Abraham Lincoln in the Kitchen (35 page)

So, what about the corned beef and cabbage back at the Willard? On March 3, the evening before he was inaugurated, Lincoln hosted a
dinner at the hotel for his incoming cabinet secretaries,
William Seward, Salmon Chase, Gideon Wells,
Montgomery Blair,
Simon Cameron, Caleb Smith, and Edwards Bates. It seems to me there were two meals that could be considered “inaugural dinners”: the elegant one served in
the White House and this homey, welcoming meal Abraham Lincoln requested the day before for the men who would stand by him during the challenges to come.

Although we don't know the menu at the first White House dinner, Mrs. Grimsley's characterization does give us a clue. I would suggest that the “elegant” meal is similar to the ones served to the Lincoln party in New York, a Frenchified repast rich with choices and sauces. The Lincolns held their first official state dinner two weeks later. They hosted the members of the cabinet and a visiting reporter, William Russell of the
London Times
. He described the atmosphere and cuisine of the event but, again, not the menu. The state dinner “was not remarkable for ostentation. No liveried servants, no
Persie
splendor of ancient plate or
chefs d'oeuvre
of art glittered round the board. Vases of flowers decorated the table, combined with dishes in what may be called the ‘Gallo-American' style, with
wines which owed their parentage to France and their rearing and
education to the United States, which abounds in stunning nurseries for such productions.”

This style of
food was not all that uncommon across America during the 1850s. Even in Minnesota at the western edge of the settled country, French-American dishes made their way onto tables, at least for special occasions. I've seen menus from those years in early St. Paul, Minnesota—when people had cows in their backyards and Native Americans walked the streets in tribal dress—menus with the same kinds of dishes that the chefs at the Astor House prepared for the Lincolns' stay. At a banquet for the Minnesota Historical Society on June 24, 1856, the chefs of the Winslow House Hotel prepared a rich and varied array including real turtle soup, oyster soup, boiled shad with “anchovia sauce,” several roasted and boiled meat dishes, and a dozen entrées, all with Gallo-American flair: veal cutlets à la Florentine, calves feet à la tortune, fricandeau veal à la toulauce, and boiled beef à la Parisienne, to name a few. The twenty dessert selections included champagne jelly, Victoria and Albert pudding, and lemon ice cream.

Although there aren't any surviving
Springfield
restaurant menus from the era, display advertisements in the 1850s city directories certainly give the suggestion of similar fare. Springfield's fancy foods could have filled the bill. In 1857 Edmund Duchamel advertised his “French Restaurant” serving up “every delicacy in season … in the most superior style and shortest notice.” James Busher was serving “Persian Sherbet and root beer” from his brewery and malt house at the west end of Jefferson Street. In January 1858 editions of the Springfield newspaper, Edouard Doul of the St. Louis restaurant advertised that he had received, “from Paris (France) of his own importation the delicacies … Pates du Fois gras (Strasborg) and Pates du Poulard.” He offered them “cheap for cash.”

We don't know if any of these fancy foods made their way onto the Lincolns' table. They “often entertained small numbers of friends at dinner and somewhat larger numbers at evening parties.” Although that unnamed writer says these were held in a “simple way,” that doesn't mean a few bits of fancy foods couldn't have been served. Young Mary Lincoln did, after all, attend a French boarding school in
Lexington and grew up in a home where her family entertained leading politicians and businessmen. These are just hints at the sophisticated foods and beverages the Lincolns left behind in Illinois.

The Lincoln family left more than familiar foods and shops behind. They left behind family and friends and the certainty of their place in society. One of the first things Mary did as the family settled into the White House was to seek playmates for Willie and Tad, and the
Taft boys fit the bill perfectly. Mrs. Lincoln and Mrs. Taft had met at a reception and on learning Bud was twelve and Holly eight, near enough in age to the Lincoln boys who were ten and almost eight, Mrs. Lincoln asked that they come to play. Older sister Julia described the first time they came to call at Mrs. Lincoln's request. “We went into the conservatory and there stood the boys by the water-lily tank watching the goldfish. Such nice, quiet, shy boys, I thought. In five minutes the four boys had disappeared and I saw them no more that day.” The Taft boys returned home filthy dirty at dark and reported that they “had the best time and had been all over the White House. Mrs. Lincoln said we must come every day and bring Julia … Mr. Lincoln jounced us on his lap and told us stories.”

The boys did eat hard-boiled eggs, at least once. On Easter Monday, April 1, the
Lincoln and Taft boys took part in the annual
Easter Egg Roll on the White House lawn. The activity was new to Willie and Tad, and Julia reported they “enjoyed it immensely.” Each of the four boys had a basket filled with the brightly colored eggs. “The players stand at the top of the hill and watch their eggs race to the bottom. The one which
first arrives is the winner; the cracked or broken ones go to the victor who eats them or is expected to.”

The children and their raucous activities were an important escape for President Lincoln. Mary Lincoln invited adult guests, too, for breakfast, tea, and dinner in an attempt to relieve the stresses of office. But Willie, Tad, Bud, and Holly had the run of the place. Once, Julia walked in on them wrestling Lincoln to the ground. Another time, Tad fired a toy cannon into the Cabinet Room while the cabinet was meeting, and there were countless other adventures involving dolls that needed pardoning and animals that needed rescuing. It was the boys' attic theatrical event, which all the staff and soldiers who had five cents could come and watch, that caused Lincoln to throw back his head and laugh heartily. Julia recounted that it was the “only time I ever saw Mr. Lincoln really laugh all over.”

When Lincoln first took office, he was besieged at all hours by people who wanted to be appointed to office in the new Republican government. In 1861 the city was smaller than it is today and so was the White House. The Oval Office wasn't added until the twentieth century, when the wings on either side were expanded. Today the second floor of the White House is private. In 1861 there were public and private rooms on both the first and second floors. Even the president's office was upstairs. The White House was seemingly as open as the streets. Reporter
Noah Brooks
described the daily access: “Let us go to the Executive Mansion, there is nobody to bar our passage, and the multitude washed or unwashed always has free ingress and egress.… The right or west wing of the house is occupied by the President's family, the center by the state parlors and the east wing has below stairs the famous East Room and upstairs the offices of the President and his secretaries.”

During this time, Lincoln was trying to manage conditions to avoid the looming war. He said of those days that he was “like a man so busy
renting rooms at one end of his
house that he has no time to put out a fire burning in the other.” Concerned for her husband's health, Mary Lincoln instituted a daily carriage ride to “induce him to take the fresh air.”

The crush of presidential social obligations was seemingly equal to the besiegements of office seekers and petitioners. The president was to hold a kind of open house, a levee, on Tuesday evenings and Saturday afternoons when Congress was in session. These events were essentially receiving lines. The Marine Band played and President and Mrs. Lincoln greeted all the guests, the president shaking each person's hand and Mrs. Lincoln simply speaking with them. After all guests had been greeted, the Lincolns would mingle a bit. There weren't any refreshments served. It was also expected “that during each winter he will
entertain at dinner all the members of both Houses of Congress and the Diplomatic Corps so that official dinners have to be given by him as often as twice a week.”

On March 12, 1861, President and Mrs. Lincoln held a party with “music and dancing,” according to a letter sent by
John Nicolay. On June 7, 1861, Mrs. Grimsley quoted the
Washington Star
report of the
first formal dinner the Lincolns hosted for the diplomatic corps: “The dinner was served in a style to indicate Mrs. Lincoln's good taste and good judgment had exercised supervision.”

Lincoln hoped with his inaugural address and policies that he could buy time to solve the problems with the rebelling states, but when he first entered his office on March 5, 1861, he received a letter from Major Robert Anderson at
Fort Sumter in South Carolina, stating that the garrison would run out of supplies in a month or six weeks. Lincoln said later, “Of all the trials I have had since I came here, none begin to compare with those I had between the inauguration and the [April 13] fall of Fort Sumter.”

After the South Carolina troops turned back a supply ship and fired on Fort Sumter, Southern states continued to secede from the Union. Topographically, Washington sits in a bowl, and when Lincoln took office, the militarily advantageous “high ground” surrounding it was in opposition control.
Baltimore, just forty miles north of the capital city, had strong Southern sympathies.
Richmond, Virginia, soon to become the capital of the Confederate States, was just a hundred miles south.

Washington became isolated. As Julia Taft described, “There was
one Sunday [in April] when
Washington realized that it was entirely cut off from the North. Wires were down and rails torn up and the city shivered in fear of a mob of
Baltimore ‘pug-uglies' that were reported on the way to burn and pillage.”

The
Lincoln and
Taft boys built a fort on the roof of the White House with a small log serving as a cannon and a “few old condemned rifles.” All four boys spent hours up on the roof during 1861 pretending that it was a fort or a man-of-war ship.

Real troops from Massachusetts fought their way through Baltimore and reached the city on April 19. They arrived “with bands playing and flags flying as they came up to the [White House].” Soon more troops arrived from New York and other states. By early summer “Washington had become a great camp with more regiments arriving daily. Everyone breathed easier and felt that
the war was as good as won.”

Two months later, on July 21, 1861, the first
battle was fought at Bull Run. The Union forces were routed. The nation was at war and it would not be over quickly.

From all accounts, the Lincolns fell into a work- and war-driven routine with chaotic interruptions from the boys. In the morning, President Lincoln was up reading, writing, and working long before the rest of the household or even the city. Mrs. Lincoln would call him in to
breakfast about eight o'clock, and by nine he would be back at his desk with doors opened to the throngs. Mrs.
Grimsley reported that Mrs. Lincoln frequently “invited well-known friends to breakfast and then sent word to the President we had company [and] breakfast was waiting for him.”

His breakfasts were simple: an egg and some toast or other bread. If he stopped for lunch around noon, he often had just a biscuit and a glass of milk in the winter, and fruit, grapes, or apples in the summer. His law partner William Herndon later recalled the way Lincoln ate an apple. “His manipulation of an apple when he ate it was unique. He disdained the use of a knife to cut or pare it. Instead he would grasp it around the equatorial part, holding it thus until his thumb and forefinger almost met, sink his teeth into it, and then unlike the average person, begin eating at the blossom end. When he was done he had eaten his way over and through rather than around and into it. Such, at least, was his explanation. I never saw an apple thus disposed of by any one else.”

In one of her few surviving 1861 letters, Mary Lincoln wrote that she had received a box of delicious grapes from General George
McClellan and that they “often received delightful fruit from New Jersey.”

Mary Lincoln wrote in a letter to her friend Hannah Shearer that
entertaining in the
White House was “very different from home.” In the White House, “[W]e only have to give our orders for the dinner and dress in proper season.”

Certainly not every meal in the White House was served with fancy
French sauces and fussily fixed vegetables. As I tested a few of the French-inspired entrées, I quickly discovered those dishes are the culinary equivalent of an 1860s ball gown—all ruffled and tucked, decorated with lace and braid, and assembled with a lot of work, specialized ingredients, and skills—elevating something that could be simple and lovely into an extraordinary experience. Many of the dishes highlighted on inaugural-journey menus were designed to be made in restaurant or hotel kitchens, where hundreds are fed at each sitting. (During the pre-inaugural crush, the
Willard Hotel sometimes fed 1,500 people in a day.) These fancy dishes called for an array of sauces that required hours to make from cooked-down stocks, only to have a tablespoon put onto the dish as a finishing flourish. Delicious, yes, but not practical for a working household with any number of guests invited to stay at the drop of a hat. Stews, roasts, soups, and masses of simply cooked vegetables made much more sense for the Lincolns to serve in the White House.

We do have a hint of very ordinary dishes on the menu. As I wrote in
Chapter 9
, Dr. Henry M. Pierce and his nephew discovered President Lincoln eating leftover
baked beans for
breakfast. And the
Taft boys stayed to dinner so often that their mother scolded them about it. I can't imagine these active, mischievous boys between the ages of eight and twelve dining on veal cutlets à la Florentine. Julia recounted, “My mother often told them not to ‘make a nuisance of yourselves by always staying at meals.' When the President and Mrs. Lincoln had distinguished visitors at dinner, the boys would sometimes have their dinner in another room and declared that to be great fun.” All four boys even attended a state dinner, sitting near the foot of the table.