Abraham Lincoln in the Kitchen (14 page)

But even better than these
cookbook recipes was a treasure I found on microfilm. I was reading the
Sangamo Journal
newspaper, and there in the November 3, 1832, edition was a column of recipes. Although the date was six months after the men marched off—and five months after many of them came home—and published in the relatively more urban city of Springfield, it is hard to get closer time and place
than this. The eighteen recipes are for cakes and cookies. Two of them fit nicely into this soldier-provisioning story. Pint cake is a variation of several styles of early cake that are simply bread dough enriched with sugar, dried fruit, additional butter or eggs, and some spices. With housekeepers making loaves of bread on a daily basis, it was an easy matter to pull out a “pint” of bread dough and turn it into cake. The second recipe that jumped right out and demanded to be made is a jumble. This version is different from Mrs. Jemison's jumbles, the very first historical recipe I researched and cooked. This recipe is just as tasty but has less butter and sugar and uses caraway seeds instead of exotic mace for flavoring. Given that the cook would have to form the cookie rings individually, it probably wasn't a recipe that the ladies of New Salem had time to bake as the men set off, but maybe it would have been a good treat to serve when they returned. I just know I couldn't resist.

As to what the New Salem militia men actually ate in camp, government documents and memoirs helped me to figure out some of the possibilities. Once in Beardstown, the Sangamon County troops joined others from around the state. Steamboats brought provisions upriver for the regular army troops and volunteer militia. Scattered records of provisions for the New Salem company survive. On the 25th, Lincoln signed for corn, pork, salt, one barrel of flour, and five-and-a-half gallons of whiskey. On the 28th, the company was formally enrolled in state service, and Lincoln again drew supplies including candles; soap; a fifty-pound gridiron; four tin buckets; seven coffee boilers; seven tin pans; sixteen tin cups; more corn, pork, flour, and whiskey. He also signed for fighting materiel: lead, powder, and thirty muskets and bayonets. On May 17, he drew ten pounds of cornmeal and ten pounds of pork. Certainly the Sangamon County volunteers would have had more to eat than this. Rations for the regular army included fresh beef and vinegar.

Memoirs from Lincoln's company's thirty-day enlistment are limited, too. As the volunteers moved northeast through Illinois on the track of Black Hawk, they witnessed the grim results of battle and encountered one Indian. William Greene recounted that an “old Indian” stumbled into their camp. Although he had a pass from General Cass stating that he was a “good & true man,” some of the army
soldiers were intent, saying, “We have come to fight the Indians and by God we intend to do so.” According to Greene and others, Lincoln stood between the soldiers and the Indian, protecting him from harm and letting him go along his way. By the end of May, the volunteers and their horses were exhausted and their calico clothing torn to shreds by continually tramping through brush and brambles. Royal Clary explained the governor's release statement: “The men's times were up—horses jaded & worn out—men naked etc and they must be discharged and so we were.”

The New Salem area men were mustered out on May 27. However, Lincoln reenlisted for two more terms of about twenty days each. First he joined Captain Elijah Iles's company, this time as a private. When that enlistment was up, he joined an independent spy company under the command of Captain Jacob M. Early. And, more important to me, he was in the company of George M. Harrison, who later told Herndon a good deal about actual food in the campaign. According to Harrison, bacon was an important part of the army diet. “The government furnished four raw articles from which we prepared our diet; bacon hams and shoulders, pickled pork, flour and beef cattle.” Harrison explained they always had plenty of bacon, unless they failed to carry enough.

Cooking equipment was similarly limited. “A frying pan with a
short handle, a tin water bucket furnished by the government, pocket knives, bowie knives, hatchets, tin cups, a coffee pot and elm bark for dishes, kneading tray furnished by ourselves.” It is unclear what happened to the fifty-pound gridiron Lincoln had signed for a few weeks earlier. The life of the volunteer troops had changed over the brief course of the war. Earlier on, men described camp life that included singing, card games, and various sports. Now the commanders moved troops quickly following the movements of Black Hawk and his band, which included warriors and women and children.

As to the food the volunteer militia ate, Harrison's descriptions were more specific than many period cookbook writers. “The meat we could boil—when we could get a pot—broil, roast or fry; the latter was generally practiced in order to save all the grease for bread to shorten and to fry. The bread we could bake or fry, the latter mode was generally practiced, for it was the less trouble and the less time of the two modes; the former mode we usually practiced by wrapping the stiff,
shortened dough in a spiral manner around our ramrods … where it would bake into a most esculent bread.”

“Shortened.” Here is a recipe in an adjective. None of today's discursive language: “make a short crust.” Just a single word. I knew what Harrison meant. A short crust is used for pies, where we combine
butter,
lard, or “shortening” with flour so that bits of the fat are encased in a flour envelope before the liquid is added. As this crust bakes, the fat melts, giving off its own bits of liquid, turned to steam, and the result is a flaky crust we all know from well-made pies or biscuits. This was, in fact, the first recipe and cooking method I learned from my mother. I had never really thought about the name. Recipe writers at least as far back as the middle 1600s used the same verb to describe this quickly made alternative to puff pastry. Back then, Sir Kenelm Digby described the piecrust made by Lady Lasson for her pie of “Neats-tongues”: “Her finest crust is made by sprinkling the flower [
sic
] … with cold water and then working the past[e] with little pieces of raw Butter in good quantity.… And this makes the crust short and light.”

There was a slight hitch to adapting Harrison's flour and bacon fat to my usual short crust method that calls for ice-cold water and hard shortening. Harrison and Lincoln were eating in June and July. I took another clue from Harrison's description of their cooking equipment, “kneading tray furnished by ourselves,” and figured the men simply mixed the fat with flour using their hands. Four tablespoons of bacon fat, cooled so it was just turning white, mixed perfectly with one cup of flour. As to cooking technique, I opted for a modification. I didn't have a rifle ramrod, but I did find an old auger in the back of the garage—an advantage of living in a 125-year-old house. This rusty two-foot-long piece of iron was about the right diameter—a half inch—to replicate Harrison and Lincoln's method. I covered it with aluminum foil and wrapped the
snake of dough around it, then propped it up over the low wood fire and waited. And waited. And waited even longer. Harrison was right; this was a very slow method. I unwound the still slightly raw dough from the “ramrod” and placed it on the grill over the lingering coals. About fifteen minutes later, we did indeed have a most esculent bread.

As to main dishes, militia volunteers made use of what they could find as they moved through the land of small, panic-abandoned farms set in northern Illinois and southern Wisconsin forest clearings. Apparently, the men went hungry rather than engage in widespread
hunting. Maybe lead to make bullets was scarce. Possibly they were under orders not to shoot as the retort might make others in the area think they were under attack. Or perhaps the wildlife abandoned the area as well as the farmers. Harrison made much of one hunting success: “Once in particular, after stretching our rations nearly four days one of our mess shot a dove, and having a gill of flour left, we made a gallon and a half of delicious soup … this soup we divided among several messes that were hungrier than we were and our own mess.”

Here was a recipe that demanded to be tried. The ingredients and the method are very clear. I substituted a Cornish game hen from the grocery freezer section for the dove and was pleasantly surprised at the result. There was more water to meat than I usually use when making chicken soup. The amount of flour, equal to a half cup, thickened the soup the slightest bit. The meat from the “dove” stretched farther that I thought. All in all, an edible soup even without benefit of salt, pepper, or other seasonings.

There were also bigger birds to prey upon. Harrison described the men raiding a chicken coop and capturing scrawny hens and roosters. The family who settled on this northern Illinois farm had “skedaddled for fear of losing their scalps.” The hungry band of volunteers took advantage of the unfed chickens before them. They tried simply cooking them over the fire, but then took a notion to fry them in some grease rendered from a hog jowl Harrison had found up in the rafters of the smokehouse. It provided just enough to make the tough fowl as acceptable as “eating saddle bags.” The chickens we get in the grocery are nowhere near as tough and skinny as those half-starved chickens were, but I wondered how the combination of grilling and then frying in bacon fat would
taste. The result was quite good, but very messy to make. In the recipe at the end of the chapter, I've adapted the concept, pairing the chicken and bacon in a much more succulent dish than the men of Lincoln's mess would have had, but the flavor combination is very good, especially cooked over a wood fire.

Lincoln and Harrison were discharged from the army in July near Whitewater, Wisconsin. The trip home was slightly more than two hundred miles. The two made most of the journey on foot because their horses were stolen the evening before they departed. They were not the only men of the company who walked home. Members of their company did share rides from time to time, but Harrison reported that the horses' backs were “too sore from constant riding.” In Peoria, the company split up and Lincoln and Harrison bought a canoe. Taking up a new mode of travel for “a novelty,” they paddled along on the slow current of the
Illinois River. At one point they overtook a raft and were invited aboard for a feast of “fish, corn bread, eggs, butter and coffee; just prepared for our benefit.” They sold the canoe in Havana, Illinois, and walked the rest of the way, with Harrison stopping at Petersburg and Lincoln continuing on to New Salem and his first election campaign for a seat in the Illinois legislature.

BATTER PUDDING

 

This has been the trickiest recipe in all of my Lincoln cookery research. With just five ingredients, batter pudding is simple to mix. But it can be challenging to cook successfully. I wrote of my frustrations with the traditional boiling method in the text. When baked in the oven, the pudding puffs up, rather like a popover. Patience is key for serving: if you cut it before it cools, the inside may be too damp and doughy. The compromise method of steaming works well, but you are stuck in the kitchen for the hour it takes the pudding to cook through. Yet for all the issues, this is a dessert worth trying. Its simple taste makes a lovely base for fresh berries or
vinegar sauce
.
Pumpkin butter
would be tasty spooned over it as well
.

¾ cup milk

1 ¼ cups unbleached all-purpose flour, plus extra for sprinkling

¼ teaspoon baking soda

⅛ teaspoon salt

1 egg, lightly beaten

Pour the milk into a mixing bowl and gradually stir in the flour, mixing with a fork. Stir in the baking soda and salt. Mix in the egg. Boil, bake, or steam the pudding following one of these methods:

TRADITIONAL BOILING METHOD:
Fill a large stockpot about two-thirds full with water and bring to a boil. Meanwhile, dip a heavy pudding cloth or linen-like dishtowel in
the boiling water and then sprinkle well with flour on one side: this will form a seal between the boiling water and the pudding batter. Shake off excess flour. Lay the cloth floured side up on the work surface. Pour the pudding batter onto the center of the cloth, gather up the edges of the cloth, and tie them up at the top securely with a long piece of kitchen string. Make sure you leave some room for the batter to swell inside the cloth. Lower the pudding into the boiling water, extending the end of the string outside the pot so you have a way to pull the pudding out of the pot. Wrap the end of the string around a wooden spoon and balance the spoon across the top of the pot. Keep the water at a strong simmer for 1 hour. Pull the pudding out to check if it is done. Press lightly on the side of the cloth; if the pudding rebounds, loosen the string and stick a skewer or thin knife into the pudding. If it comes out clean, the pudding is done. If not, tie it up again and return to the boiling water for as long as another hour. Remove from the water. Let cool before unwrapping and slicing.

MODERN BAKING METHOD:
Preheat the oven to 350°F. Pour the batter into 2 lightly greased small loaf pans. Bake until firm in center and the pudding has just begun to pull away from the sides of the pans, about 45 to 55 minutes. The pudding will rise up and then fall when removed from the oven. Cool completely before breaking into serving pieces.

STOVETOP STEAMING METHOD:
You will need: a 1-quart heatproof pudding bowl or casserole; waxed or parchment paper; kitchen string; and a deep pot with a lid large enough to comfortably hold the pudding bowl or casserole. You will also need a trivet to keep the bowl off the bottom of the pot. (I improvised with iron flower-arranging frogs.) Lightly grease the pudding bowl and add the batter. Lightly grease a piece of waxed paper, lay it across the top of the bowl, and tie in place with the string. Lower the bowl into the pot. Add enough boiling water so the water comes about halfway up the bowl. Maintain a strong simmer until the pudding is done, adding more boiling water as needed. Check the pudding with a skewer after about 45 minutes. (You can stick the skewer through the waxed or parchment paper.) If the skewer comes out clean, the pudding is done. If not, continue cooking until the skewer comes out clean. This could take another half hour.

Boiled pudding is best served with a sauce such as vinegar sauce, pumpkin butter, or fruit.

Makes 1 round pudding or 2 small pudding loaves, for 6 to 8 servings

ADAPTED FROM “BATTER PUDDING,” MISS ELIZA LESLIE, SEVENTY-FIVE RECEIPTS FOR PASTRY, CAKES, AND SWEETMEATS, 1828.