. In a large stockpot, combine the presoaked beans and the water. Cook, simmering slowly, until the beans are very soft. This could take as long as 2 hours. Use an immersion blender to puree the beans. Or dip the beans out of the cooking liquid and press them through a food mill or process in a blender, using some of the reserved water if necessary. Return the beans to the soup pot and water. Add the thyme and simmer, stirring until smooth. Add the remaining ingredients and heat through.

Makes about 3 quarts of thin soup

Some like this soup with forcemeat balls, made as follows.

FOR THE FORCEMEAT BALLS:

1 cup cooked beef, finely chopped

1 hard-boiled egg, grated on the small holes of a box grater

¼ teaspoon
each
dried thyme and savory

¼ teaspoon minced fresh parsley

⅛ teaspoon
each
ground mace and cloves

1 tablespoon soft butter

1 tablespoon flour, plus extra for rolling

Combine all the ingredients and knead into a cohesive mixture with your hands. Form into balls, slightly less than 1 inch in diameter. Roll the balls in flour and add to the simmering soup 5 to 10 minutes before serving. Forcemeat balls sink to the bottom at first and rise to the top when done.

Makes about 1 dozen forcemeat balls, one for each 1-cup serving of soup

ADAPTED FROM “MOCK TURTLE BEAN SOUP,”
AMERICAN FARMER
, OCTOBER 1855.

APPLE BUTTER

 

Old-fashioned fruit butters go well alongside meats or smeared on bread. One advantage of fruit butters is that the cook can use less-than-perfect fruits. The bubbling butter must be watched carefully as it nears the end of cooking or it will stick and scorch
.

2 pounds sweet cooking apples such as Jonathan or McIntosh

1 cup apple cider or water

½ cup light molasses

¼ teaspoon ground cinnamon

¼ teaspoon ground cloves

¼ teaspoon freshly grated or ground nutmeg

¼ teaspoon ground allspice

Peel apples and grate them on the large side of a box grater, stopping at the core. (Or you may core and just chop them.) Bring cider or water and molasses to a boil in a large, wide nonreactive pan. Add the grated apples, reduce the heat to a simmer, and cook until the apples are soft, about 20 minutes. (If the apples have not disintegrated, puree the pulp with an immersion blender or potato masher.) Add spices and continue cooking until the apple butter is very, very thick, stirring frequently to prevent scorching. The finished apple butter should have a sheen on it and be thick enough to mound slightly on the spoon. Store in the refrigerator for up to a month or in the freezer for up to 6 months. For longer storage see
home-canning directions
.

TIPS FOR SUCCESS:
Perhaps the easiest way to make apple butter is in a slow cooker. Cooking times will vary depending on how your slow cooker is set up. The size of your slow cooker is important, too. The apple mixture should be at least 2 inches deep so that it will simmer properly. If you have just a thin layer, the mixture has a tendency to scorch. The quantities used in this recipe worked very well in my 2-quart cooker. I tripled the amounts for my 5-quart cooker.

Makes three or four 8-ounce jars of apple butter

ADAPTED FROM PERIOD SOURCES.

CLUES TO LIFE IN THE SPRINGFIELD HOME

T
hanksgiving and Abraham Lincoln are inextricably linked. Although communities around the nation celebrated fall “
Thanksgivings” during much of the nineteenth century, Lincoln's 1863 proclamation advanced the celebration to a true national holiday. He called upon his “fellow citizens in every part of the United States and also those who were at sea and those who are sojourning in foreign lands to set aside the fourth Thursday in November as a day of Thanksgiving.” He concluded his proclamation with the hopes that the nation would soon be restored to the “full measure of peace, harmony, tranquility, and Union.”

Although Mary Lincoln didn't leave behind recipes or diary entries of her own, it turns out the Lincolns did leave some tantalizing, tangible touchstones: her stove, her cookbook, and some garbage.

A few days before Thanksgiving, my trip to a local gourmet store opened an experimental window. As I stood amid the shelves of fancy cookware, racks of amazing gadgets, and displays of wonderfully practical tools, my eyes were distracted by the notice of “Red Bourbon heritage turkeys” listed on the chalkboard of local agricultural shares. I always buy a fresh turkey, but here was the chance to cook something from the nineteenth century. Granted, this breed of turkey was
first sold about twenty years after Lincoln's day, but it was the closest I've yet come to a farm-raised bird of the era. There was one 8.2-pound turkey left and I took it without hesitation even though it cost a great deal more than the
ten cents a pound
Mary
Lincoln once paid. I decided it was worth the investment to support local agriculture and to do research. I hoped we'd have some good eating, too.

Now it was time to dig in. Archaeologist Floyd Mansberger, historical architect Fran Krupka, and others have done a number of excavations and analyses of artifacts found at the Lincolns' Springfield homesite. Mansberger's 1985 excavations around the house produced a number of artifacts: broken plates—blue transfer, undecorated white, blue shell edged, and ironstone; nails and tacks; and some fragments from glass tumblers and medicine bottles. Most interesting to Mansberger's investigation was the area under the back porch, an abandoned well covered over by the mid-1850s house renovation. In addition to typical household goods, Mansberger's team found an eggshell, peach pits, and fifty-seven pieces of animal bones. These bones, added to two hundred other pieces of animal remains found in other excavations at the site, tell an interesting tale. The Lincolns ate beef sirloin, short loin round, and ribs. They also had a bit of mutton or lamb, a fair amount of
pork, chicken, and turkey. The fifty-seven bones from the well included turkey bones and the remains of pigs feet. We know the Lincolns ate turkey in the early years of their residence in the home, and we know Mary purchased an eight-pound turkey on January 10, 1859, for eighty cents from C. M.
Smith's store.

I figured I'd dive into Miss Eliza Leslie, the cookery book Mary Lincoln owned, to find era-appropriate directions for cooking the turkey I'd bought. How to cook this beautiful bird? I returned to my thinking about the way Mary Lincoln's
cast-iron stove operated and the experiment I'd conducted back in October.

I'll have to admit I've never cooked on a
wood-burning or cast-iron stove. My opinion of them had been colored by postfeminist writing in articles and books that speak of women spending “years slaving over a hot stove.” The pictures of huge mid-nineteenth-century stoves didn't help. The Victorian version of today's 8-burner, stainless steel Viking Ranges, these nineteenth-century paragons had hot-water reservoirs, food-warming closet, baking ovens, and special roasting oven where the meat will be done “as perfectly as by an open fire.” Harriet Beecher
Stowe and her sister Catharine sang the praises of such kitchen-filling stoves
by saying “proper management … will for 24 hours keep the stove running.” All that changed when I began to study the
Royal Oak #9 stove in the
Lincolns' kitchen. The Lincolns purchased it on June 9, 1860, to replace an earlier model.

The Royal Oak #9 was an award-winning stove design and a wonder of efficiency. There were four “burners” on top, two of them directly over the relatively small firebox—about the size of two men's shoeboxes placed end to end. The others were set up for slower cooking on days when the stove was going to burn wood for some time; they were gently heated by the current of air as it moved toward the stovepipe and was vented out of the house. A sturdy shelf stuck out in front of the firebox, just right for keeping food warm or heating flatirons.

The oven was not a cube like those in today's ranges. It was shaped like a trapezoid, a rectangle with four unequal sides, to take maximum advantage of the heat from the angled wall of the firebox that formed the right wall of the oven. In Mary's oven, the left side, where the door hinged, was 14 ¼ inches tall. The narrowest part of the oven opening, at the top, was 9½ inches wide. The wider opening at the bottom was 13 ¾ inches. The right side was angled to connect the top and bottom. This arrangement created a deep space: 22½ inches from front to back. There was a shelf about halfway up where Mary could have slid food that was 11 inches wide and 6 or 7 inches tall, like a sirloin beef roast.