Abraham Lincoln in the Kitchen (29 page)

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 familiar 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.

As Springfield grew, Mary and other homemakers in town would have had help from grocers, confectioners, and bakers. Mrs. John Stuart recalled the early days when “not even a loaf of bread could be bought in the town.” Later newspaper advertisements shout out the goods: dried fruits, raisins, figs, apples, oranges, cranberries, fancy confections of all kinds, candies, ice, wines and liquors, meats,
canned oysters, dried mackerel, and cigars, along with cooking staples such as flour, cornmeal, hominy, molasses, sugars of all kinds, salts, butter, spices, and flavoring extracts.

Mary was far from alone as she struggled with life in her Springfield cottage. Her three
sisters were married and living in town. The Lincolns lived about a block and a half from her sister Frances and husband Dr.
Wallace. Younger sister, Ann, and her husband, merchant C. M.
Smith, lived about four blocks away; the oldest Todd daughter, Elizabeth, wife of Ninian
Edwards, lived just another two blocks farther west of the Smiths and six blocks from the Lincolns. The sisters, for
the most part, chose not to reveal much about their relationships when William Herndon came gathering information after
Lincoln's assassination. Again, my imagination and common sense make me consider that there was significant interaction among them. The Lincolns did have a charge account at C. M.
Smith's store.
Mary lived with Elizabeth for three years before she married Lincoln. The newlyweds immediately moved into the single room at
Globe Tavern. Robert was born just nine months later. I have to think that as the time came close, Mary would have moved into one of her sisters' homes, perhaps that of
Frances, whose husband was a physician, to have her first child. The recollection of their mother's death right after childbirth must have been in all of the sisters' minds. Abraham lost his only sister in childbirth, too. A younger brother, born when Lincoln was just three, lived only a few days. Although there isn't any evidence to support my thinking, I can't see any of these sensible people risking Mary's or the baby's life by having her give birth in a small residential hotel room.

Mary did write one clear image of the close interaction she had with her sisters. In June of 1860, Ann and C. M. Smith's ten-year-old son died of typhoid fever. Mary wrote that the
family was inconsolable and for a week she “spent the greater portion” of her time with them. Certainly her sisters would have supported her in times of sickness, loss, or loneliness.

Any of her sisters could have brought meals from their kitchens into the Lincoln home or invited Mary and the children to eat with them on the many times when Abraham was riding the court circuit or pursuing political obligations. Or when the cottage was being remodeled. Anyone who has ever lived in a house during remodeling knows how disruptive it is. The work at the Lincolns' home began simply with some whitewashing and brickwork and expanded into cutting through walls and raising the roof, twice. Even if Mary and her help were operating out of a summer kitchen set up in the backyard washing shed, I can imagine Elizabeth might have brought by some of her famed chicken
salad, or Frances might have come round the block to offer to share a meal in her home. Frances describes a close relationship between the sisters during the one interview she did give to Herndon. She spoke of the Lincolns' backyard as “being used as a woodpile,” describing how Abraham liked
to saw wood for exercise. When she “used to go over to my sister's to visit … many times,”
Lincoln would
read aloud from Shakespeare and other books and sometimes “would all at once burst out in a joke.” She also said she planted flowers around their home “often.” Sharing of food could easily have been part of their family interactions.

Excavations around the home and into account books suggest specifics of the cottage's transforming steps, beginning with the return from Lincoln's congressional term in Washington, D.C. Mary and the boys, Robert born in August 1843 and Eddy in March 1846, had divided their time between the single room in a boardinghouse where Lincoln lived in Washington and her father's and stepmother's home in
Lexington during the 1847–49 term. They had rented out the
Springfield home and it appears they did not move right back in when the tenant left. At some point between 1849 and 1852, the first phases of remodeling were completed. With each step, the cottage became more sophisticated, until in 1856 it was a home designed and decorated to suit the position of one of the state's leading attorneys and a candidate for the Senate or even the presidency.

Initially they hired
John Roll, a local carpenter and longtime friend of Lincoln's, to whitewash the walls and ceiling, close up the fireplaces, and install new hearths for heating stoves. Roll was one of the local lads who helped build the raft for Lincoln's 1831 trip to New Orleans. Later, the Lincolns expanded the rear of the first floor. Carpenters, perhaps Roll, sawed through the tenons attaching the kitchen to the front part of the home and slid the entire large room five and a half feet to the south. They then enclosed a new fourteen-by-eighteen-foot room made from the old north porch and the kitchen and created a pantry room at the northeast corner and an open porch between the pantry and the new kitchen opening into the backyard, squaring off the
house.