Abraham Lincoln in the Kitchen Read Free

ingredients. From the Pilgrim days, our corn was referred to as “Indian” corn to differentiate it from wheat, which the English settlers called “corn.” Many nineteenth-century recipes use that name. Despite their value and good taste, cornmeal dishes fall out of favor and are “rediscovered” as good food just about every generation. I’ve read articles in scores of nineteenth-century ladies’ magazines, travel narratives, and agricultural journals preaching cornmeal’s benefits. AsHenry Andrews testified on the value of cornmeal in the March 1842 edition of the leading farming magazine of the day, the
Union Agriculturist
:
    I believe it is generally admitted that there is no grain grown in the U.S. of more value as to its general usefulness for both man and beast than the Indian corn, and yet with what contempt it is treated by many when it is occasionally placed on our tables in the form of bread. How many have I fallen in with in my travels among northern people particularly those who are unaccustomed to the mode of living in the middle and southern states who exclaim against corn bread or its usefulness any farther than for [live]stock. I think the cause of dislike is more from the want of knowledge how to prepare it for the table, than any thing else.
    Preparing it for the table was a labor-intensive process and one that Abraham Lincoln would have known well. Corn keeps its own calendar with jobs for farmers at every stage. After the ears start to set kernels, farmers would remove the leaves below them, “pulling fodder” to feed their animals. In the fall, corn just shuts down, stops growing, and begins drying. The leaves wither to tan, the silks brown while the kernels harden and begin to dry on the faded ten-foot-tall stalks still standing in growing rows or after being cut and gathered into shocks. Although pioneers ate some of their corn crop in the “green” state—ears of cornboiled or roasted, as we do—they consumed most of it from the dried kernels transformed intocornmeal or hominy.
    Settlers often turned the next step of the harvesting process into a social event. Indiana neighbors remember Lincoln at corn shuckings, neighborly gatherings where the husks were removed from the dry ears of corn amid joking, storytelling, and music. Sometimes the farmers divided the group down the middle in teams, and neighbors raced to see which side could shuck the most ears before placing them in the corncrib or loft for storage. It was a perfect setting for the young Abraham to listen and practice his ownstorytelling skills.
    Stripping the ears from the stalks, shucking them, and then shelling the kernels off the cob was hard work. It took one hundred ears of corn to make one bushel of corn kernels. Moderately successful corn crops in the 1820s yielded between sixty and eighty bushels from an acre. Mechanical picker-wheel or disk-type shellers appeared as early as 1815, but no one knows if the Lincoln family had one. They were so simple achild could operate them. Just hold an ear of corn against the spiked disk and crank away. The whirling spikes removed the dry kernels from the cob. These kernels then dropped into a container carefully placed under the sheller and were ready for the next cooking step.
    Converting the kernels into cornmeal was work, too. The Lincolns may have made small batches of cornmeal by grating corn still on the cob across an oval piece of tin punched full of holes with acommon nail and tacked on a board. We do know that young Abraham’s chores included taking the corn to themill so it could be ground into meal.
    In 1818 Noah Gordon’shorse-powered mill was just about two miles away from the Lincolns’ Indiana home. Each farmer would hitch his horse to the mill and drive it around in a circle, powering thegrinding stones. Various versions of a story about Abraham’s accident at the mill exist, but the simplest is in the 1860