2 cups small black beans
1 gallon water
2 sprigs fresh thyme
3 hard-boiled eggs, sliced
1 lemon, sliced
2 tablespoons salted butter
Salt and freshly ground black pepper, to taste
1 to 2 cups white or red wine, if desired
Wash and pick over the beans to remove any debris or stones. Soak the beans overnight or do a quick soak, following package directions. In a large stockpot, combine the presoaked beans and the water. Cook, simmering slowly, until the beans are very soft. This could take as long as 2 hours. Use an immersion blender to puree the beans. Or dip the beans out of the cooking liquid and press them through a food mill or process in a blender, using some of the reserved water if necessary. Return the beans to the soup pot and water. Add the thyme and simmer, stirring until smooth. Add the remaining ingredients and heat through.
Makes about 3 quarts of thin soup
Some like this soup with forcemeat balls, made as follows.
FOR THE FORCEMEAT BALLS:
1 cup cooked beef, finely chopped
1 hard-boiled egg, grated on the small holes of a box grater
¼ teaspoon each dried thyme and savory
¼ teaspoon minced fresh parsley
⅛ teaspoon each ground mace and cloves
1 tablespoon soft butter
1 tablespoon flour, plus extra for rolling
Combine all the ingredients and knead into a cohesive mixture with your hands. Form into balls, slightly less than 1 inch in diameter. Roll the balls in flour and add to the simmering soup 5 to 10 minutes before serving. Forcemeat balls sink to the bottom at first and rise to the top when done.
Makes about 1 dozen forcemeat balls, one for each 1-cup serving of soup
ADAPTED FROM “MOCK TURTLE BEAN SOUP,” AMERICAN FARMER, OCTOBER 1855.
APPLE BUTTER
Old-fashioned fruit butters go well alongside meats or smeared on bread. One advantage of fruit butters is that the cook can use less-than-perfect fruits. The bubbling butter must be watched carefully as it nears the end of cooking or it will stick and scorch.
2 pounds sweet cooking apples such as Jonathan or McIntosh
1 cup apple cider or water
½ cup light molasses
¼ teaspoon ground cinnamon
¼ teaspoon ground cloves
¼ teaspoon freshly grated or ground nutmeg
¼ teaspoon ground allspice
Peel apples and grate them on the large side of a box grater, stopping at the core. (Or you may core and just chop them.) Bring cider or water and molasses to a boil in a large, wide nonreactive pan. Add the grated apples, reduce the heat to a simmer, and cook until the apples are soft, about 20 minutes. (If the apples have not disintegrated, puree the pulp with an immersion blender or potato masher.) Add spices and continue cooking until the apple butter is very, very thick, stirring frequently to prevent scorching. The finished apple butter should have a sheen on it and be thick enough to mound slightly on the spoon. Store in the refrigerator for up to a month or in the freezer for up to 6 months. For longer storage see home-canning directions.
TIPS FOR SUCCESS: Perhaps the easiest way to make apple butter is in a slow cooker. Cooking times will vary depending on how your slow cooker is set up. The size of your slow cooker is important, too. The apple mixture should be at least 2 inches deep so that it will simmer properly. If you have just a thin layer, the mixture has a tendency to scorch. The quantities used in this recipe worked very well in my 2-quart cooker. I tripled the amounts for my 5-quart cooker.
Makes three or four 8-ounce jars of apple butter
ADAPTED FROM PERIOD SOURCES.
TALKING TURKEY
CLUES TO LIFE IN THE SPRINGFIELD HOME
Thanksgiving and Abraham Lincoln are inextricably linked. Although communities around the nation celebrated fall “Thanksgivings” during much of the nineteenth century, Lincoln’s 1863 proclamation advanced the celebration to a true national holiday. He called upon his “fellow citizens in every part of the United States and also those who were at sea and those who are sojourning in foreign lands to set aside the fourth Thursday in November as a day of Thanksgiving.” He concluded his proclamation with the hopes that the nation would soon be restored to the “full measure of peace, harmony, tranquility, and Union.”
Although Mary Lincoln didn’t leave behind recipes or diary entries of her own, it turns out the Lincolns did leave some tantalizing, tangible touchstones: her stove, her cookbook, and some garbage.
A few days before Thanksgiving, my trip to a local gourmet store opened an experimental window. As I stood amid the shelves of fancy cookware, racks of amazing gadgets, and displays of wonderfully practical tools, my eyes were distracted by the notice of “Red Bourbon heritage turkeys” listed on the chalkboard of local agricultural shares. I always buy a fresh turkey, but here was the chance to cook something from the nineteenth century. Granted, this breed of turkey was first sold about twenty years after Lincoln’s day, but it was the closest I’ve yet come to a farm-raised bird of the era. There was one 8.2-pound turkey left and I took it without hesitation even though it cost a great deal more than the ten cents a pound Mary Lincoln once paid. I decided it was worth the investment to support local agriculture and to do research. I hoped we’d have some good eating, too.
Now it was time to dig in. Archaeologist Floyd Mansberger, historical architect Fran Krupka, and others have done a number of excavations and analyses of artifacts found at the Lincolns’ Springfield homesite. Mansberger’s 1985 excavations around the house produced a number of artifacts: broken plates—blue transfer, undecorated white, blue shell edged, and ironstone; nails and tacks; and some fragments from glass tumblers and medicine bottles. Most interesting to Mansberger’s investigation was the area under the back porch, an abandoned well covered over by the mid-1850s house renovation. In addition to typical household goods, Mansberger’s team found an eggshell, peach pits, and fifty-seven pieces of animal bones. These bones, added to two hundred other pieces of animal remains found in other excavations at the site, tell an interesting tale. The Lincolns ate beef sirloin, short loin round, and ribs. They also had a bit of mutton or lamb, a fair amount of pork, chicken, and turkey. The fifty-seven bones from the well included turkey bones and the remains of pigs feet. We know the Lincolns ate turkey in the early years of their residence in the home, and we know Mary purchased an eight-pound turkey on January 10, 1859, for eighty cents from C. M. Smith’s store.
I figured I’d dive into Miss Eliza Leslie, the cookery book Mary Lincoln owned, to find era-appropriate directions for cooking the turkey I’d bought. How to cook this beautiful bird? I returned to my thinking about the way Mary Lincoln’s cast-iron stove operated and the experiment I’d conducted back in October.
I’ll have to admit I’ve never cooked on a wood-burning or cast-iron stove. My opinion of them had been colored by postfeminist writing in articles and books that speak of women spending “years slaving over a hot stove.” The pictures of huge mid-nineteenth-century stoves didn’t help. The Victorian version of today’s 8-burner, stainless steel Viking Ranges, these nineteenth-century paragons had hot-water reservoirs, food-warming closet, baking ovens, and special roasting oven where the meat will be done “as perfectly as by an open fire.” Harriet Beecher Stowe and her sister Catharine sang the praises of such kitchen-filling stoves by saying “proper management … will for 24 hours keep the stove running.” All that changed when I began to study the Royal Oak #9 stove in the Lincolns’ kitchen. The Lincolns purchased it on June 9, 1860, to replace an earlier model.
The Royal Oak #9 was an award-winning stove design and a wonder of efficiency. There were four “burners” on top, two of them directly over the relatively small firebox—about the size of two men’s shoeboxes placed end to end. The others were set up for slower cooking on days when the stove was going to burn wood for some time; they were gently heated by the current o
f air as it moved toward the stovepipe and was vented out of the house. A sturdy shelf stuck out in front of the firebox, just right for keeping food warm or heating flatirons.
The oven was not a cube like those in today’s ranges. It was shaped like a trapezoid, a rectangle with four unequal sides, to take maximum advantage of the heat from the angled wall of the firebox that formed the right wall of the oven. In Mary’s oven, the left side, where the door hinged, was 14 ¼ inches tall. The narrowest part of the oven opening, at the top, was 9½ inches wide. The wider opening at the bottom was 13 ¾ inches. The right side was angled to connect the top and bottom. This arrangement created a deep space: 22½ inches from front to back. There was a shelf about halfway up where Mary could have slid food that was 11 inches wide and 6 or 7 inches tall, like a sirloin beef roast.
But there is more: a second small door at the bottom right of the oven space, about under the firebox, increased the oven’s usefulness. This door was hinged on the right side, so the two doors opened like a book. So, when Mary opened this roughly 6-inch square “cookie sheet” door, she had access to the full floor of the oven, expanding the 13 ½ inches to 23 inches wide and 22 ½ inches deep, but only for something that is less than 6 inches tall.
The more I thought about how the heat from the firebox would “work” this oven, the more impressed I became with the award-winning possibilities. As heat rose, the temperature in the lower, full-oven floor would have been cooler than for anything placed on the 11-inch shelf at the top of the oven. My electric oven heats from the bottom, and I have to switch cookie sheets from the top and bottom racks midway through baking so my cookies bake evenly. It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that there could even have been significant oven-temperature differences in the Royal Oak #9 to allow high-heat meat cooking along with mid-range bread baking at the same time.
My fingers began to twitch with the possibility of cooking on such a stove. Of course, the Lincolns’ stove was off-limits, but that didn’t stop me from thinking of other ways to test my basic firebox theory: the way the firebox, oven, and burners were organized contradicted the image that stoves were kept hot all day. I was willing to bet that a well-laid fire could come up to heat fast enough to cook a meal and then would be diminished nearly as quickly.
A gift from the spirits of culinary experimentation helped me turn our trusty Weber grill into a cast-iron stove, in a manner of speaking. Earlier in the summer I had noticed a couple of very heavy-gauge racks from a gas grill in the road outside our garage. Not wanting to run over them, I waited until traffic cleared and picked them up. I purchased two solid iron plates at a camping goods store, and with two metal garden stakes, I wired the whole contraption together, ending up with a “firebox” about fourteen by eight by eight inches with the grills top and bottom and solid metal sides. I built a small but hot fire, carefully balanced my smallest cast-iron skillet on top of the upper grill, and melted enough fat to fry up a batch of nutmeg doughnuts, rolling and cutting the dough on a tray on our picnic table.
I used about a dozen good-size dry tree limbs cut into foot-long pieces and a bit of kindling. This fire was much more efficient than I thought possible. I was ready to cook in about ten minutes. The oak branches kept a good enough coal base to finish the five dozen doughnuts but cooled off after an hour or so. Another time I built a bigger fire and cooked a small beef roast in a pan over the “stove.” I would not recommend that anyone else be foolish enough to try this. Balancing a frying pan of melted fat on the top grill over hot coals was nerve-wracking and very dangerous.
As good as the doughnuts and roast were, I wasn’t ready to risk the Red Bourbon heritage turkey to my jerry-rigged cooker. The gourmet store had recommended immersing the bird in a saltwater solution to brine it for a juicy result. I hoped Miss Leslie would have a better idea than infusing this beautiful bird with salt water. She did. More important, her directions for roast turkey did more than explain how to cook a turkey dinner. They hit me in the pit of my stomach with recognition of a significant fact I’d been overlooking, one that is key to understanding the lives of Mary and Abraham Lincoln.
Miss Leslie wrote: “Stuff the craw of the turkey with the force-meat.… Dredge it with flour, and roast it before a clear brisk fire, basting it with cold lard. Towards the last, set the turkey nearer to the fire, dredge it again very lightly with flour, and baste it with butter. It will require according to its size between two to three hours roasting.”
The recipe seemed simple enough and it was, in fact, the one I followed when I baked the Red Bourbon in my oven. I did cover the bird with cheesecloth to help the basting liquids—butter, not lard, in my case—keep the meat moister. I made the forcemeat from fresh bread-crumbs grated from a sturdy loaf, combining the crumbs with cold butter instead of Miss Leslie’s suet, and a mixture of marjoram, nutmeg, black pepper, and finely grated lemon peel. I bound it with an egg yolk, and stuffed just the craw. It was delicious, as was the turkey, moist with a rich, meaty flavor. There was less white meat in relation to dark. The dark meat was more toothsome. This was a bird that had spent its days wandering about the yard, and we were thankful for its contribution to our dinner. I rounded out the period dinner with cranberry sauce simply made from three ingredients and mellow, lightly peppery mushroom sauce, both from Miss Leslie’s book and suitable, as she said, for serving with poultry.
But here was the real revelation from this cooking adventure, one that drove me to think even more deeply about the lives Mary, Abraham, and the boys lived in their Springfield cottage: Miss Leslie’s direction to “roast it before a clear brisk fire.” This is the edition of the cookbook that we know Mary Lincoln bought on December 10, 1846, along with Miss Leslie’s The House Book: A Manual of Domestic Economy. Importantly, it offered directions for open-hearth cooking as well as for stoves. Miss Leslie was writing just as American cooks were making the transition from hearth to stove and just at the time Mary Lincoln needed all the help she could get because she was cooking on an open hearth, the kind of arrangement young Abraham grew up with in Indiana in the 1820s.
I knew the Lincolns had remodeled their home extensively. In at least two or three phases, beginning in 1848 and ending in 1856, they enclosed the fireplaces so heating stoves could be installed, moved the kitchen, added a pantry and parlor, and partitioned off a dining room—all on the first floor—and raised the roof for the full second story. At some point they purchased a cooking stove. But I had been so wrapped up in the image of the Lincoln house as I saw it during my childhood tour and as it is presented today that I had not considered the full depth of those changes and what it meant to life in the home.
When Mary Lincoln began setting up housekeeping in the first and only home she and Abraham would own, Robert was a crawling baby just under a year old. The first floor of the house was essentially three equal-size rooms, about fourteen by eighteen feet, arranged like an upside-down letter T. Across the west front of the home (the top of the T) were the parlor and sitting room separated by stairs. The kitchen with its open hearth for heating and cooking was centered behind this front wing and extended eighteen feet to the east. There were three bedrooms upstairs tucked under the sloping roof of the one-and-a-half-story house. The small house was a huge improvement over the single room Abraham and Mary had lived in at the Globe Tavern right after their marriage in November 1842. They moved out with the baby, Robert, in the spring of 1844 to a rental home for a few months and then into the cottage at Eighth and Jackson.
At first Mary did have help setting up housekeeping and managing life in the cottage from Harriet Hanks, the eighteen-year-old daughter of Abraham’s cousin Dennis Hanks. Hanks married Lincoln’s stepsister, so Harriet was both a niece and a cousin. She came from the family farm to live with the Lincolns, go to school, and help around the house. Apparently she arrived sometime in 1844 and stayed for about eighteen months. She was gone by the time the Lincolns’ second son, Eddy, was born on March 10, 1846. Harriet would have been as famili
ar as Abraham was with open-hearth cooking. Whereas Mary simply passed though the kitchen during her childhood in the large Lexington, Kentucky, home, Abraham and Harriet would have been raised in one in the one-room cabins of their youth.
The popular images of Mary Lincoln show her as first lady, in fancy dresses fit for balls or formal receptions. Even the earliest-known picture taken in 1846 shows Mary as a young woman with delicate hands, hair in ringlets down her neck, and wearing a dress sewn with a complex pattern of stripes, small sleeve ruffles, and a lace collar. It is hard to merge this picture with the realities of her bending over the hearth, moving iron pots on cranes, stirring food in low-to-the-ground spider frying pans, or managing a roast in a tin reflector oven. But she must have. For at least the first three years that the Lincolns owned the house at Eighth and Jackson, from 1844 until they left for Lincoln’s congressional term in October 1847, the only cooking facility was the open hearth in the large kitchen wing.
Mary must have prepared some of the meals, even in the best of times when she had help from Harriet Hanks; Catherine Gordon from Ireland, the eighteen-year-old listed in the 1850 census; the unnamed ten-to-twenty-year-old female in the 1855 census; or Mariah Vance, the free woman of color who lived in Springfield and sometimes came to help with washing and cooking. Mary Lincoln advanced from her first basic cooking steps to a woman who impressed men accustomed to eating the finest restaurant meals. She produced delicious meals made from sophisticated ingredients, and to me, that effort and evolution as a cook is a testament to her intelligence and the love she had for her husband and family.
Abraham Lincoln in the Kitchen Page 19
