Abraham Lincoln in the Kitchen (20 page)

BARBECUE “FIXIN'S”:
Mrs. Bryan did offer some serving suggestions with her recipe for barbecued shoat. When we lived in Alabama for a while, we came to call such dishes “fixin's.”
The Kentucky Housewife
described serving barbecue: “When it is well done serve it with a garnish … squeeze over it a little lemon juice and accompany it with melted butter and
wine,
bread sauce, raw salad, slaugh or cucumbers and stewed fruit.”

CUCUMBER SALAD

 

A modicum of vinegar and lemon juice and a smattering of cayenne and ginger transform normally mild-mannered cucumbers into a snappy salad. Easy to make, this relish lasts for several days in the refrigerator. It is tasty alongside any meat, adds zest to vegetables, and can be mixed with mayonnaise for a sandwich spread or tartar sauce
.

2 large or 4 medium cucumbers

1 teaspoon salt

10 green onions, peeled and thinly sliced into rings

¾ cup white or cider vinegar

Juice of ½ lemon (2 to 3 tablespoons)

⅛ teaspoon ground cayenne pepper

⅛ teaspoon ground ginger

Pare the cucumbers, cut in half, and remove the seeds. Chop into about a ½-inch dice. Place in a nonreactive bowl and mix with the salt. Let stand for at least 1 hour. You may keep the cucumbers salted down for about 4 hours at the most. Drain off the accumulated juices and rinse well under cold water. Add the sliced green onions to the cucumbers.

In a small saucepan, mix the vinegar, lemon juice, cayenne, and ginger. Heat to boiling and pour over the vegetables. Let stand for at least 3 hours before serving; overnight is better. Store in a covered container in the refrigerator for up to 4 days.

Makes 6 to 8 servings as a relish

ADAPTED FROM “CUCUMBER SALAD,”
PRAIRIE FARMER
, JULY 1859.

SPRINGFIELD SCENES FROM DIARIES AND GROCERY LEDGERS

I
have a distant and vague memory of the first time I visited Abraham
Lincoln's home in Springfield, Illinois. I was nine years old and remember looking up and seeing a tall black hat hanging on a peg by the front door. The hallway seemed dark and narrow. Stairs to the second floor took up more room than the front-hall steps in my grandparents' house. Nanny and Pa's house was smaller. Their narrow stairs went up an outside wall with a window, and there was only one set of rooms on each floor. The Lincolns had parlors on either side of the central hall and several bedrooms upstairs.

Visiting the Lincolns' house, squished among grown-ups and crowded up to the protective barrier, I peered into rooms set up with old-fashioned furniture, books, and toys for the boys in the upstairs bedroom. I don't remember the kitchen. All in all it was a dissatisfying visit. The year before, our parents had taken us to Mount Vernon. Now, there was a house fit for a president of the United States. The rooms in George Washington's home were high ceilinged and grand. The lawn down to the river was fun to run across. The garden of hedges smelled different than any I'd been near. Lincoln's house smelled dry and stuffy, but at least it didn't burn my eyes the way the smoky and damp cabin rooms in New Salem Village had. We'd stopped at that state historic site on the same trip.

In the time since, I've read accounts of the events and lives in the Lincoln home written by neighbors, friends, and political guests. One comment runs through many of them: the Lincoln boys were never
shushed and hardly disciplined. Both Abraham and Mary were indulgent parents. Abraham enjoyed spending time with his sons.
Neighbor
James Gourley told how
Lincoln would walk out along the railway with his children, way out into the country talking and “explaining things.” Another friend, Joseph Gillespie, reflected that Lincoln's children “literally ran over him and he was powerless to withstand their importunities.” Gillespie said, “He was the most indulgent parent I ever knew.”

I wanted to shake the “historic house cobwebs” out of my mind and find the ingredients to create a real sense of life in the Lincoln home. And I was pleased to find some of those ingredients the Lincolns bought during their years in
Springfield listed on ledger pages from a couple of local stores. Abraham and Mary Lincoln purchased the house seventeen years before they left for the White House. They actually lived in the home for just fifteen years, as they rented it out while Lincoln served his one term in Congress.

I hadn't known too much about Mary Lincoln until I started this research. I had a vague awareness of the common characterizations in books, magazines, and movies that focused on Mary's shortcomings, easily suggesting the Lincolns'
marriage was troubled. Now, after reading scores of first-person narratives from friends and relatives, I've come away with a more complete, complex understanding of Mary and of her life with Abraham. As Mary Lincoln's authoritative biographer Ruth Painter Randall concluded, in the home at Eighth and Jackson “there was love … fun and playfulness, there was the joy of children.”

Mary and Abraham knew each other extraordinarily well. Once, when she took him to task for being hours late for supper, he teased her back. Everyone had waited to eat. The chickens were overcooked; the rest of the dishes were cold. He said he was just “two minutes” late. She promptly corrected him, “two hours,” and the family settled in to eat with good humor. That Mary's exuberant opinions and criticisms sometimes spilled into public view gave some Springfield folks cause to cluck their tongues in dismay at a nontraditional behavior and to write about it later.

In everything he did, Lincoln was “regularly irregular; that is he had no stated time for eating, not fixed time for going to bed, none for getting up.” As frustrating as that would be, his long absences—riding the
court circuit for weeks at a time or traveling to give political speeches—were harder on Mary. She became, essentially, a single mother, with little household help and no means of immediate contact with her traveling husband, whom she loved deeply, until he walked back in the door. She “often said [to neighbor
James Gourley] if her husband had stayed at home as he ought to, that she would have loved him better.”

During the 1950s, the Lincoln house volunteers displayed freshly baked bread on the kitchen's cast-iron stove. Visitors treated to that lived-in aroma must have built a layer of possibility onto the experience of walking on the same floors that Lincoln trod, looking out into his backyard, and sensing the wholeness of family life. I hoped to re-create some sense of their lives in my kitchen.

I began with the published recollections hoping to find mentions and even descriptions of
food that I could use to build a vivid picture to connect with the specific purchases detailed in the ledgers. I sat with two sets of books open on my desk and my computer's desktop—remembrances of the Lincolns and period cookbooks. Later I took to my kitchen and began to cook.

I sorted through stories and recipes trying to match foods to events. Alas, for all the
entertaining the Lincolns did during the winter session of the Illinois legislature and the rest of the year, few of their guests described exactly what they served. In recollections published years later, Donn Piant wrote that Mrs. Lincoln offered pie to her guests, but he didn't say what kind. In a speech twenty years after the Lincolns left Springfield, their friend Isaac Arnold said that Mrs. Lincoln's “table was famed for the excellence of many rare Kentucky dishes and in season it was loaded with venison, wild turkeys, prairie chickens, quail and other
game, then abundant.” In the 1890s
Noah Brooks reported to journalist
Ida Tarbell that Mrs. Lincoln served corned beef and cabbage during a supper he shared with the family in 1857.

Caroline Owsley Brown described
Springfield society in general and calling among friends and
neighbors on New Year's Day. Everyone was expected “to eat oysters, chicken-salad, drink coffee, put down a saucer of
ice cream and cake and nibble a few bon-bons.” Oranges, raisins, almonds, and white grapes also graced the table along with the fancy macaroon pyramids held together with spun sugar made by
Mr. Watson, the local confectioner, who had traveled to St. Louis to learn the trick of making them.

As to contemporaneous descriptions,
Orville Hickman Browning, a lawyer from Quincy, spent the legislative seasons in Springfield and visited the town on other matters during the years. His diaries have some of the few contemporary descriptions of events. However, his entries are irritatingly short on details:

Another diary from this period gives some sense of the social life Mary Lincoln had among her
neighborhood and church friends. On January 1, 1851,
Mrs. William Black began her diary with an entry “Took tea at Mrs. Lincoln's.” Her third child, Samuel Dale, was born five days later. On February 11, she “spent the evening at Mrs. Lincoln['s].” She called on Mary with her daughter and the baby on February 26 and March 5, when she “spent the afternoon,” as she did again on March 10. Little Samuel died on March 24, 1851, a little more than a year after the Lincolns' four-year-old son Eddy had died. Mrs. Black spent much of the
next month in mourning and at prayer. On May 3, “Mrs. Lincoln insisted on our coming over in the evening—we did so and found Dr. Smith [the Presbyterian minister] there he prayed with us before leaving.” Two days later Mrs. Black once again spent an afternoon with Mary after she “sent a second message for me” to come. Mary must have been feeling low or ill with Abraham out of town on the court circuit in Urbana and Danville, as the next day Mrs. Black wrote, “called on Mrs. Lincoln—found her in better spirits.”