Abraham Lincoln in the Kitchen

by Rae Katherine Eighmey

  Come along. We’ll see what directions food can take us as we travel to capture the flavor of Lincoln’s times.

  ABRAHAM AND MARY LINCOLN

  CORN DODGERS AND EGG CORN BREAD

  Both Abraham Lincoln and Mary Todd ate corn bread as children. He ate it from necessity; she ate it from tradition. The circumstances of their childhoods produced very different recipes. As adults, they continued to enjoy corn bread. Abraham relished it, eating corn bread and corn cakes “as fast as two women could make them,” and for Mary there was no food more comforting. Years after Lincoln’s death, in 1879, she was recovering from an illness during her four-year stay in Europe and wrote from France to her Springfield nephew of her longing for “a taste of … good food—waffles, batter cakes, egg corn bread—… all unknown here.”

  As in colonial states, corn was the predominant crop in pioneering Kentucky, Indiana, and Illinois. It provided food for the people who lived on farms and for the horses, cows, and pigs as well. Although tedious to plant by hand, it grew reliably. The Lincolns grew mostly corn on their Indiana farm with some wheat. Beans or pumpkins commonly shared the corn patch, so farmers could get two, or even three, crops from one cleared acre. The pumpkin vines ran freely on the ground between the cornstalks and helped keep the weeds down by shading the soil to limit germination. Beans climbed the cornstalks for support. And corn, made into whiskey in a backyard still, could be turned into cash or used as an important barter good.

  Abraham’s father, Thomas Lincoln, did raise successful corn crops. When the family moved to Indiana, he had to leave behind forty bushels of corn stored in a neighbor’s loft. Some biographers suggest Thomas took several barrels of whiskey to Indiana as well. Corn mash converted into whiskey through the alchemy of the still magically transformed corn into a desirable, highly portable cash crop.

  I’ve worked with a lot of old cornmeal recipes over the years. Most of them are fairly straightforward and easily adapted to our kitchens and ingredients. From the Pilgrim days, our corn was referred to as “Indian” corn to differentiate it from wheat, which the English settlers called “corn.” Many nineteenth-century recipes use that name. Despite their value and good taste, cornmeal dishes fall out of favor and are “rediscovered” as good food just about every generation. I’ve read articles in scores of nineteenth-century ladies’ magazines, travel narratives, and agricultural journals preaching cornmeal’s benefits. As Henry Andrews testified on the value of cornmeal in the March 1842 edition of the leading farming magazine of the day, the Union Agriculturist:

  I believe it is generally admitted that there is no grain grown in the U.S. of more value as to its general usefulness for both man and beast than the Indian corn, and yet with what contempt it is treated by many when it is occasionally placed on our tables in the form of bread. How many have I fallen in with in my travels among northern people particularly those who are unaccustomed to the mode of living in the middle and southern states who exclaim against corn bread or its usefulness any farther than for [live]stock. I think the cause of dislike is more from the want of knowledge how to prepare it for the table, than any thing else.

  Preparing it for the table was a labor-intensive process and one that Abraham Lincoln would have known well. Corn keeps its own calendar with jobs for farmers at every stage. After the ears start to set kernels, farmers would remove the leaves below them, “pulling fodder” to feed their animals. In the fall, corn just shuts down, stops growing, and begins drying. The leaves wither to tan, the silks brown while the kernels harden and begin to dry on the faded ten-foot-tall stalks still standing in growing rows or after being cut and gathered into shocks. Although pioneers ate some of their corn crop in the “green” state—ears of corn boiled or roasted, as we do—they consumed most of it from the dried kernels transformed into cornmeal or hominy.

  Settlers often turned the next step of the harvesting process into a social event. Indiana neighbors remember Lincoln at corn shuckings, neighborly gatherings where the husks were removed from the dry ears of corn amid joking, storytelling, and music. Sometimes the farmers divided the group down the middle in teams, and neighbors raced to see which side could shuck the most ears before placing them in the corncrib or loft for storage. It was a perfect setting for the young Abraham to listen and practice his own storytelling skills.

  Stripping the ears from the stalks, shucking them, and then shelling the kernels off the cob was hard work. It took one hundred ears of corn to make one bushel of corn kernels. Moderately successful corn crops in the 1820s yielded between sixty and eighty bushels from an acre. Mechanical picker-wheel or disk-type shellers appeared as early as 1815, but no one knows if the Lincoln family had one. They were so simple a child could operate them. Just hold an ear of corn against the spiked disk and crank away. The whirling spikes removed the dry kernels from the cob. These kernels then dropped into a container carefully placed under the sheller and were ready for the next cooking step.

  Converting the kernels into cornmeal was work, too. The Lincolns may have made small batches of cornmeal by grating corn still on the cob across an oval piece of tin punched full of holes with a common nail and tacked on a board. We do know that young Abraham’s chores included taking the corn to the mill so it could be ground into meal.

  In 1818 Noah Gordon’s horse-powered mill was just about two miles away from the Lincolns’ Indiana home. Each farmer would hitch his horse to the mill and drive it around in a circle, powering the grinding stones. Various versions of a story about Abraham’s accident at the mill exist, but the simplest is in the 1860 campaign autobiography in which Lincoln described himself using the third person: “In his tenth year he was kicked in the head by a horse and died for a time.” Other stories provide more details. The horse was balky, Lincoln switched it one too many times on the flanks, and it kicked back. According to some neighbors’ reports, he had been talking at the time. Abraham fell to the ground unconscious and when he woke up after more than a few minutes, he finished his sentence as though nothing had happened.

  As to foods made from that ground meal, Lincoln’s cousin Dennis Hanks described one of Abraham’s more reliable snacks: “Seems to me now I never seen Abe after he was twelve that he didn’t have a book in his hand or in his pocket. He’d put a book inside his shirt an’ fill his pants pockets with corn dodgers an’ go off to plow or hoe. When noon came he’d set under a tree an’ read an’ eat.”

  Judge John Pritcher, another neighbor, writing in 1888 recalled the dodgers in not-quite-appetizing terms: “I have eaten many corn dodgers made from the meal from that old mill—It would make good chicken feed now—but we were glad to get it then. Abe used to bring me my meal regularly.”

  So, a recipe for corn dodgers seems like a good place to start cooking. This is one of the archetypal images of the boy Lincoln, sitting under a tree absorbed totally in his reading. Hanks’s description provided some recipe guidance as well. The dodgers needed to be sturdy enough to withstand being tucked into a pants pocket. Granted, pioneer pants were likely loosely fitted homespun, so the dodger wasn’t jammed into the side of a pair of tight-fitting Levi’s. Still, tender corn bread would not do the trick.

  After dozens of test corn dodgers, I discovered two keys to making them: coarsely ground cornmeal—stone ground if you can find it—and patience. A nonstick skillet helps, too. Lincoln’s mother and stepmother would have had a very well-seasoned cast-iron skillet. Although I have one, my modern nonstick skillet worked just fine. Corn dodgers are essentially cornmeal and hot water with the tiniest bit of fat and salt added. I tried making them with regular cornmeal, but they turned out hard and, as Judge Pritcher allowed, just fine for bird food. After working with the coarsely ground meal a couple of times, I developed a feel for the mix that is a cross between a batter and a dough. I was able to form the corn dodgers in the palm of my hand and slip them gently into the pan. Some modern recipes suggest frying the cakes in deep fat. I don’t think the pioneers would have d
one that. Cooking fat, whether lard or butter, was a precious ingredient on a frontier farm. Using more than the bare minimum to cook meats or breads would have been wasteful.

  The names of cornmeal breads that the Lincoln and Todd families ate in the 1820s and 1830s—corn dodgers, cornpone, Johnnycakes, egg corn bread—are familiar. The recipes I found in agricultural journals and cookbooks of the era, however, are definitely and deliciously different, as you will see in the recipe section at the end of the chapter. However, one ingredient, or dish, almost got the better of me: hominy.

  About the only thing you can say for sure about hominy is that it comes from dried kernels of corn. After that, there are as many meanings for hominy and directions for making it as there are decades between now and the Pilgrims, regions of the country, and cooks in the kitchen. The hominy we buy in stores today is either canned, large white exploded kernels or finely ground hominy grits. Both of these products frequently have had the outer hull and the small hard germ removed. The germ, the part of the corn kernel where growth begins, looks like a small seed the size of a pencil point at the base of the kernel.

  I was somewhat bewildered as I first tried to understand the nineteenth-century recipes with this twenty-first-century hominy perspective. When I looked at the period recipes after reading the Union Agriculturist, they made much more sense. The full name of the newspaper is the Union Agriculturist and Western Prairie Farmer, and it was one of a number of early monthly newspapers written for and by farmers. The Union Agriculturist began its first issue, published in January 1841, with a plea for information from the people who were working the western land, breaking the prairies, and who had the firsthand information for success. “Upon you we must rely for the matter that is to make this paper interesting and valuable.”

  And they got lots of answers on a great many subjects: breeds of cattle suited to the West, how to make a beet pie, best way to preserve butter, how to cure gapes in chickens were some of the pieces published from readers in 1841 and ’42. Making hominy was a “Household Department” topic of interest in 1842. Three correspondents sent in their hominy-making thoughts to the paper. In March Union Agriculturist printed Putnam County (possibly Indiana) resident Henry Andrews’s letter. In April, the paper published one from A. B. Gordon of Cold Bend, Warren County, which could have been in any number of midwestern states, and in June, the last piece was from a “Kentucky Farmer.” Their letters thoroughly explained the early-nineteenth-century process and product while singing its praises as a delicious food.

  Making hominy is a country task and opportunity. Though the ingredients would have been available to city residents, the mechanical apparatus to break the kernels was constructed and used in the farmyard. Hominy making was an all-day operation, and, as I discovered, one that is well worth the effort.

  Abraham Lincoln would not have had my hominy problem. Pioneer children grew up in the kitchen, as the large fireplace that heated their one-room cabins served also as the cook stove. Not only did they, by necessity, work in the fields and garden to raise the crops and manage the chickens, pigs, cows, and horses, but they were also constant observers of kitchen tasks, even if they were not involved in the preparation of the food. On a pioneer farm, labor was constant. Every morning and evening someone needed to milk the cow. Milk was set aside so it could separate, and then someone skimmed off the cream that rose to the top and churned it into butter. Eggs needed to be gathered before they could start turning into chickens under the sitting hens. Fresh garden vegetables needed to be picked before they rotted on the vines or stalks. And in a one-room cabin, cooking took place in the space that was living room and bedroom as well as kitchen.

  Every frontier child knew where his food came from and probably how to cook it. Lincoln, like many others, would have had to help even more. When his mother, Nancy, died from milk sickness, he was nine and a half, and his sister, Sarah, was eleven and a half. The homemaking fell to these two children. Even though Dennis Hanks minimized Abraham’s indoor activities when he reminisced that all he and Abe did to cheer hardworking Sarah was to bring her a turtle as a pet, I strongly suspect Lincoln would have done more than wander in from the woods and fields. In the reality of rural life, he would have helped at the very least with common male chores: chopping wood, carrying water from the stream, and making hominy.

  In the Lincolns’ farmyard, the first step in making hominy would have been to make lye, essential to removing the hulls from the kernels. So let’s look at the letters in the Union Agriculturist for the best ways to proceed. First the dried corn kernels must be soaked for fifteen to twenty minutes. Henry Andrews suggested using just boiling water, but the others insisted on a lye solution made by dumping a couple of shovels full of wood-fire ash into hot water and waiting for the ash to settle to the bottom of the pot. The resulting lye liquid, “strong enough to float an egg” or “sharp enough to bit the tongue,” is dipped off and into a large pot. As the Kentucky Farmer said, this solution will “save half the labor.” He also reported that a six-gallon pot could hold up to five quarts of corn for soaking. After the corn has soaked, remove it from the pot and “commence beating,” using a mortar and pestle.

  These few minutes of soaking loosened the hull but did not significantly soften the kernel. Settlers made large mortars to process both dry corn kernels for regular cornmeal and those soaked for hominy. They started with a log standing about thirty inches high. Next the hominy makers turned the top few inches of the log into the mortar bowl by chopping or burning a hole in it. Or they could use the method described by Mr. Andrews, the clever Putnam County farmer. He built up the mortar basin using boards nailed onto a tapered shape he chopped out of the top of the log so that it looked like the flared outside of a wineglass bowl. As he said, you could build this almost as fast as you could read about doing it. To add even more oomph to the pounding, the pestle had an iron wedge driven into the pounding end, secured by an iron ring. Some suggested that farmers could devise a “sweep” to make the job even easier. Attach the pestle to a light tree branch and then use its natural upward spring to lift the pestle before pulling it down to pound the kernels.

  After the corn was sufficiently pounded, as the Kentucky Farmer said, “This beating is perfected when the grains are divested of the skin and each grain is cracked. We do not admire it beat fine.” Then the rinsing and cooking began. Several rinsings in clear water were needed to float off the released hulls and some of the germ, as well as the lye residue. Next, simply cook the corn with a little salt and a lot of water for three to four hours in a large pot until “anyone can easily discover when it is well done by its greatly swelled appearance and by the rich savory done taste.” One writer suggested: “It is a very nice dish served up hot out of the boiling kettle taken with butter or eaten with milk like mush.”

  But most of the nineteenth-century experts in the Union Agriculturist advised putting the cooked hominy away, as the Kentucky Farmer summed up, “in wood or stone vessels in a cool place to be used as occasion demands.… When wanted for daily meals it is either simply warmed in a skillet with a little butter or lard or fried or baked until a brown crust envelopes the whole mass. It is best taken with good butter.”

  Hominy, as cooked in the South and Midwest in the nineteenth century, was a fall and winter dish. Corn harvest, shucking, and drying finished up in October and November. The hominy-making process was not taken lightly, even by folks used to working with caustic lye, rigorous pounding, and long simmering over a wood fire. As one writer explained, “But the boiling is too serious a job to be performed as often as hominy is relished and that is at breakfast and dinner at least. It is therefore boiled say once or twice a week. Except in cold weather but a small quantity should be boiled at a time as it soon sours unless the temperature is low. Indeed, it is not used except in the cold months and would be neither relished nor deemed seasonable at any other time.”

  I am compelled to make the following warning: it is no longer saf
e or even possible to soak corn kernels in lye in a home or farm setting. Food-grade lye is no longer sold. Even if it were still available, lye is highly dangerous and no one should go near it. I’ve done some adventuresome cooking in my days, and I would not attempt soaking corn or cooking with lye. You can purchase a substitute, “culinary lime,” in some stores or online, but it, too, is a caustic substance, and working with it can be tricky.

  However, you can buy kernels of corn that have been treated to the pre-pounding hominy stage. I turned my attention southwest and discovered an online resource for “posole,” kernels soaked in an alkaline solution to remove the thin, transparent outer hull. Gourmet stores and markets serving Mexican American customers carry the product sold as dried kernels. Mexican cuisine calls for cooking these “nixtamalized” kernels so they swell up to popcorn size. They are left whole in tasty soups and stews or ground and formed into tortillas.

  I was more interested in the pioneer version, kernels shattered into “rice-size” pieces and then cooked. Like any modern cook, I turned to the food processor and quickly learned that modern isn’t better. I experimented with a variety of pulsing techniques. No matter what I tried, the resulting pieces were either too big or too small. The processor’s action chops or slices but doesn’t shatter. And, worse yet, the hard germ, or the seed-to-be, was processed along with the rest of the grain.

  Time to rethink, consider the pioneer experience, and search the garage. I found an old metal mixing bowl, a couple blocks of wood, and our old eight-pound sledgehammer. After a bit of steel-wool cleanup, I had the equipment to try the nineteenth-century pounding method. I just needed the right place. Then I remembered the tree stump.

  A couple of years ago, a storm took out the top two-thirds of an old basswood tree. We cut it off about three feet from the ground, thinking it might make a nice, natural outdoor table. The inside had hollowed out a bit, just the right size to hold the mixing bowl. I put two-by-fours in first to support the bottom of the bowl and to provide an opposing hard surface for the sledge blows. I poured in about a cup of posole-treated kernels and began pounding. Mimicking the pioneer-described pestle technique, I lifted the sledge up and down, rather like operating a dasher on a butter churn, striking the corn with the top of the hammer instead of the normal striking face. At first the kernels had a tendency to jump. Some of them even landed out of the bowl. As more of them cracked, the mass tended to stay in the bottom. After about five minutes, I had enough to pour into a large mesh strainer, and sifted out the corn that was the desired size of a grain of rice. A good bit more remained. More pounding. More sifting. After about fifteen minutes I had it all pounded.