Abraham Lincoln in the Kitchen (13 page)

This was one of the few times Lincoln publicly mentioned his military service. History is fortunate that
George M. Harrison served with him as an Illinois Militia volunteer during the Black Hawk War, and we are equally fortunate that William Herndon, Lincoln's Springfield law partner, wrote to everyone he could think of as he documented Lincoln's life in the years immediately after his death. Herndon received three lengthy letters from Harrison, filled with chatty details. Harrison described meals and cooking methods so well he could have written a cookery book. Harrison even recalled their shared culinary adventures in a letter he sent to Lincoln in May 1860, congratulating him on the Republican Party presidential nomination. Harrison wrote of their friendship forged “when we ground our coffee in the same tin cup with the hatchet handle—baked our bread on our ramrods around the same fire—ate our fried meat off the same piece of elm bark.”

As to the cooking, Harrison impressed upon me the value of bacon prepared from nineteenth-century fatty hogs. In the early 1800s, “bacon” referred to all
pork cured by salting and smoking, not just the slices from the hog's flank or belly we call bacon. Legs could be called “hams” as we call the bone-in ham today. Period agricultural sources talk about the economics of “making bacon” from the whole hog.

Bacon is a wonderful
food
for an army on the move. Rendered carefully and with consideration, the slab of basic streaky bacon yields meat, seasoning, frying medium, and an essential ingredient for campfire bread. I spent the better part of a morning working with thick-sliced bacon, cooking it slowly in my cast-iron skillet over a low wood fire built in our Weber grill. I needed the bacon grease to test some of Harrison's cooking methods and wanted the meat for other dishes. I pushed the pieces to the side of the pan as they began to crisp. Bacon fat continued to melt into the pan, and the next strips added to the accumulating fat. The result: nearly a cup of clear fat and a pile of perfectly lean, chewy meat. It was a revelation.

Enveloped in smoke and bacon perfume, I considered that the service Lincoln rendered in the three-month-long Black Hawk War in 1832
had converted him as well. In April, Abraham
Lincoln was a raw young man. Although he never saw battle, by the time he returned toward the end of July, he was a man who had begun to find his path toward
leadership and public service.
Harrison described Lincoln's impact: “The whole company, even amid trouble and suffering received Strength & fortitude, by his buoyancy & elasticity.”

Lincoln modestly wrote that he experienced the “ordinary hardships of such an expedition.” He and Harrison were mustered out, along with the last of the volunteer militia, just two weeks before the final engagement. His election to captain of his troop of fellow Sangamon County volunteers at the beginning of the war was, as he wrote in 1860, “a success which gave me more pleasure than I have had since.”

Lincoln's connection with Native Americans began before he was born. His father was just six years old when he witnessed his own father's death. As Abraham described it, “my paternal
grandfather, Abraham Lincoln, emigrated from Rockingham County, Virginia, to Kentucky about 1781 or 1782, where a year or two later he was killed by the Indians, not in battle, but by stealth, when he was laboring to open a field in the forest.”

Twenty years later, the various
treaties signed between the U.S. government and the Shawnee, Miami, Pottawatomie, Sauk, and Fox—the tribes of lands that would become Indiana, Ohio, Kentucky—granted them the right to “be at liberty to hunt within the territory and lands which they have now ceded to the United States, without hindrance or molestation, so long as they demean themselves peaceably, and offer no injury to the people of the United States.” As the white settlers encroached, those who had lived in the land for generations, roaming and hunting in its forests, slipped back into the margins, in most cases trying to coexist with newly declared property owners.

No one really knows how much Lincoln interacted with Native Americans in his youth and young adulthood. When asked by Herndon, Lincoln's cousin Dennis Hanks simply wrote back, “No Indians there when I first went to Indiana. I say No … Nun.” Shawnee had lived in the area, so it seems probable that Abraham would have unearthed arrowheads as he worked in newly cleared fields. During the same time,
John James Audubon wrote of seeing Native Americans hunting
in the forests while he scouted subjects for his
Birds of America
. He described a lone Indian hunting bear in the Kentucky woods within a hundred miles or so of
Lincoln's home in that state. Audubon felt sorry for the Indian's condition, a dilapidated gun and ragged blanket for his clothing. But he admired the man's skill at hunting, killing two mallards with one shot, and the grace with which he prepared them over a campfire for his dinner.

Not all interactions were so peaceful. Families like the Lincolns and, on his mother's side, the Hankses, who had pioneered their way from Virginia through Tennessee or Kentucky up into Indiana and Illinois, had personal history of Native American attacks. In this letter to Jesse Lincoln, a distant cousin, Abraham
Lincoln wrote that the story of his
grandfather's death at the hands of the Indians and of his Uncle Mordecai, a fourteen-year-old, then killing one of the Indians was “the legend more strongly than all others imprinted upon my mind and memory.” His father fought in several skirmishes during his
service in the militia. Abraham's mother, Nancy, named their daughter, Sarah, after her cousin who had been kidnapped and held captive by the Pottawatomie for five years.

So, in April 1832, when Illinois Governor
Reynolds called for volunteers to respond to the threat from Chief Black Hawk's band of five or six hundred warriors near present-day Rock Island, the young men in the New Salem area, including the men from Clary's Grove three miles away, were ready to sign up. By all descriptions it was a rag-tag bunch. Although the state militia quartermaster issued “muskets & bayonets” along with flints, powder, and lead, each man was responsible for providing his own clothing and horse. They would have taken their own food, too, for traveling to Beardstown where they met the rest of the army of nine thousand on April 22.

It was about forty miles from New Salem to the enlistment point at Beardstown—a decent day's journey for men and horses. Years later, journalist
Ida Tarbell reported the details that Lincoln was elected captain at Richland, about thirty miles southeast from Beardstown on what is now Illinois Highway 125, the day before the group reported for duty. So the company must have left New Salem on April 20, traveled south to Richland, and spent the night there before joining up.

I was curious about the sixty-eight men who served under Captain Lincoln during the first month of the war. The Illinois secretary of state website lists them all. Using the 1830 census for Sangamon County and helped by unusual nineteenth-century names, I identified fifteen of the men as heads of household and figured that another eight were older sons in families who were living in the area in 1830. Lincoln didn't arrive in
New Salem until 1831. I had expected to find the company comprised of young single men, the type who would be rowdy and looking for adventure. Certainly there were those young men among the ones I couldn't place. But the men I could identify in the census from two years earlier were family men. Most were between twenty and thirty years old, but four were between thirty and forty, one was older than forty. Among them they had thirty-eight children, twenty-eight under the age of five, eight children between five and ten, and two older than ten.

Residents of New Salem were not scurrying off into the forts for protection the way northwestern Illinois settlers were. The families stayed in town and on the surrounding farms. Would they have gathered on the morning of April 20, 1832, for a ceremony in the center of New Salem where the main street bends, separating the shopping street from the town's homes? Would cups of last fall's cider have been raised in a salute? Did any of the twenty little boys under five chase after his father with a play wooden musket over his shoulder or a flag in his hand as the band of fighters rode out of town?

Perhaps New Salem wives and mothers would have provisioned their brave volunteers with
foods for the two-day road trip and to hold them over until the group received army rations. I can't imagine it any other way. The women would have had to hurry, too. News of Black Hawk's threat and the governor's call for troops arrived in town on April 19. Smokehouses and barrels would still have had fall-cured and smoked
pork cuts including bacon. Those meats would normally need to supply the tables through the end of summer, but this was an emergency. Home-dried apples or peaches might have been packed into saddlebags. Gingerbread certainly would have traveled well, too. Bacon, ham, cornmeal, and maybe even some expensive coffee seem likely victuals for the volunteers.

But what could the women prepare to send along as a special taste
of home? Mid-April is a time of husbanding resources in midwestern farming communities. The spring of 1832 was damp and cold. The first fresh garden
crops of spinach, peas, lettuces, and radishes were weeks away. So was fresh meat. However, certain foods were plentiful. Chickens lay more eggs in the spring than any other season. Cows with newly weaned calves have plenty of milk. There should have been good supplies of milk and eggs. The ladies of town could have sent their soldier boys off with a sturdy boiled pudding as a special treat. Steamed or boiled
puddings have less fat and sugar than cakes, so they would have been more affordable. They also have the advantage of quick mixing and cooking without the need for constant monitoring, most helpful for women who probably had to mend clothing, perhaps even quickly sew up a spare shirt for the adventure.

Maria Eliza Ketelby Rundell offered some puddings in her 1823
American Domestic Cookery
. Her recipes are clearly written for city-dwelling cooks with ingredients such as rice, oatmeal, lemons, orange-flower water, and “a two-penny loaf” of bread. Still, from the title, her “Puddings in haste” looked like a possible candidate, but as I considered the ingredients and method, it seemed less likely. In
pioneering Illinois,
suet, or beef fat, would have been a precious ingredient, suitable for Christmas plum puddings and possibly not even available in the spring. Other ingredients, such as grated wheat bread, currants, and lemon peel, would have been similarly rare. The method of forming egg-size balls and dropping them in boiling water certainly would have produced a pudding in haste, but would have required careful watching.

I turned to Miss Leslie's 1828 receipt book. Although hers were eastern recipes, it was not too hard looking at the ingredients to pick dishes much more suitable to central Illinois cooking conditions. I found two possible candidates, “Batter Pudding” and “Indian Pudding.” Miss Leslie's recipes for a boiled wheat and a corn batter pudding were economical desserts more like a very damp cake than the custard dessert we commonly call pudding. The recipes look simple but, as I discovered, are downright tricky to make the old-fashioned way. Miss Leslie's method sounds easy enough. Have a large pot of boiling water. Take a sturdily woven cloth, wet it, and then dust with flour. Pour the pudding batter into the cloth and tie it shut, making sure to “leave room for the pudding
to swell.” Then just boil it for one to three hours. “Serve up hot with sauce made from drawn butter,
wine and nutmeg.”

Her “Batter Pudding” recipe called for six eggs and a quart of milk with eight “tablespoons” of flour. Clearly that was not a measuring tablespoon. A look twenty-five years ahead into Eliza Acton's cookbook,
Modern Cookery in All Its Branches
, which was revised for the American market by
Godey's
editor Sarah J. Hale, gave a proportion of half a pound of flour to four eggs.

I made adjustments and have included an ad
apted recipe of the batter pudding at the end of this chapter. I started with a quarter recipe. Several indigestible, sticky, doorstop puddings later, I had discovered the huge problem with boiling: there isn't an easy way to check progress. My boiled puddings had a terrible tendency to come out way too damp. Seems as though mid-nineteenth-century cooks may have had the same problem and advanced to cooking the batter in molds. Mrs. Acton scolded that though “modern taste is in favor of puddings cooked in moulds … they are seldom as light as those boiled in cloths.” Be that as it may, I figured it was worth a try. The advantages of being able to easily check doneness outweighed the possible change in lightness. Much to my delight I found that, in my kitchen, the baked-in-the-mold version was much better. Light and somewhat plain, but good.

This description at the end of Miss Leslie's recipe for “Indian Pudding” caught my attention: “When cold it is very good cut in slices and fried.” Sounds perfect for men out on a military campaign even though the “Indian” refers to
cornmeal, not a possible enemy. Miss Leslie was right. That lightly spiced molasses pudding is very good served that way. I figured the camping
soldiers might enjoy the plain batter pudding served just that simple way without a sauce. You could add a half teaspoon each of cinnamon and nutmeg to the
Tennessee Cake
to sample a cake similar to Indian Pudding.

Another recipe I found in Miss Leslie's book worth considering is a sturdy cracker called “Apee.” I've made these for years and was delighted to find them in an 1828 source. They are somewhat like an English “digestive biscuit,” a cross between a cookie and a cracker. The
caraway seeds actually do have a soothing effect on digestion. Perhaps the Rutledge family would have prepared these cookies in their tavern kitchen. As the
leading family in town with two sons marching off, they may have made a couple of batches as a farewell—and “eat well”—contribution to the war.