Read Abraham Lincoln in the Kitchen Online
Authors: Rae Katherine Eighmey
Abraham Lincoln in the Kitchen (5 page)
LINCOLN'S
GINGERBREAD MEN
I
n all of his writings, Abraham Lincoln didn't say much about food, but his evocation of gingerbread men may well have set his national political career on the right path.
At the first debate with
Stephen A.
Douglas in 1858, Lincoln used a childhood incident to partially defuse the very ugly Senate campaign tactics. A boisterous and partisan crowd of ten thousand, two-thirds of them hearty Lincoln supporters, filled Lafayette Square in Ottawa, Illinois, on August 21. Douglas spoke first for sixty minutes, then Lincoln for ninety, with Douglas returning to the platform for a thirty-minute rejoinder. As each man spoke, the audience interrupted with “cheers and laughter” and shouts of “yes, yes” and “Go get him.” Douglas addressed the crowd using his typical unctuous style, praising his opponent for his accomplishments to the point of near mockery and then turning the rhetoric to a harsh and misleading attack on Lincoln's policy positions. When it was Lincoln's turn to address the crowd, he strongly defended his policy stance but then began telling a gentle anecdote that turned out to be a verbal assault on Douglas with an artfully vigorous “wink and a nod” to the audience so they were in on the joke, too.
Douglas had misrepresented Lincoln's stance on slavery, suggesting that he would “set the states at war with one another” over the issue. Rather than counterattack, Lincoln feigned bewilderment that the well-regarded Douglas would so misstate his positions and so he had been blindsided by the compliments Judge Douglas had heaped upon him. “I
was not very accustomed to flattery and it came the sweeter to me. I was rather like the Hoosier, with the gingerbread, when he said he reckoned he loved it better than any other man, and got less of it.”
Reportedly this story about his Hoosier friend wanting to eat gingerbread men charmed that Illinois audience, and also impressed the thousands of readers of the newspaper accounts. Six years later in the White House,
Lincoln expanded the gingerbread story, giving a personal context as he recalled an incident from his
Indiana boyhood.
Once in a while my mother used to get some sorghum and ginger and make some gingerbread. It wasn't often and it was our biggest treat. One day I smelled the gingerbread and came into the house to get my share while it was hot. My mother had baked me three gingerbread men. I took them under a hickory tree to eat them. There was a family that lived near us that was a little poorer than we were and their boy came along as I sat down.
“Abe,” he said, “gimme a man?”
I gave him one. He crammed it in his month in two bites and looked at me while I was biting the legs from my first one.
“Abe,” he said, “gimme that other'n.”
I wanted it myself, but I gave it to him and as it followed the first I said to him. “You seem to like gingerbread.”
“Abe,” he said, “I don't suppose there's anybody on this earth likes gingerbread better'n I do.” He drew a long breath before he added, “and I don't suppose there's anybody on this earth gets less'n I do.”
Lincoln's anecdote gives great clues not only to how his mother would have made gingerbread men, but also about life in the early days of Indiana
statehood.
The Lincolns moved to Indiana two months before Abraham's eighth birthday and just about the time the state was officially admitted to the Union on December 11, 1816. His father, Thomas, had scouted and claimed 160 acres that fall, probably marking the corners of his new farm with piles of brush, as was the custom, and quickly building a lean-to
shelter before heading back about fifty miles southeast to fetch his family.
The move assured that Thomas
Lincoln would own this farm in a state newly admitted to the Union. Titles to the two different farms he had purchased in Kentucky had been disputed, with Lincoln ultimately losing the land. Thomas and his wife, Nancy, must have felt that owning land with certainty in a free state was worth uprooting their two
children,
Sarah, almost ten, and Abraham, nearly eight, from school and community. Lincoln also left behind forty bushels of
corn harvested from his productive Knob Creek land near
Elizabethtown, Kentucky. It would be some time before the
Indiana
crops would be as bountiful. The new land was forested. The family even had to cut their way through saplings, trees, and tangles of wild grapevines the last few miles to the farm from the path-like township road.
Thomas Lincoln's family was among the first in that section, then two counties east from the southern tip of Indiana, although family would soon follow. Vincennes, sixty miles northwest, was the nearest big city. It would be two years before
James Gentry settled two miles west of the
Lincoln farm, opening up his store. Eventually the town was named for himâGentryville. Troy, about fourteen miles southeast on the Ohio River, served as the Lincolns' market town for the first few years. They took corn there to be ground and traded for supplies they could not make or grow.
In October 1818 Nancy Lincoln went to help care for her aunt Elizabeth
Sparrow, who had become sick on their neighboring farm. While there, Nancy, too, drank the poisoned milk, contaminated when cows grazed on toxic white snakeroot. She died in a few days from the “milk sickness,” as did her aunt and uncle. A year later Thomas traveled back to Kentucky and returned with his new wife, Sarah
Johnston. The two
families had known each other in Elizabethtown. Sarah's husband had died just before the Lincolns moved north. She had three children, two of them about the same ages as the Lincoln children, Sarah and Abraham, now almost thirteen and eleven. It made sense in the pioneer days of the 1810s to combine the families.
The gingerbread parable is appealing whether Nancy or Sarah made Abraham's treat. He referred to them both as “mother.” But I'm willing to bet that Nancy made those men. There were just two children
during her days at the
kitchen hearth. After Sarah moved in there were six children in the household including Dennis Hanks, a twice-orphaned
Lincoln cousin whose guardians had been the
Sparrows.
There is a poignancy to the vision of a small boy running to get his share that doesn't fit as well with an eleven-year-old who was, by most accounts, doing nearly a man's work in the forest and fields.
Lincoln's
gingerbread
recipe is one Nancy would have known in her heart and her hands. Abraham would have known it, too. Growing up in a one-room
log cabin he was, essentially, raised in the kitchen. Not only would young Lincoln have watched food being cooked, he would have harvested and prepared some of the ingredients and probably learned to cook for himself, too.
However, I did need a recipe, so I consulted several period cookbooks, using Lincoln's description as a guide. I have three cookbooks by Miss Eliza
Leslie of Philadelphia, perhaps the most well-known early- to mid-nineteenth-century cookbook writer. Some of her books are available as modern reprints or online. I do have two original volumes, one the same 1845 edition Mary Lincoln purchased. Mrs. Lettice Bryan's
The Kentucky Housewife
, published in 1839, has recipes with their origins right in Lincoln country. I pulled other resources off my bookshelf and from the stacks of photocopies of magazine and agricultural journal pages dating from the 1830s through the 1860s.
The ingredients Lincoln didn't mention are as important as the two he did. We're
used to gingerbread as a mixed-spice cake. I usually make gingerbread flavored with ginger, cinnamon, and cloves. Some gingerbreads have
nutmeg or
mace; even allspice may turn up in the recipe. Almost all have molasses as the syrupy sweetener. I had hoped to find a period recipe using just ginger and
sorghum. I did find a couple that were simply spiced with ginger, but none called for sorghum.
Miss Leslie's 1828 recipe for “Common Gingerbread,” from her first cookbook, seemed like the best one to try. It is closest to the time period, uses very simple ingredients, and is spiced only with ginger. She made her gingerbread with flour, butter, milk, a hint of brown sugar, ginger, pearl ash, and molasses.
Lincoln specified sorghum, which is different from molasses. The flavor it brings is subtle, sweet, and aromatic without dominating. As
my southern friends say, it is “truly fine.” Sorghum would nicely balance the single spice,
ginger.
Sorghum
syrup, which you can usually find next to
molasses in larger grocery stores, comes from the tall, broad-leafed sorghum plant that looks somewhat like corn when it is growing in the fields, only without the ears. For someone with a bit of time and a very big kettle, the syrup is relatively easy to make. Sorghum stalks are crushed, releasing the juice, which is strained to remove impurities and then cooked down in large kettles, evaporating excess water much like maple sap is made into syrup. It takes about twelve hours to make syrup from the juice. An acre of sorghum can produce 150 gallons of syrup.
Although sorghum is a farm product, it was rare in the United States before the 1850s. Farmers grew some sorghum in the South beginning in the 1700s, when seeds were imported from Africa. In 1850 a new strain was imported from France, and the crop took off. I've not seen it mentioned in recipes published through the 1850s; they all call for molasses. So Lincoln's mother's use of sorghum would have been unusual for the era.
The Kentucky Housewife
even specifies, “West Indian molasses, not
sugar house” for its gingerbread. Most molasses is a by-product of sugar processing. As the juice extracted from the sugarcane is boiled, the pure white sugar crystallizes. In the 1800s the crystals were molded into a cone shape for sale. As the process continues, brown sugar crystallizes, with dark brown sugar having a higher molasses content than light brown. Finally, the remaining molasses is poured off. The last bit of molasses left in the bottom of the barrel, called “black strap,” is the strongest.
The other ingredient Lincoln said his mother “used to get” was ginger, a product of the Caribbean. Ginger is grown for its tuberous root, used fresh or dried and then ground to make the spice. The first shipment of ginger from Jamaica to northern Europe was in 1585. Recipes for gingerbread published before the 1840s, including the recipe I used from Miss Leslie, require a lot of ginger. “Large spoonful” or a “third of a tea cup” were common measurements. By the 1850s, cookbooks call for far less, more in keeping with today's amounts measured in teaspoons. One explanation can be found in the instruction Miss Leslie wrote in the 1845 edition of her cookery book: “Ground ginger loses much of its
strength by keeping. Therefore, it will be frequently found necessary to put in more than the quantity given in the receipt.” As I was using modern ginger, I adapted the recipe by using a smaller quantity of the spice.
Pearl ash is a period-specific ingredient in Miss Leslie's recipe, but it has a readily acceptable substituteâbaking soda. I've always simply substituted modern baking soda for pearl ash or
saleratus, the substance that followed it. These powders react with acidic ingredients, such as molasses or sour milk, to make the batters bubbly and cakes bake up light.
No one knows if the
Lincolns made pearl ash on their farm, but they could have. The raw material, clear-cut trees, was all around them. Six generations ago, before the Revolutionary War, my Scots-
Irish relatives emigrated from Donegal, Ireland, settling on the western Pennsylvania frontier. Then in 1840, great-great-grandparents John and Mary Fails moved farther west to the Pennsylvania-Ohio state line. There, like the Lincolns, they settled on a heavily wooded farm. And there the Fails made “black salts,” the first step to making pearl ash.
The process for
clearing a forested farm hadn't changed much from colonial days. Whether it was the Lincolns or my Scots-Irish ancestors, the job started with the cold, sharp blade of an ax and finished with fire. Abraham and his father cut down trees and set aside
logs for building their cabin and outbuildings, turning into furniture, chopping for firewood, or splitting into fence rails. The remaining branches, logs, and stumps were burned. For the Fails family and others of their time, the ashes from those fires were an important source of revenue.
I have a yellowed and tattered newspaper clipping from the 1920s in the family album describing their pioneering efforts some seventy-five years earlier. “It is a tradition in the family that after a log heap had burned, if even in the night a storm threatened, the family would hasten to gather the ashes least they should become wet and leached and in this way lose their value.”
As my great-greats in Pennsylvania knew and as the Lincolns in Indiana would have known, the ashes from all those fires held the keys to making fat congeal into
soap and cakes rise. Soaking the ashes in hot water leached out the lye essential for turning leftover rendered pork or beef fat into soap. Two more steps produced pearl ash for
leavening purposes. Pioneers turned the liquid lye into solid black salts by boiling it
until the water evaporated. Further refining the black salts in a very hot fire, perhaps even in a kiln, burned off all the dark carbon bits, leaving a pure, white
ash. Fortunately, we can just dip our measuring spoons into the little orange-and-red box of baking soda.