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

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 notcommon, and good cooks like Abraham’s stepmother, SarahLincoln, 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, thefarms of Spencer County would have come to look like the one farmed today by the Park Service.Lincoln’sneighborA. 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 thatThomas had planted apple trees.
    Woods provided a comprehensive description of the vegetables he saw planted on Indiana and Illinois farms. “I’ve seen no sweetpotatoes, 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 stuffrecipes 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