Abraham Lincoln in the Kitchen by Rae Katherine Eighmey

were the “many bears and other animals still in the woods.” Life forthe Lincolns on the Hoosier frontier was a time of rapid change. I wanted to find a food approach that would help explain those changes. I have a great many recipes from pioneer sources. Though pioneer cabin cookery is important to understanding the period and the dishes are delightful to taste, there is a much larger story from those fourteen years in Indiana than a set of recipes from hearth and home alone could convey.
    On the way back to the car and the twenty-first century, I considered what I had read in the Herndon memoirs, nineteenth-century agricultural journals, and cookbooks. I realized that three foods—pawpaws, honey, and pumpkins—tell the story of growth from frontier life into established settlement. Each presents a key aspect of the way settlers interacted with nature and how the community andLincoln grew.
    When the Lincolns hacked their way through the vines and saplings to reach the small clearing and lean- to shelter Thomas had prepared, they were the first settler family on that section of land and one of the first in what would become Spencer County.
    The Lincoln and Hanks families had settled on new land before. Ancestors on both sides arrived in America during the seventeenth century. They had known the challenges and hardships of breaking new territory. Later, aschildren in Kentucky, both of Lincoln’s parents lost their fathers. Thomas continued to live with his widowed mother. He learned carpentry and farming skills while working for friends and relatives. In 1803 he purchased his first farm. He was twenty-seven years old. Three years later he sold 2,400 pounds of pork and 494 pounds of beef inElizabethtown trade. Clearly he had learned his lessons well.
    After Nancy’s father died, her mother remarried, and Nancy was raised in the “pleasant and comfortable” home of her elderly maternal uncle and aunt, Richard and Rachael Berry, going to school and learning how to spin and weave. Upon their deaths, she continued to live in the household then headed by her cousin, Richard Berry, Jr. The elder Berry’s tax records and will showed how successful he had become. He had six hundred acres of land, horses, cattle, furniture, and kitchen goods—plates, dishes, pots, kettles, and aDutch oven. He alsoowned three slaves—a woman named Nan, her daughter, Hannah, and a boy, Fill.
    So, when Thomas and the family moved into the new state of Indiana, they were drawing upon their own successful pioneering heritageto gain a foothold in a free state of limitless promise. In another poem, “The Bear Hunt,” written about the same time as the lines beginning this chapter,Lincoln described the wildness of that early settlement:
    When first my father settled here.
    â€™Twas then the frontier line:
    The Panther’s scream, filled the night with fear
    And bears preyed on the swine.
    Nancy Lincoln’s aunt and uncle,Elizabeth and Thomas Sparrow, with their ward Dennis Hanks, arrived sometime in the fall of 1817. These new Hoosiers, descendants of hardworking farmers, had skills and knowledge to live off the land before their farms were in production. When they left Kentucky for theIndiana frontier, they left behind the possibility of shopping inElizabethtown, Nancy bartering her eggs for flour, her peaches for spices, or Thomas buying sugar or molasses with coins received for furniture he made and sold. For the first months on the Indiana farmstead, the Lincolns, Sparrows, and their fewneighbors would have been pretty muchself-sufficient, by necessity living a real lesson in eating locally and seasonally until they could clear farmlands and plant their crops. In short, they were gathering andhunting their food, rather than planting and growing it.
    But what food it was! Reading early Hoosiers’ lists of wild fruits,game, and fish, I was struck by the diverse and healthfulsupply of food and how