Read Online Abraham Lincoln in the Kitchen by Rae Katherine Eighmey - Free Book Online

from herElizabethtown 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 1818James 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 tobarter 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:
    Americans seldom do anything without having [a frolic]. They have husking, reaping, rolling frolics. Among the females they have pickling, sewing, and quilting frolics. Reaping frolics are parties to reap the whole growth ofwheat etc. in one day. Rolling frolics are clearing wood land when many trees are cut down and into lengths to roll them up together so as to burn them and to pile up the brushwood and roots on the trees.Whiskey is here too, upon request, and they generally conclude with a dance.
    Lincoln neighborElizabeth Crawford recalled some of the foods served atchurch celebrations. “In the wintertime they would hold church in some of theirneighbors 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 orturnips 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, wheatflour was, too. Cornmeal andcorn 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 forwild 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 thefarms were established, the Hoosiers depended upon their cultivated lands tosupply food for themselves and their animals. Thepumpkin 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