Abraham Lincoln in the Kitchen

by Rae Katherine Eighmey

  Lincoln and Tad also interacted with the soldiers camped on the grounds surrounding the cottage and other buildings. Lincoln’s association with these men was significant. He came into camp and laughed at their entertainments, including one with two soldiers under a blanket, pretending to be an elephant—one soldier being the hind end and the other, holding a board for the trunk, as the front. Audience members shouted out tricks for the “trained elephant” to perform. Lincoln sat and visited with these young soldiers, perhaps escaping in memory to the days in New Salem when he was a young man cavorting in wrestling matches and feats of strength with the boys from Clary’s Grove or his own efforts at command and warfare during the Black Hawk campaign.

  In the evenings, Lincoln wandered the grounds of the Soldiers’ Home. He walked past the tents of both the cavalry and infantry companies and stopped, “passing a word with them.” Members of the cavalry detail camped near the first national cemetery for soldiers just across the road from the Soldiers’ Home. Dedicated after the loss at the First Battle of Bull Run in July 1861, the cemetery filled rapidly, and as the war continued it was the scene of several burials a day. By the summer of 1863 there had been more than eight thousand interments.

  These soldiers not only protected the president, but they also provided companionship for Tad, now nine years old and the only child left at home. After Willie’s death, distraught Mary Lincoln asked that the Taft boys no longer come to the White House for classes with the tutor or to play. Soon Bud and Holly Taft and their sister, Julia, were sent up north to school. The oldest Lincoln son, Robert, never lived at the White House; he began studies at Harvard before the war and visited on vacations. Secretary of War Stanton’s children were sometime playmates, but Tad found good friends in the Pennsylvania “Bucktail” soldiers. They named him an honorary “third Lieutenant.” Letters and memoirs from the members of Company K provide brief witness to the everyday events. Albert See, one of the soldiers, wrote that Tad showed up nearly every day “when the dinner bell rang” and would simply get in line and “draw his rations the same as the rest of us.” Private Cutter recalled giving Tad some “bread and molasses.”

  In addition to the regular army ration of twenty-two ounces of bread, fresh beef (in place of salt meat), beans and rice or hominy, molasses, coffee, tea, salt, and pepper, soldiers could buy food from vendors who called on camp. As Cutter wrote to his brother, “Tell Grand Mother I have lots of Bread and Milk to eat. It is five cents a pint and the old woman is around most every day to sell cakes and pies, milk, apples, and a little of everything.”

  During the three summer seasons spent at the cottage, Lincoln came by the troop encampments for meals, too. He would sit and have a plate of beans and some coffee with the men. He also invited officers to come into the cottage to dine with him when Mrs. Lincoln was vacationing in New York or Vermont. Captains Derickson of Company K and Crotzer of Company D were dinner companions. Cavalry officer James Mix reported that he often ate breakfast with the president.

  Mary Lincoln recognized the importance of the soldiers’ service. Back in the city she often visited the hospitals and sent soldiers baskets of wine and fruit, “re-gifting” things that had been sent to the White House. Christmas of 1862 she was among a number of government wives who donated food from their homes and raised money to buy even more so that hospitalized soldiers would have a fulsome holiday meal. The women took plates and fed those who were bedridden. Mrs. Lincoln was one of the “waiters” at one hospital. Later when she heard that one of the cottage guard units was under orders to leave for combat, she gave the unit two bushels of apples.

  The Pennsylvania guard continued their responsibilities when the Lincolns returned to the White House. Private Cutter’s letters give a good sense of the bounty available in the city markets. “We were up around the city and had a mince pie that was first rate, you must not think that we have a hard time here and nothing to eat. We can get a pass to go in the city where the market is and get any thing we want there. There is more folks at the [M]arville market stand than there is in Meadville [Pennsylvania]. On fair days there is about 200 stands where they are and every other one is selling pies, cakes, and everything you can think of. I was up there the other day and bought butter and cheese.”

  The Lincoln family left the Soldiers’ Home retreat for the last time in October 1864. The three summers there had been times of monumental events. Lincoln framed and wrote the Emancipation Proclamation during his first summer at the cottage, apparently beginning consideration of the policy in June, reading a first draft to the cabinet on July 22, and presenting the completed document to his cabinet on September 22, 1862. Major summer battles had taken a tremendous toll: Confederate victories at Second Bull Run, August 28–30, 1862, left 16,000 Union casualties; Antietam, September 17, 1862, 12,400 Union casualties; Chancellorsville, April 30–May 6, 1863, 14,000 Union casualties; Chickamauga, September 18–20, 1863, 16,170 Union casualties; and the great Union victory at Gettysburg, July 1–3, 1863, 23,000 Union dead and wounded.

  At the Lincoln Cottage I could sit and reflect on where this journey brought me. I began with a simple understanding of the lives of Abraham and Mary Lincoln and a curiosity to see where an examination of the foods of the era might take me. Over all the miles between southern Indiana and this spot overlooking Washington, through the piles of recipes and plates of re-created foods, my admiration for the Lincolns had only increased as I was able, for a few moments, to come close to entering their world. I only wished I had a corn dodger to munch.

  Today the tree-filled grounds are mostly still, except for the occasional voices of the veterans who live here and the visitors leaving the guided house tour. I sat in the small shelter a few yards from the house. Could it have been built on a spot where Company K set up camp and President Lincoln stopped by for some beans and coffee and maybe bread and molasses? I pictured him sitting among a company of men he commanded, committed to a course of national survival, and breaking bread with them.

  And so I come to the last recipe mystery of this book. What was that bread? Noah Brooks gave me some clues in his report from the army bakery at the “upper end of G Street in Georgetown.” He described the efforts of 280 men working twenty-four hours a day to make “sweet, wholesome and fresh” twenty-two-ounce loaves of bread for the army. The bread was formed like a large bun and baked fifteen to a sheet in ovens that could hold ten baking sheets at a time. Every day the men went through 210 barrels of “super” flour that cost Uncle Sam $8.87 per barrel. “Opposite each oven is the apparatus for raising and molding the dough and connected to it is the ‘yeast manufactory.’ ” Brooks claimed the bread “compares favorable with the best private bakeries.”

  The key to the recipe is as much what Brooks doesn’t mention as what he does. There is no list of firkins of butter or lard, gallons of milk, clutches of eggs, or barrels of sugar. Brooks was an accurate and descriptive reporter. If these ingredients had gone into the soldier’s bread, he would have mentioned them. No, this was a simple flour-and-water bread leavened with a yeast sponge.

  Reporter Brooks was specific about the “super” grade flour for this bread. Descriptions in agricultural journals of the day suggested that milling high-grade flour yielded fifty pounds of flour from a sixty-six-pound bushel. In milling terms, this would have been a 75 percent “extraction rate.” Modern “white” flours are milled to 73 percent extraction. So the flour that the army bakers used was as white as the unbleached flour we use today. As to the yeast, Brooks described the “Germans” working in a separate building to prepare the yeast. Most of the period bread recipes began with a “sponge,” a bubbly preliminary mixture of the yeast, water, and flour. The bubbles indicated that the yeast was working, so the baker would know that the bread would rise before mixing up ten quarts of flour and two quarts of water, the amount Mrs. Sarah J. Hale’s 1857 cookbook suggested was enough for four loaves “for a small family.” There were several ways to get the beginning yeast c
ulture; brewer’s yeast was one of the most common. But once they had that beginning culture, the men in the yeast manufactory would simply encourage it to multiply. This is not the same process as growing a sourdough culture. The prodigious rate at which they were turning out bread and Brooks’s description of a “sweet” bread indicate that their starter was just a basic and quick-rising sponge. I make my sponge with standard dry rapid-rise yeast.

  Now for some quick math to verify my one-rise recipe logic: The 280 army bakers used 210 barrels of flour a day. A little less than one pound of flour makes one loaf of soldier’s bread. There are 156 pounds of flour in a barrel. That yields 32,760 loaves of bread. Divide the number of loaves by the number of loaves per pan (15), number of pans per oven (10), and the number of ovens (20) and you get 11 “batches” of bread. Divide the number of batches into the 24 hours a day they were baking and you get 2.2 hours to produce a loaf of bread. My jaw dropped when I finished the calculations—that was just about how long it took for me to mix and bake my test loaves.

  Mixing the sponge into dough is a very hands-on and sticky process and kneading is critical to a loaf that rises well and has a good texture. The men who had the responsibility for that task in the army bakery were “neatly dressed and tidy men to whom tobacco in any form is a forbidden article so long as they are in the bakery.”

  Brooks ended his essay with the thought that “Uncle Sam’s bakery is one of the sights of Washington, and many a soldier has reason to thank his lucky stars that its proximity has delivered him from the poor fare of ‘hardtack’ of doubtful age.”

  And as I come close to the last of Lincoln’s recipes in this book, I am thankful for the time I’ve spent with these evocative foods. Brooks’s vivid description gave me enough clues to devise the recipe. The bread is easy to make. Take your time, knead the dough well, and then chew on the sustaining textures of the past.

  SOLDIER’S BREAD

  This sturdy bread is just the kind of loaf soldiers would have tossed into their haversacks. The mild flavor stands up well to sharp cheeses and boiled meats, and it dunks well into all kinds of soups.

  1 envelope active dry yeast

  2 ½ cups warm water, divided

  1 tablespoon sugar

  6 ½ to 7 ½ cups unbleached bread flour, plus more for dusting

  ½ teaspoon salt

  Put the yeast in a mixing bowl; add ½ cup of the warm water and the sugar. Stir with a fork until blended and set aside until it begins to bubble. This is proofing the yeast to be sure it will make the bread rise. Mix in 1 cup of the flour and knead into a smooth dough. Put back into bowl and pour 2 cups of warm water around the ball of dough. Set aside for 15 to 20 minutes until the dough ball rises and is bubbly on the bottom.

  Add 2 cups of the flour to the water and carefully begin to mix with your hand, breaking up the dough “sponge” and blending it with the flour. Continue adding more flour until you have a smooth and non-sticky ball of dough. Knead for several minutes on a lightly floured surface until it is very smooth. Divide the dough in half. Form each half into a tight round loaf. Place on a lightly greased baking sheet and put in a warm place to rise until doubled.

  Preheat the oven to 350°F. Bake until browned on top and when you tap the bottom of a loaf it sounds hollow, about 45 minutes.

  TIPS FOR SUCCESS: Yeast is a living thing. It needs the right warm temperature to make the bubbles that make the bread rise. A water temperature of 110°F is about right. An air temperature of about 125°F is about right for the sponge and loaves to rise. In my cold winter kitchen, I often boil a cup of water in the microwave and then put the bowl of dough in next to it. When the loaves are formed, I preheat the oven just to 95°F, turn it off, put the dough in, and leave the oven door cracked open a bit. If the oven is too hot, the yeast will die and the bread won’t rise.

  To knead your bread dough, push it down, turning and pushing again, until it is smooth. I divide the dough in half and knead each loaf for about five minutes

  Makes two 8-inch round loaves

  RECIPE DEVELOPED FROM NOAH BROOKS’S INGREDIENT DESCRIPTIONS.

  CAKES IN ABRAHAM LINCOLN’S NAME

  The Lincolns were in residence at the White House on April 10, 1865, as the news spread throughout the city of General Robert E. Lee’s April 8 surrender to General Ulysses S. Grant, bringing with it the end of the war. A great crowd walked through rain and mud from the Navy Yard to the White House lawn, picking up more and more people and even the Quartermaster’s Band along the way. Nearly three thousand in number, they called for the president to come out. He spoke briefly and called upon the band to “play ‘Dixie.’ One of the best tunes I’ve ever heard.” He concluded his appearance calling for three cheers for “General Grant and all under his command” and another three cheers for the navy.

  The following evening Abraham Lincoln made his last public address. Speaking again from the upper windows of the White House, he called for reconciliation with the Southern states. “Let us all join in doing the acts necessary to restoring the proper practical relations between these states and the Union.”

  Three days later President and Mrs. Lincoln went to a performance of Our American Cousin at Ford’s Theatre. In the middle of the play, John Wilkes Booth entered the presidential box and shot Abraham Lincoln in the back of the head. He was carried across the street into the home of Mr. William Petersen and laid in a small bedroom on the first floor. At 7:33 the morning of April 15, 1865, Abraham Lincoln’s great heart stopped beating.

  Walt Whitman wrote:

  When lilacs last in the door-yard bloom’d,

  And the great star droop’d in the western sky in the night,

  I mourn’d—and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring.

  At Lincoln’s death, Secretary of War William Stanton said, “Now he belongs to the ages.” The president, his accomplishments, and his ideas belonged so much to the country that people publicly mourned Lincoln’s death almost as though he were a member of their immediate family. People wore black ribbons on their sleeves. Some even hung their homes with black crepe. There were mourning ribbons and badges, memorial portraits, articles and books celebrating his life. Nineteenth-century cookbooks brought forth a bakery case full of cakes paying homage to the martyred president. These cakes joined those named for Presidents Washington and Madison as well as other political figures on both sides of the Civil War.

  Many of the published recipes for Lincoln cakes pass along the simple recipe that first appeared in Godey’s Lady’s Book in 1865: “2 eggs, 2 cups sugar, ½ cup butter, one of sweet milk, three of flour, 1 teaspoon cream of tartar, half teaspoon soda and one of lemon essence.” Others are more like light fruitcakes.

  After my Lincoln foodways talks, when the group is mingling and sampling the Lincoln cake, jumbles, apple butter, and other period foods, folks will frequently ask what happened after President Lincoln was assassinated. How did Mary survive yet another death? What happened to Tad and Robert? A complete response, as with the rest of Lincoln literature, fills many books and articles, but the short answer is this: Mary Lincoln remained in seclusion in the White House while the funeral train carrying her husband home to Springfield passed through seven states during nearly two weeks. The route, arranged by a committee of Illinois citizens, stopped in ten cities where the president-elect’s train had stopped on its journey to Washington four years and two months earlier. Lincoln’s coffin was taken in solemn procession from the train to lie in state in city halls or state capitols. Thousands of people walked past paying their respects. All along the route, scores of smaller cities and towns put up mourning arches over the tracks with banners celebrating the “martyred President.” By mid-May, Mary was ready to move to Chicago with Robert and Tad. She left the White House on May 22, 1865.

  Mary Lincoln lived seventeen more years, dying on July 16, 1882, in the Springfield home of her older sister Elizabeth Edwards. Mary survived the president’s assassination and Tad’s death six yea
rs later. For two multiyear periods she lived in Europe. Robert Lincoln became a successful attorney and strove to keep his mother in physical, mental, and financial health. He married and had three children. His only son, Abraham Lincoln II, died at age sixteen. The last surviving Lincoln descendant, a great-grandson, Robert Todd Lincoln Beckwith, died in 1985.

  And so I’ve come to the end of this exploration that started with the recipe for Mary Lincoln’s Almond Cake. My old oak table is now cleared of research books and manuscript pages. I’ve completed the notes on my last spattered recipe sheet. The kitchen is fragrant with yeasty smells from two round twenty-two-ounce loaves of soldier’s bread cooling on my kitchen counter. Somehow the memories of my visits—recent, past, and in imagination—to the places Lincoln lived rise with their steam. This has been an extraordinary journey.

  LINCOLN CAKE

  Nineteenth-century homemakers would have called this satisfying cake “a good keeper.” Its taste and texture are best when it has mellowed a day or two in a covered container. A thin slice is all you need.

  3 ½ cups unbleached all-purpose flour, divided

  1 teaspoon baking soda

  1 ½ teaspoons ground cinnamon

  ½ teaspoon freshly grated or ground nutmeg

  ½ teaspoon ground cloves

  ½ cups raisins

  ½ cup dried Zante currants

  ½ cup diced candied citron

  1 cup chopped almonds

  1 cup (2 sticks) salted butter

  1 ½ cups packed brown sugar

  3 large eggs, lightly beaten

  1 cup milk

  ¼ cup brandy

  Preheat the oven to 325°F. Grease and flour a 10- to 12-inch angel food cake pan. Mix 3 cups of the flour, the baking soda, and spices and set aside. Mix the raisins, currants, citron, and almonds with the remaining ½ cup flour and set aside. Cream the butter and brown sugar. Add the eggs and mix well. Add one-third of the flour-and-spice mixture, then the milk, the second third of the flour, the brandy, and finally the remaining flour mixture, stirring well after each addition. Stir in the fruit-and-nut mixture. Pour the batter into the prepared pan, filling it about three-quarters full. Bake until a skewer or thin knife inserted in the center comes out clean, about 1 hour and 15 minutes. Let the cake cool for 10 or 15 minutes before running a knife around the edge of the pan. Remove the outside section of the pan. When the cake has cooled completely, pop it off the center tube. Cut into thin slices and serve.