Abraham Lincoln in the Kitchen (32 page)

Now
food traveled readily between sections of the country giving people more and more choices. Even though the political differences between North and South were increasingly tense, on Springfield tables Carolina rice could share a dinner plate with New England stewed codfish.

In Springfield the benefits of progress were now an obvious part of everyday life:
Oysters!
Pineapples!! Tomato sauce!! In cans!!!! As I read the foods heralded in the 1850s Springfield newspapers' grocery advertisements—oysters from the East Coast, pineapples and citrus from the tropics, and just-invented
canned tomato sauce—I realized there could be no better realization of Abraham
Lincoln's 1832 progressive vision than the food available to the people of Springfield. A huge variety of fresh and packaged food filled the stores, and the growing, diverse population had the money to buy it.

In 1853, Springfield businessman and newspaper editor
Simeon Francis highlighted the change over the previous ten years: “In those times [1843] few of our farmers, indeed of our citizens, could indulge
in such luxuries as coffee, sugar, tea, or a broadcloth coat.” The price of farmland increased from between three dollars to eight dollars an acre and now sold for between fifteen to thirty dollars.

Farming and food were the engines of this economic progress. Far from being a sleepy backwater, Springfield was an active national trading hub. During 1856, for example, the two
railway lines exported nearly a million bushels of
wheat and
corn grown on Springfield-area farms. Another half million bushels of wheat were ground into one hundred thousand 156-pound barrels of
flour and sent along the rails. Eastward shipments of live cattle and hogs brought $1,500,000 to the city. Armstrong's
woolen mill turned seventy-five thousand pounds of wool into blankets, flannels, and yarn. Another two hundred thousand pounds of raw wool, worth $100,000, were sent east for manufacturing.

Springfield's population grew from 2,600 in 1840 to 7,250 in 1855 as people from around the nation and across the ocean came to make their mark. Many early Illinois settlers had been from the upper South—Tennessee and Kentucky—others from Indiana and Ohio, and some from New England. Now European
immigrants came directly to the center of Illinois, contributing their traditions into the cultural mix. These immigrants changed the nation and Springfield. Their foods were reflected in a variety of “American” cookbooks and magazines. Whether the Lincolns actually ate any “foreign foods” is another journey into speculation, but they had the opportunity, especially from three immigrant groups—Irish,
Germans, and
Portuguese.

Mary Lincoln and many of her neighbors employed as live-in help
Irish girls, who arrived as part of the great migration following the Irish potato famine. Irish stew recipes began appearing in nearly every cookbook.

Springfield's substantial German population filled two churches: one Lutheran, one Methodist. The community had political clubs and a marching band. City directories displayed ads from grocers “Reisch & Helmle” and “Klaholt & Claus,” along with three Bier Halles: “Leuterback & Sawer's,” “Raps & Shoemaker's,” and “Weideman & Schriefer's Lager Bier Halle.” As to recipes for food to go with that beer, there was a German-American cookbook published in Philadelphia and printed in both languages, “a complete manual … with particular references to the climate and production of the United States.” The book has recipes for simple and
sophisticated dishes including
sauerkraut and
beef with sour cream. For those who wanted Old Country flavors without the work and wait, Springfield residents only had to look to Lavely's grocery store for their supply of “crout.” The store ran a large advertisement in January 1859.

Lincoln recognized the importance of the German population as a key voting block. He even purchased Springfield's German-language
newspaper, the
Illinois Staats Anzeiger
. Control of the paper remained with the editor, Theodore Canisius, under the condition that the paper supported the Republican Party. Lincoln owned it from May 30, 1859, to December 6, 1860.

Springfield's
First Presbyterian Church, the church the Lincolns attended,
helped sponsor a large group of
Portuguese who had fled religious persecution in their homeland. The families left Madeira and lived for a time in Trinidad before they were welcomed to Illinois. By 1855 some 350 Portuguese had settled in Springfield (about 4 percent of the population), working in a variety of trades. Mary Lincoln employed one Portuguese woman,
Charlotte DeSouza, as a seamstress. Maybe DeSouza shared some of her favorite homeland foods with the Lincolns: chopped beef with eggs or a fancy egg custard encased in puff pastry. Regardless of my speculation about what the Lincolns may have enjoyed, Portuguese recipes were entering American life. Springfield homemakers may have happened on the recipe for the “Portuguese way to prepare mutton” as I did in Lucretia Irving's 1852 book
Irving's 1000 Receipts, or, Modern and Domestic Cookery
, a complex dish of chops stuffed with a forcemeat and dressed with the fancy “Sauce Robert.”

Free people of color made Springfield their home, too.
Mariah Vance worked for the Lincoln family on and off for several years in a variety of responsibilities, including cook. She was, evidently, a valued friend of the family. Years later Robert stopped to visit her when he passed through Danville, where she had moved. Another Springfield free person of color, a young man named
William H. Johnson, born about 1835, accompanied Lincoln to the White House and functioned as his barber and valet.

Though there were occasional economic downturns in Springfield, the track was steadily ahead through the 1850s. Signs of success were all around. The clothing needs of the community were met by workers at Wiley's ready-made clothing factory. Craftsmen in the two hat stores
made one-third of the hats they sold, and fifty shoemakers cobbled at the city's seven shoe dealers. Furniture builders made fine and everyday home furnishings. Laborers, who had earned about ten dollars a month working at Armstrong's
woolen mill, Manning's carriage shop, flour mills, the pork-packing plant, and brickyard, now earned twenty dollars, while the prices of manufactured and imported goods declined.

Advertisements in Springfield's newspapers chronicled and sometimes even celebrated the community's economic advances in the kinds of
foods—fresh,
imported, and manufactured—people could purchase. In the early 1840s, grocers advertised mostly staples and a few fancy goods. In the fall of 1841, Barrett & Taylor offered 1,500 barrels of
salt “sold low,” for those who needed this essential ingredient for home curing or smoking meats. J. Bunn had two barrels of rice in stock along with Underwood's lemon syrup, pickles, ketchup, pepper sauce, and fresh lemons. John Buckhardt's store offered rice along with “New Orleans molasses” and barrels of both loaf and crushed sugar. Iles & Pasfield listed raisins, rice, allspice, cloves, nutmegs, mace, cinnamon, black and red pepper, vinegar, coffee, and tea, along with fish—mackerel, shad, herring, and cod. A. Lindsay and Bro. gave a more complete description of these fish in their July 11, 1842, ad. “Just received a choice lot of fish—consisting of Mackerel, Shad, Salmon, Herrings, pickled and smoked.”

By the mid-1850s not only were prices lower, but more and more exotic goods were available at the dry goods, or grocery, merchants in Springfield. Fruits from the Caribbean included
pineapples and oranges. Newly perfected
canned tomato sauce put the useful “esculent” vegetable on Springfield homemakers' pantry shelves for year-round use.
Cheese was popular. Favored kinds include some from the Western Reserve region of northeast Ohio and even a type of cheddar cheese shaped like a pineapple made in New York. Dried cod along with smoked and pickled fish were still advertised, perhaps reflecting the preferences of New Englanders and the
Portuguese residents. But now, as the December 1856 newspapers exclaimed, the railroad could bring “the celebrated Baltimore oyster” to town. “Fresh Shell
Oysters” were advertised by H. C. Meyers & Son and W. W. Watson & Son. W. Lavely offered “Fresh Cove Oysters.”

We know the Lincolns had charge accounts at two of the twenty-three Springfield dry goods and grocery stores in business during 1859. Alas, we don't
know their shopping habits at any of the butchers, bakers, or meat markets in town, but we do know they must have made purchases there.

However, we do have witnesses recording several times when Lincoln ate oysters. Lincoln scholar Wayne Temple suggests that if Lincoln had a favorite seafood, it “would have been oysters.”

Oysters had been available in central Illinois earlier. Lincoln and the other
Sangamon Long Nine, very tall legislators, served oysters and champagne at a party celebrating their success in passing the legislation to move the
capital from
Vandalia to
Springfield in 1837. But this 1856 advertising intensity suggests a good supply for just about every Springfielder who cared to eat them. In January 1859, Hull's store even advertised “chafing dishes for cooking oysters.” An illustration in the
American Home Cook Book
shows such a dish, fueled by an alcohol lamp “to keep steaks hot or to cook oysters, venison, mutton, etc. on the table.” It looks like a modern, low chafing dish or one of those holders to disguise a utilitarian baking dish, with decoratively pierced “silver” sides surrounding some kind of cooking basin. Just the thing for a quick supper or an oyster party.

So we come to another common Lincoln food speculation: Did Springfield families hold parties that featured only oysters? Did the Lincolns host them? Certainly, there were such events as oyster parties. In 1855 a short story in
Harper's New Monthly Magazine
portrayed an oyster party held in New York: “Some ten or a dozen young men were seated round the long-table, some busily stewing oysters in silver chafing-dishes … while more were sipping their Sauterne, and watching the operations of their companions with a sort of hungry interest.… The table looked like work. On the snowy cloth three or four silver chafing dishes glittered and one might hear in the pauses of conversation the bubbling of the savory stews within.”

Alas, the household inventories and purchase records don't show that the Lincolns, or any of Mary's sisters, owned an oyster chafing dish. And even though archaeological excavations around the Lincoln Home National Historic Site have found oyster shells and shards of bivalve shells—possibly oysters—those shells are the only existing evidence. It will remain speculation whether the couple ever did feed their guests exclusively on the popular bivalve.

During the 1800s, a great many Americans enjoyed oysters. They were featured on the menus of swanky New York City hotels and were so plentiful they fed the masses inexpensively. Some oysters were pickled in water, vinegar, and sp
ices and sealed in cans. Others traveled alive, in their shells, in barrels filled with seaweed and, sometimes, ice. Oysters can stay alive, holding their shells tightly sealed, for a number of days.

For longer life, several period cookbook authors suggested feeding oysters following this recipe: “Put them into water and wash them with a birch besom [small broom] until quite clean; then lay them bottom downwards into a pan, sprinkle with flour or oatmeal and salt and cover with water. Do the same every day and they will fatten. The water should be pretty salty.”

Storekeepers Lavely and Meyers also mention “cans” in their ads for oysters. As early as 1825, New Yorker Ezra Daggett packed salmon, lobsters, and oysters in tin cans. But the process required the food to be cooked inside the closed cans for five hours so that it would be safely sealed. The Springfield merchants may well have been selling both
canned and live oysters. Various ads state oysters “by the dozen or by the can,” suggesting some merchants were dealing with live oysters. During the month of December, Watson proclaimed that his store was receiving oysters “daily.” And H. C. Meyers & Son headlined “Prices Again Down!” on several occasions, perhaps in a hurry to get the live oysters out of the store and into customer's stomachs—stewed, scalloped, and maybe even on the half shell.

We do have a hint about how Lincoln liked to eat oysters. After a speech in Pontiac, Illinois, in January 1860, he declined an offered plate of raw oysters. “If I should eat a raw oyster with you it would be the first time I had ever eaten one. I like them cooked.” A guest at a restaurant dinner in Springfield in 1856 reported Lincoln ate fried oysters. And, eight years later, fried oysters became part of an election victory celebration.

On November 8, 1864, President Lincoln anxiously awaited the returns for his reelection. He walked over to the Executive Office Building, next door to the White House. There were
telegraph lines into Secretary of War
Edwin Stanton's office. There Lincoln, his secretary
John Hay, and friend and reporter
Noah Brooks could monitor the votes as they came in from the states. It was a cold and rainy night. Clerks brought in the telegraphed reports showing Lincoln's vote totals growing
higher than the Democratic candidate, Lincoln's former general George
McClellan. At midnight, with the results certain, telegraph officer Major Thomas Eckert brought in supper.
John Hay described the scene. “The President went awkwardly and hospitably to work shoveling out the fried oysters. He was most agreeable and genial all the evening.”

After this submersion into oyster and Lincoln lore, I figured I'd best test a recipe. Like Lincoln, I wasn't ready to eat mine raw. But Miss Eliza Leslie's oyster stew did sound mighty good. As the simmering smells of lemon, mace, cream, and oysters filled my kitchen, I turned again to the question that started this chapter. What made Lincoln, well, Lincoln? Certainly the decade of the 1850s was pivotal: slavery in the Southern states, simmering through ten presidential administrations, came to a full boil of dissent as
Kansas erupted into bloody riots in 1855 and '56 and John Brown raided the U.S. arsenal at Harper's Ferry in 1859. Lincoln's speeches and letters demonstrate a thoughtful, ideological, ambitious, and pragmatic man at the geographical and metaphorical crossroads of the nation.