Abraham Lincoln in the Kitchen by Rae Katherine Eighmey Page A

much of it I’ve had the luck to eat. Some of the meats common in Lincoln’s forest, such as bear, are virtually impossible to find, and even if you do, according to recent Centers for Disease Control research, bear meat is infested with parasitic trichinous and unsafe to eat. However, you can find rabbit and duck, along with pheasant and venison, even if you aren’t friends with someone who hunts or fishes. Markets carry those meats and a few of the fish as well, especially in the Midwest. Among those freshwater fish listed by Hoosier neighbors were catfish, perch, carp, bass, skipjacks, black fin, suckers, pike, garfish, shovel fish, sturgeons, minnows, sunfish, eels, and soft-shelled turtles.
    Certainly there was plenty of protein in those first years. Various neighbors recalled Abraham’s skills obtaining it.A. H. Chapman,aneighbor, told Herndon that Lincoln “never cared much forhunting or fishing yet when a youth was successful as a hunter and a fine shot with a Rifle.” E. R. Burba, a neighbor from Kentucky, recounted settlers’ memories of Lincoln and reported that he combined his hunting and woodsman skills. Burba said that Lincoln had a “fondness for fishing and hunting with his dog & axe. When his dog would run a rabbit in a hollow tree he would chop it out.” Transplanted Londoner James Woods described the same behavior. “Rabbits are tolerably plentiful.… They do not burrow in the earth, but when hunted run into the hollow trees so that an axe is necessary in rabbit hunting.”
    J. W. Wartmann, an old Lincoln neighbor, wrote a list of the fruits of the forest there for the gathering: mulberries, hickory nuts, hazelnuts, chestnuts, black walnuts.Elizabeth Crawford, another neighbor, expanded the list: winter grape, fox grape,wild plums, wild cherry, black haw, red haw, crab apple, blackberry, raspberry, gooseberry, dewberry, strawberry, persimmons, and thepawpaw.
    The pawpaw, sometimes called the “Hoosier banana,” is an unusual fruit with a complex, rich, and fragrant flavor, packed with vitamins, minerals, and even amino acids. Pawpaws ripen over a four-week period from August to October depending on where they grow. Ripe fruit is soft and keeps for only two or three days. I’ve tried to imagine the impact this richly flavored fruit would have on a pioneer’s taste. It is the only fruit Dennis Hanks mentioned in his interviews.
    Certainly there were other sweet fruits. Peaches were grown in southern Indiana orchards.Pineapples had been used as the welcome sign in cities along the Gulf and Atlantic coasts since the colonial period. MissLeslie of Philadelphia has a recipe for preserving pineapple in her 1828 receipt book. Other tropical fruits flourished in Florida in the 1820s as one southern traveler described: “The banana, the plantain, the pine apple [
sic
], the cocoanut [
sic
] and most of the tropical fruits flourish.… Figs, oranges, limes, lemons and all varieties of citrons … thrive.” For all this bounty, I’ve not seen any evidence that those fruits could have been common, or even known, in the Mississippi and Ohio River valleys in the 1820s.
    The imperative chorus of an old folk song demonstrates the joy of pawpaws—children run “way down yonder to the pawpaw patch … pickin’ up pawpaws, put ’em in your pockets.” Beyond nutrition, exotic flavor,and delight in eating, I see the pawpaw as a horticultural metaphor for pioneer settlement. One plant’s success becomes the foundation for many more. A single pawpaw sends out runner roots, matting the sub-surface of the soil. These roots send up new trees (technically branches from the same original tree), and soon the single pawpaw has become a patch.
    One settler, James A. Little, wrote in 1905, “We can never realize what a great blessing the pawpaw was to the first settlers.… Well do I remember sixty or more years ago