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

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 withwildhoney, 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 somefrom 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 Indiananeighbors 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 roastpotatoes 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:
    It was nothing for people to go 8 to 10 miles for a [church] meeting. In the winter time they would put on their husband’s old over coats and wrap up their little ones and take one or two of them up on their one beast and their husbands would walk and they would go to church and stay in the neighborhood til the next day and then go home. Apples were veryscarce them times. Sometimes potatoes were used as a treat. I must tell you the first treat I ever received in old Mr. Lincoln’s house was a plate of potatoes washed and pared very nicely and handed round. It was something new to me for I never had seen a raw potato before. I looked to see how they made use of them. They took a potato and ate them like apples.… They were glad to see each other and enjoyed themselves better than they do now.
    Another verse from Lincoln’s poem brings my experience on the land and in the kitchen full circle. Every time I make the recipes from this chapter, I have in my hands the stuff of dreams and understanding. I can let myself flow onto the stream of