Abraham Lincoln in the Kitchen (8 page)

Dennis Hanks recalled those early days, too. “In the winter and spring we cleared ground, made a field of about 6 acres on which we raised our crops. We all hunted pretty much all the time. Especially when we got tired of work—which we did very often, I will assure you. We did not have to go more than 4 or 5 hundred yards to kill deer, turkeys & other wild game. We found bee trees all over the forests.”

Honey from those bee trees stands in my mind as symbolic of the second stage of settlement. Gathering pawpaws and other fruits and nuts simply made use of nature's gifts. Harvesting honey from bee trees marked the intrusion and impact of settlers on the land. Honey bees were not native to the United States. Early colonists brought beehives over from Europe. As settlements advanced away from the Atlantic coast, bees flew ahead, staking their own claims, protected from natural predators, in the hollows of dead trees. To reach the honey, bee tree hunters simply chopped the tree down. They shattered and destroyed months, even years, of work by the bee colony in just a few strokes of an ax. Some bee hunters captured the bees as well to establish
farmyard hives to pollinate gardens and provide a handy honey harvest.

I wondered what the honey from those wild and later farm-tended hives tasted like. For years the only honey I ate came from the grocery store. Highly filtered and heated during processing, it's sweet and almost cloying. I have to confess it has not been my favorite sweetener. Certainly the honey the Lincolns and their neighbors enjoyed would have been different. Then two summers ago my neighbor, Tim, set up a hive in his backyard. Now bees harvest pollen and nectar from my flowers, pear tree, and even the basil plants. I see them all summer long. Sometimes the rubber mat outside my back door is covered with bees harvesting the morning dew. Tim says they need a lot of moisture in the spring and fall. You could say that unheated, lightly filtered honey from Tim's bees has vintages. Summer honey is light and beguiling, almost with a hint of mint from the linden tree pollen and clover. End-of-season honey is dark and rich with heady floral overtones. The Lincolns must have enjoyed these kinds of honey. And they could have had a lot of it, too. Tim gets about eighty pounds a year from his hive. Those eighty pounds yield twenty-six quarts. Bee trees would have yielded much more.

Washington Irving wrote about wild bees in an essay published in 1848. He asserted that the “Indians consider them the harbinger of the white man, as the buffalo is of the red man; and say that, in proportion as the bee advances, the Indian and buffalo retire. We are always accustomed to associate the hum of the bee-hive with the farm house and flower garden and to consider these industrious little animals as connected with the busy haunts of man, and I am told that the wild bee is seldom to be met with at any great distance from the frontier.”

The Lincolns'
Little Pigeon Creek community in Spencer County did grow quickly, pushing back the frontier forest. In 1818, newly married to Thomas Lincoln, Sarah
Johnston and her three children moved to Indiana. She brought furniture and household goods from her
Elizabethtown city home to civilize this “country that was wild and desolate.”

By the 1820 census, four years after the Lincolns arrived, there were nine families, including the Lincolns, living within a mile of their farm with forty-nine children: fifteen boys and thirteen girls under seven, and twelve boys and nine girls between seven and seventeen. In another mile radius there were six more families with thirty-four more children.
That's nearly 120 people in the neighborhood, with more and more arriving every year. In 1818
James Gentry moved to the county and set up the first store in the Little Pigeon Creek community. The market community was starting to build, too.

As the neighborhood changed, so would the food.
Farm-produced surpluses of milk, butter, and eggs meant ingredients for baking and extra to
barter or trade with merchants for foodstuffs—
sugar, spices, coffee, tea—that could not be produced on the farm. Importantly, the community grew by socializing, a national trait that intrigued Englishman Woods:

Lincoln neighbor
Elizabeth Crawford recalled some of the foods served at
church celebrations. “In the wintertime they would hold church in some of their
neighbors houses at such times they were always treated with the utmost kindness. A bottle of whiskey, pitcher of water, sugar and a glass, or a basket of apples or
turnips or some pies or cakes.”

Crawford's list of special foods told me what was highly prized as a sign of hospitality: whiskey, possibly made in the host's or a neighbor's backyard still from local corn mash. Sugar was definitely a purchased item, and the glass used to serve it and the whiskey was a very special piece of tableware, quite a change from hollowed-out gourds or tin cups for everyday drinking. Apples were rare in the early Indiana settlement days. It took three to five years, or longer, for an apple tree to bear fruit. The crisp white flesh of a peeled mild turnip is not that different from a tart apple, if you think about it. Then there were the pies and cakes. Not only were apples in short supply, wheat
flour was, too. Cornmeal and
corn breads were common, and cake recipes used a mixture of wheat and cornmeal.

As more and more forest fell to ax and plow, there was less area for
wild fruits and nuts to thrive and more people vying to gather them. Game animals would have retreated farther away from the danger of man. Now that the
farms were established, the Hoosiers depended upon their cultivated lands to
supply food for themselves and their animals. The
pumpkin was one of those important foods.
Lincoln even recalled that it was his job on the Kentucky farm to plant the pumpkin seeds in every third hill of corn his father planted. Pumpkin vines running among the corn hills gave two crops on the same land.

This was a new vegetable for Englishman James Woods and one that, for me, is indicative of the maturing of farm life from the wilds of the frontier. Woods wrote for his readers back home, “Pompions are another highly prized production of this country. They often grow to an immense size and weigh from 40 to 60 pounds.” As Woods explained, “Cattle of all descriptions, pigs, poultry are fond of them, but they prefer the inside and seeds to the outside.”

Once, settlers had simply turned cows and hogs out to feed in meadows and forage on the forest mast of fallen leaves, fruit, and nuts, a practice with great risk, as Lincoln said in his poem, of the bears feeding on the swine. More important, open grazing was a risk to the health of the community. Milk from cows grazing on wild white snakeroot poisoned Abraham's mother and many other settlers. Now farm animals, too, needed sustenance from farm-raised food such as pumpkins, rutabagas, and corn. Leaves pulled from still-growing cornstalks were used to feed livestock. To pay a neighbor for a copy of Weem's
Life of Washington
borrowed and accidentally damaged in a rainstorm, Lincoln “pulled fodder,” spending three days stripping those leaves.

Of course, people enjoyed pumpkins. Yet, as anyone who has ever kept a jack-o'-lantern on the porch steps past Halloween or through a freeze knows, pumpkins do not keep for very long. As Woods explained, “They make good sauce and excellent pies and are much eaten here; they are sliced and dried for winter use for pies and sauce.” Some sources say that the children would eat the dried pumpkin as a kind of fruit leather.

The way pumpkin pie or sauce was prepared depended on the affluence of the cook. I've made simple pumpkin butter, sweetened with honey or molasses and just sharpened with a dash of vinegar. The recipe included here calls for a bit of cinnamon or nutmeg. Though the pumpkin,
honey, and vinegar would have been readily available, Hoosiers would have had to purchase molasses and spices. As the community grew, those ingredients probably would have been accessible, if not
common, and good cooks like Abraham's stepmother, Sarah
Lincoln, would have sought them out. Pumpkin pie recipes in cookbooks of the era are not all that different from the ones we make today.

Fortunately we can start with canned pumpkin, saving the time to cut up the pumpkin, stew it in a pan with a little water, and pass it through a sieve for a smooth puree, or to soak dried pumpkin to soften it before making it into the paste. Period sources also have recipes for corn bread where the stewed pumpkin stands in for a large part of the liquid in the recipe. I've included versions for both pumpkin butter and pie in the recipe section.

In a relatively short time, the
farms of Spencer County would have come to look like the one farmed today by the Park Service.
Lincoln's
neighbor
A. H. Chapman provided a succinct description. “Lincoln's little farm was well stocked with hogs, horses, and cattle and … he raised a fine crop of wheat, corn, and vegetables.” Chapman also reported that
Thomas had planted apple trees.

Woods provided a comprehensive description of the vegetables he saw planted on Indiana and Illinois farms. “I've seen no sweet
potatoes, but Irish or common potatoes grow tolerable in wet season … very few parsnips or carrots, but they are said to do well in wet season … small beans of the kidney kind are cultivated by the Americans. They are generally planted to climb on the corn and are many sorts and different colors … 
cabbages grow well.” He continued his list: “Onions and shallots, cucumbers grow well. Parsley and radishes thrive and lettuce. We found many morels [mushrooms] in the spring.”

Another source for varieties of vegetables grown in the United States is the first American cookbook, written in 1789 by Amelia Simmons. She includes recipes for turnips, peas, green beans, beets, spinach, squash, and cooked tomatoes as well as those vegetables mentioned by Woods.

I was really glad to come across Woods's list of plants cultivated for seasonings. Capsicum, a member of the hot red pepper family, topped his list for use in soups and stews, followed by “fennel, coriander, peppermint, spearmint—the last two are scarce, sage is extremely plentiful.”

This was the stuff
recipes were made of, and the period cookbooks are full of them. I'm tempering my recipe selection with a goodly dose of common sense. As with the recipes for baked goods, I prefer to work with simple recipes, recognizing that the earliest American cookbooks were published on the Atlantic coast where women had better cooking facilities and more varied ingredients. Woods's simple listing and the indication that red pepper was “used in soups and stews” may be recipe enough. Sage complements pork and fowl. Fennel leaves and seeds have a wide range of traditional uses from sausage to sauces for ham and pork to giving a sweet accent to vegetables such as potatoes, cucumbers, and cabbage, as well as seasoning vegetable soups. Coriander flavors pea soup, vegetable soup stocks, spinach, sausage, and even biscuits.

The Lincoln women were considered “good cooks.” They did what anyone who cooks 365 days a year does: they looked at what was in the garden or pantry and pulled together a simple dish that made the best of their local ingredients. It seems sensible that preparation would have been simple, too. Fruits would have been eaten out of hand, simply stewed for a sauce, possibly sweetened with
wild
honey, or dried to preserve them for winter use. Meats and fish could be roasted, grilled, boiled, or made into a soup or stew.

Knowing the wild and cultivated foods and even having some recipes from the period gets us close to the flavor of the era. But here, too, a time machine would come in handy, for even if the ingredient names are the same, the flavor of those foods would have been different. I've been lucky enough to gather some
from the wild. Although specialty markets in big cities may have some of these delicacies from field and forest, even they can't come close to treasures freshly plucked from secret and not-so-secret places. The pencil-eraser-size wild raspberries I pick each July from a high lake bank are sharper flavored than the ones I grow in my garden or even the ones from the farmers market. Tiny wild strawberries are jewels compared to the huge plastic-wrapped grocery-store varieties. As to mushrooms, you can't match even the fanciest to a freshly gathered, spongy-looking morel. Hard-traveled red or purple plums from California or Chile can't stand up to small, flavor-packed wild plums plucked from a creek-side tree. Wild asparagus is a slender, flavorful, condensed version of the cultivated varieties.

Lincoln's Indiana
neighbors attest to times when the bountiful surroundings and successful farms fell on hard times.
Elizabeth Crawford used food in her interviews with Herndon to bring those hard times into focus. She remembered a tale that Lincoln himself may have related. It seems one day there were only roast
potatoes for dinner. Thomas Lincoln offered grace, thanking the Lord for these blessings. “When he sat down to eat, Abraham put on a long face and said I call these very poor blessings.”

Potatoes play a role in Mrs. Crawford's second remembrance, too: