Abraham Lincoln in the Kitchen

by Rae Katherine Eighmey

  In the time since, I’ve read accounts of the events and lives in the Lincoln home written by neighbors, friends, and political guests. One comment runs through many of them: the Lincoln boys were never shushed and hardly disciplined. Both Abraham and Mary were indulgent parents. Abraham enjoyed spending time with his sons. Neighbor James Gourley told how Lincoln would walk out along the railway with his children, way out into the country talking and “explaining things.” Another friend, Joseph Gillespie, reflected that Lincoln’s children “literally ran over him and he was powerless to withstand their importunities.” Gillespie said, “He was the most indulgent parent I ever knew.”

  I wanted to shake the “historic house cobwebs” out of my mind and find the ingredients to create a real sense of life in the Lincoln home. And I was pleased to find some of those ingredients the Lincolns bought during their years in Springfield listed on ledger pages from a couple of local stores. Abraham and Mary Lincoln purchased the house seventeen years before they left for the White House. They actually lived in the home for just fifteen years, as they rented it out while Lincoln served his one term in Congress.

  I hadn’t known too much about Mary Lincoln until I started this research. I had a vague awareness of the common characterizations in books, magazines, and movies that focused on Mary’s shortcomings, easily suggesting the Lincolns’ marriage was troubled. Now, after reading scores of first-person narratives from friends and relatives, I’ve come away with a more complete, complex understanding of Mary and of her life with Abraham. As Mary Lincoln’s authoritative biographer Ruth Painter Randall concluded, in the home at Eighth and Jackson “there was love … fun and playfulness, there was the joy of children.”

  Mary and Abraham knew each other extraordinarily well. Once, when she took him to task for being hours late for supper, he teased her back. Everyone had waited to eat. The chickens were overcooked; the rest of the dishes were cold. He said he was just “two minutes” late. She promptly corrected him, “two hours,” and the family settled in to eat with good humor. That Mary’s exuberant opinions and criticisms sometimes spilled into public view gave some Springfield folks cause to cluck their tongues in dismay at a nontraditional behavior and to write about it later.

  In everything he did, Lincoln was “regularly irregular; that is he had no stated time for eating, not fixed time for going to bed, none for getting up.” As frustrating as that would be, his long absences—riding the court circuit for weeks at a time or traveling to give political speeches—were harder on Mary. She became, essentially, a single mother, with little household help and no means of immediate contact with her traveling husband, whom she loved deeply, until he walked back in the door. She “often said [to neighbor James Gourley] if her husband had stayed at home as he ought to, that she would have loved him better.”

  During the 1950s, the Lincoln house volunteers displayed freshly baked bread on the kitchen’s cast-iron stove. Visitors treated to that lived-in aroma must have built a layer of possibility onto the experience of walking on the same floors that Lincoln trod, looking out into his backyard, and sensing the wholeness of family life. I hoped to re-create some sense of their lives in my kitchen.

  I began with the published recollections hoping to find mentions and even descriptions of food that I could use to build a vivid picture to connect with the specific purchases detailed in the ledgers. I sat with two sets of books open on my desk and my computer’s desktop—remembrances of the Lincolns and period cookbooks. Later I took to my kitchen and began to cook.

  I sorted through stories and recipes trying to match foods to events. Alas, for all the entertaining the Lincolns did during the winter session of the Illinois legislature and the rest of the year, few of their guests described exactly what they served. In recollections published years later, Donn Piant wrote that Mrs. Lincoln offered pie to her guests, but he didn’t say what kind. In a speech twenty years after the Lincolns left Springfield, their friend Isaac Arnold said that Mrs. Lincoln’s “table was famed for the excellence of many rare Kentucky dishes and in season it was loaded with venison, wild turkeys, prairie chickens, quail and other game, then abundant.” In the 1890s Noah Brooks reported to journalist Ida Tarbell that Mrs. Lincoln served corned beef and cabbage during a supper he shared with the family in 1857.

  Caroline Owsley Brown described Springfield society in general and calling among friends and neighbors on New Year’s Day. Everyone was expected “to eat oysters, chicken-salad, drink coffee, put down a saucer of ice cream and cake and nibble a few bon-bons.” Oranges, raisins, almonds, and white grapes also graced the table along with the fancy macaroon pyramids held together with spun sugar made by Mr. Watson, the local confectioner, who had traveled to St. Louis to learn the trick of making them.

  As to contemporaneous descriptions, Orville Hickman Browning, a lawyer from Quincy, spent the legislative seasons in Springfield and visited the town on other matters during the years. His diaries have some of the few contemporary descriptions of events. However, his entries are irritatingly short on details:

  Monday Jan 19 1852 Delivered a lecture at 3rd Presbyterian Church for the benefit of the poor. After went to Mr. Lincoln’s to supper. Thermometers ranged 19 to 23 below zero.

  Thurs. July 22 1852 The warmest days of season. Mrs. B and self spent evening at Lincolns.

  Feb. 5 1857 Thurs At night attended large & pleasant party at L[incoln].

  Thurs. Feb 4, 1858 Called at Lincoln’s.

  Wed, Feb, 2 1859 At large party at L[incoln]’s. cloudy, foggy. Muddy, dismal day.

  Thurs, June 9, 1859 Went to party at night at L[incoln].

  Wed, Feb 1, 1860 After tea went to L[incoln] for an hour or two.

  Thurs. Aug. 9, 1860 In forenoon called at L[incoln] and spent an hour with him, Mrs. Lincoln and Mrs. Judd.

  Another diary from this period gives some sense of the social life Mary Lincoln had among her neighborhood and church friends. On January 1, 1851, Mrs. William Black began her diary with an entry “Took tea at Mrs. Lincoln’s.” Her third child, Samuel Dale, was born five days later. On February 11, she “spent the evening at Mrs. Lincoln[’s].” She called on Mary with her daughter and the baby on February 26 and March 5, when she “spent the afternoon,” as she did again on March 10. Little Samuel died on March 24, 1851, a little more than a year after the Lincolns’ four-year-old son Eddy had died. Mrs. Black spent much of the next month in mourning and at prayer. On May 3, “Mrs. Lincoln insisted on our coming over in the evening—we did so and found Dr. Smith [the Presbyterian minister] there he prayed with us before leaving.” Two days later Mrs. Black once again spent an afternoon with Mary after she “sent a second message for me” to come. Mary must have been feeling low or ill with Abraham out of town on the court circuit in Urbana and Danville, as the next day Mrs. Black wrote, “called on Mrs. Lincoln—found her in better spirits.”

  After the 1860 presidential nomination and then the election, the Lincolns received political and journalist guests from around the country who wrote their impressions of the Springfield home. Carl Schurz of the New York Evening Post described what he called the “modest frame house” with Lincoln standing at the rear of the front parlor: “tall and ungainly in his black suit of apparently new, but ill-fitting clothes, his long tawny neck emerging gauntly from his turn-down collar, his melancholy eyes sunken deep in his haggard face.” The reporter had kind words about Mrs. Lincoln: “Whatever awkwardness may be ascribed to her husband there is none of it in her. She converses with freedom and grace, and is thoroughly au fait in all the little amenities of society.” Frequent mentions were made of her distinguished family, sophisticated education, ladylike courtesy, ability to speak French fluently, their son’s enrollment in Harvard, and her membership in the Presbyterian Church.

  Many years later, Phillip Wheelock Ayers captured evocative scenes when he asked his mother (then Miss Wheelock) to tell him about her time living as a neighbor: “Mr. Lincoln would help freely in the kitchen
. On coming from his office he would take off his coat, put on a large blue apron, and do whatever was needed. At such times the family used sometimes to eat in the kitchen. Happening in, my mother was once invited to share a kitchen luncheon and vividly remembers Mr. Lincoln’s large figure against the kitchen wall. To him the matter of food was always one of comparative indifference.… In the numerous social gatherings at Mr. Lincoln’s house, Mrs. Lincoln was a very great help to her husband. A lady of refined tastes with a large social experience, and with considerable political insight she carried the social end of the campaign admirably. She used frequently to ask my mother to assist in passing the refreshments, a service gladly rendered.”

  Lincoln’s law partner, William Herndon, told how sometimes Abraham would bring what we might consider a carryout breakfast into the office. He would “have in his hands a piece of cheese, or bologna sausage, and a few crackers, bought by the way.” Period recipes for bologna sausage are different from the common, bland childhood lunchmeat we buy today. Looking at the recipes in a number of period cookbooks and considering the large number of Germans living in Springfield, it makes sense to me that Lincoln’s “bologna” was more like the richly seasoned and dryer-textured “Lebanon bologna.”

  All the words written about Lincoln, and these descriptions were the closest I could come to food in the Lincolns’ daily lives? Although we know Mary Lincoln owned a copy of Miss Leslie’s Directions for Cookery in Its Various Branches, 1845 edition, we don’t have her copy with its grease- and batter-spattered pages. Mary did not leave a collection of handwritten recipes tied up with a ribbon. There isn’t a diary with highlights of the guests, discussions, and foods served. None of the women who helped in her kitchen shared comprehensive menus.

  The charge accounts the Lincolns kept at local stores provide an important clue to the foods they prepared and served. Mary bought a set of cups and saucers and two preserve dishes in January 1845 from Irwin’s store. The family also purchased “gun powder tea” and some sugar. From Bunn’s store in 1849, the Lincolns bought a half dozen tumblers, candles, sugar, and at the end of September, a gallon of vinegar. We have the extraordinary good luck to have the account books of C. M. Smith’s dry goods store listing the purchases the Lincoln family made in 1859. (Smith was married to Mary’s sister Ann.) Records of a few other Springfield stores have Lincoln purchases, too, but Smith’s is a year’s worth of records that can be matched with events in the family’s life.

  That’s the good news: these records give a day-by-day accounting of the things the Lincoln family purchased. The not-so-good news: this store is just one of many stores in town where the Lincolns shopped. We know Abraham wrote checks to settle accounts with several dry goods stores, and the family probably paid cash at other merchants. Certainly the newspaper ads of the day are filled with stores selling their goods “at the lowest price for cash.”

  With such incomplete information we must take care when making assumptions. Without knowing all of the Lincolns’ purchases, we can only draw a limited picture. This is the story those purchases tell: the groceries available in Springfield were some of the fanciest available in the country, and by 1859 Mary Lincoln was an experienced and sophisticated cook—or she had one in her employment. She bought cream of tartar and baking soda in the proper proportion to make tender cakes and biscuits at a time when most cookbook recipes primarily leavened with saleratus or the interaction of soda and sour milk. Twice in January the family bought “Cooper Isinglass” and “red gelatin.” These items are certainly the ingredients for some kind of fancy molded dessert such as Charlotte Russe or blancmange. Corneau & Diller’s store advertised “red, pink and white gelatine” in 1856 Springfield newspapers at a time when articles in national ladies magazines still suggested adding spinach to make desserts green, using cochineal dissolved in a little brandy to color them red and saffron for bright yellow.

  Sugar and syrups are among the most common and regular Lincoln family purchases from the Smith store. In the winter months, the family purchased a gallon of syrup every ten to twelve days. I’m pretty sure this is a plain syrup, a by-product of sugar processing, what the British call golden syrup and similar to table syrup enjoyed in the South today. Just the perfect thing to pour over pancakes or biscuits. Although a gallon sounds like a lot, I did some quick calculations. For the six people living in the house (Abraham, Mary, the three boys, and a live-in household helper), it works out to a quarter of a cup a day. Kids I know could easily pour that much on their flapjacks.

  The Lincolns bought regular amounts of sugar, too, about eleven pounds every two weeks. Again, some quick culinary calculations bring this amount into perspective. Eleven pounds of sugar measure out to twenty-two cups, or less than two cups a day. Most recipes for cookies, muffins, or cakes call for at least a cup. A cup of sugar also measures out to sixteen tablespoons. Three adults who put a teaspoon of sugar in a cup of morning coffee would consume a cup of sugar in the two weeks. Two teaspoons per cup or two cups per person would double the amount. So each person in the Lincoln household was consuming about a quarter of a cup of sugar a day. That still sounds like a lot, but I looked at the current national data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. In 2008 the average per capita sweetener consumption in the United States was 136 pounds, or about three-quarters of a cup a day—three times the amount the Lincolns used.

  The Lincolns broke this regular pattern in July 1859, when they bought thirty-three pounds of sugar between July 23 and 25, prime fruit season in Illinois. Strawberries were probably finished, but raspberries, peaches, and plums would have been in full season, as were the summer-bearing apple trees the Lincolns had in their yard. Combine the sugar purchase with the half gallon of vinegar the week before, and it seems obvious that someone in the household is putting up fruit preserves, jams, jelly, or pickles, as they probably did in 1849 when they bought a gallon of vinegar from Bunn’s store.

  One purchase can even be linked to a specific event. They bought “salt for ice cream” on June 9, the same evening Quincy lawyer Orville Browning made a diary entry, “Went to a party at Lincoln’s at night.”

  Homemade ice cream was popular. Reviewing a new “patent family ice cream maker” for its readers, Godey’s Lady’s Book noted that ice-cream making was especially important to ladies “residing outside the cities.” By the mid-1850s hand-crank ice-cream machines were readily available, and recipes appeared in cookbooks and magazines, so homemakers could easily convert simple ingredients into family treats or entertaining delights. As the review explained: “H. B. Masser’s Patent Family Ice-Cream Freezer … is a most excellent and useful labor-saving invention enabling a mere novice to make ice-cream equal to the best.… It is said to take less than one-half the usual quantity of ice and salt, and a child can perform the operation.”

  Other Lincoln family purchases are more broadly suggestive of social life in Springfield, where the Ladies’ Aid church functions played an important role. Ask any midwestern woman about her community, and you’ll hear all about the various fund-raising and social efforts involving food. From 1950s potlucks and cakewalks to twenty-first-century women’s club charity sales of nuts for holiday baking, women and food are the engine of social progress.

  Life in Springfield in the 1850s was the same. Caroline Owsley Brown recalled those days in an article about Springfield before the Civil War. “I have heard it said the foundation walls of old St. Paul’s … were built on cakes baked by Mrs. Ninian Edwards, Mrs. William Pope, Mrs. John S. Bradford and Mrs. Antrim Campbell and other good church women. Mrs. Edwards was especially noted as a cook and the fame of her chicken salad spread far and wide.… A church supper with Mrs. Edwards’s chicken salad, Mrs. Pope’s beaten biscuit, and Mrs. Campbell’s pound cake was an event to call all society together.… Presbyterians, Methodists, Baptists, … all flocked to eat in the service of a good cause.”

  In the first week of October 1859, Lincoln was out of town all week attending both politic
al events and circuit courts. When Mary bought ten pounds of sugar, three-and-one-half pounds of pulverized sugar, and the same amount of crushed sugar along with nutmeg, lemon extract, and a dozen eggs, cakes for a First Presbyterian social seems the logical conclusion. Similarly, the thirty-two pounds of “Java coffee” Smith’s dray delivered on March 28 could have been for another church function. The price was just over sixteen cents a pound, about half the price the Lincolns usually paid for their regular three- or five-pound purchases. Was this a bulk discount, or reflecting a charitable discount by Mr. Smith?

  The family purchased other baking ingredients—cinnamon, nutmeg, almond extract—as well as ordinary groceries, such as coffee, tea, potatoes, and turnips, from Smith’s store in 1859. And that’s about all we know, hints, but no real information.

  My period cookbooks had the opposite problem: too many possibilities. The ones I have stacked at the side of my desk are filled with hundreds of recipes. A few keystrokes and mouse clicks, and a Google Books search makes it so temptingly easy to find specific recipes and ingredients from even more period cookbooks and magazines. Time to make a decision. Even though the Springfield stores did have a wide variety of foods available, I held my choices against the words of Harriet Hanks, the daughter of Dennis Hanks, Lincoln’s cousin. She lived with the family during their first years in the Springfield house and said of Mary that she was “very economical. So much so that by some she might have been pronounced stingy.”