You probably don’t look good in a stovepipe hat, and splitting rails isn’t much fun. So what’s the best way to mark Abraham Lincoln’s birthday? Why not say it with food?
Yes, Honest Abe was an honest-to-goodness foodie, according to the new book “Abraham Lincoln in the Kitchen: A Culinary View of Lincoln’s Life and Times” by Rae Katherine Eighmey.
Here are six fun facts about Abe Lincoln the foodie:
-
1. Young Abe Lincoln adored gingerbread men
The cookie his mom used to make before she died was “our biggest treat,” he later recalled, but “it wasn’t often.”
Lincoln turned his fondness for them into a well-liked anecdote he frequently told about a boy who loved gingerbread more than anybody else because he got to taste it so seldom.
-
2. Lincoln fueled his famous rhetoric with tasty barbecue
Ox-roasting at the Brennan Society's picnic, Lion Park, New York City, 1860s. Campaign rallies often accompanied picnics at which slow-roasted, pit-barbecued turkey, mutton or ox was served, though the smoky technique was not then in use.
Another commonly-savored dish was burgoo, a mixed meal of meat and vegetables that had the consistency of a very thick stew. Paper plates hadn’t been invented yet, so meat was eaten out of the hand, with hunks of bread serving as plates. Guests were expected to bring their own tin cups and spoons for the stew.
-
3. He did his own grocery shopping
Getty Images Back when every grocery store was more or less a farmers market, during his years lawyering in Springfield, Ill., Lincoln would hit the butcher shop or the bakery the first thing in the morning, before work.
Neighbors saw him “wending his way to market with a basket on his arm and a boy [one of his sons] at his side.”
-
4. He could eat four score and seven corn cakes
OK, maybe not. But corn was the leading crop in the states where Lincoln grew up (Indiana, Illinois and Kentucky), and cornbread and corn cakes were staples of his boyhood diet.
The grown-up Abe, though, never got tired of the stuff, and as an adult he said he could put away corn cakes “as fast as two women could make them.”
-
5. He ate his veggies
“He loved best the vegetable world generally,” wrote Lincoln’s friend and law partner William Herndon.
White House visitors reported his fondness for cabbage, spinach and baked beans, the latter of which he sometimes enjoyed for breakfast.
During the Civil War, Lincoln would stop by troop encampments to eat baked beans and slurp coffee with the men. Lincoln was also a big fan of apples, above all, Herndon noted.
-
6. Dinner was chicken fricasee and corned beef
Bowl of chicken fricassee The only two dishes the Lincolns were known to have eaten at dinner in the 1850s, Eighmey says.
At the time, fricasee meant chicken simmered in a thickened cream sauce flavored with salt, pepper and nutmeg. Corned beef would be slow-cooked for hours. A common quicker option popular in the 1850s would have been mutton harico. Browned, thinly cut mutton would have been tossed into a pot with some water and seasonings and cooked over an open hearth for an hour or so, with diced vegetables added roughly halfway through the process.