Free Abraham Lincoln in the Kitchen by Rae Katherine Eighmey Page B

to come together. Divide in half and pat each half into a ball. Sprinkle the work surface and rolling pin with flour. Dust a ball of dough with flour and roll from the center out in all directions to make a circular crust. Repeat for the second crust.
    TIP FOR SUCCESS: For single-crust pies, such as the pumpkin pie, make the full double-crust recipe and put the remaining half piecrust dough in plastic storage bag. It will keep refrigerated for up to 2 days, or freeze for up to a month.
    Makes enough dough for 1 double-crust pie or 2 single-crust pies or tarts

JOURNEYS OF DISCOVERY
    NEW ORLEANS CURRY AND NEW SALEM BISCUITS
    The great difference between Young America and Old Fogy, is the result of
Discoveries
,
Inventions
, and
Improvements
. These, in turn, are the result of
observation
,
reflection
, and
experiment
.
    â€”A BRAHAM L INCOLN
L ECTURE ON “D ISCOVERIES AND I NVENTIONS ,”
F EBRUARY 11, 1859
    I n the spring of 1830 the entire extendedLincolnfamily picked up stakes from their established Indiana community and moved to central Illinois to establish a new farm. Moving must have been bittersweet for Thomas and Abraham. They sold the farm they had carved out of the wilderness along with animal stock and crops for more than five hundred dollars. But the pioneering had come at a price. Nancy Lincoln had died from milk sickness and, in 1828, Abraham’s sister, twenty-one-year-old Sarah Lincoln Grigsby, died during the birth of her first child, who did not live.
    The three-family group of thirteen packed up two oxen carts and moved west, settling on the north fork of the Sangamon River about ten miles southwest of Decatur. There, the land was said to be even better for crops. Although now twenty-one years old, the age when most young men were released from obligations to their parents, Abraham stayed at home for another year, helping his father, stepbrother, and cousins clear land and splitting hundreds of rails to fence their new farms.
    In 1831, he set off to find his own place in the world. Abraham Lincoln was more than ready to pick up his own journey to self-education. Over the next eighteen months, from March 1831 through September 1832, he would see and experience more than many Americans of the era. He would begin this journey as an impressionableyoung man and emerge a budding politician. The foods he encountered underscore the possibilities of the expanded worlds he was discovering. His journey began perhaps unexpectedly when somehow he connected withDenton Offutt, an entrepreneur from Kentucky, who was accumulating aflatboat-full cargo of agricultural products from area farms to take down theMississippiRiver to sell in New Orleans.
    It is hard to imagine the magnitude of the river of food that connected Lincoln’s central Illinois world to New Orleans. During the 1830s travelers wrote home from the bustling delta city, telling of hundreds of flatboats choking the levee at this “most wonderful place in the world.” One observer wrote that, as far as the eye could see, the Mississippi River bank was “lined with flat-boats, come from above, from every part of the Valley of the Mississippi. Some are laden with flour, others with corn, others with meat of various kinds, others with live stock, cattle, hogs, horses, or mules.” In 1831, one of those flatboats was built and piloted by Abraham Lincoln.
    The plan was for Lincoln, his stepbrother JohnJohnston, and cousin JohnHanks to take the boat down to New Orleans and sell the goods. Offutt would travel aboard as a passenger. But when the three crewmen met up, as planned, with Offutt in Springfield in early March, he had bad news. The man he had hired to build the flatboat over the winter hadn’t shown up. So the flatboat crew instantly became boatbuilders.
    Lincoln had built boats before. Back in Indiana days, he had built a small scow to ferry travelers across the Ohio River and sometimes just halfway out, hailing passing