This article originally appeared in the pages of the Gettysburg Times, in May of 2025. It was penned by Wendy Allen of the Lincoln Fellowship of Pennsylvania, in the hopes of sharing the work the Fellowship does.

I often wonder what meal was served to Abraham Lincoln and his entourage at the David Wills House in Gettysburg, on the evening of November 18th, 1863, the night before he dedicated the new national cemetery with his Gettysburg Address. To investigate, I bought a really fun and interesting book, Abraham Lincoln in the Kitchen: A Culinary View of Lincoln’s Life and Times by Rae Katherine Eighmey (Smithsonian, 2014).

Even though Lincoln-related meal menus have apparently been lost to history, Eighmey suggests there are "hints" as to what the Lincolns might have eaten. For example, young Mary Todd attended a French boarding school in Lexington, Kentucky, and grew up in a home where her family entertained leading politicians and businessmen. Fancy foods and elegant meals for guests had "a Frenchified repast rich with choices and sauces.” As Eighmey states, “these are just hints at the sophisticated foods and beverages the Lincolns left behind in Kentucky and Illinois."

Apparently this style of food was not uncommon across America. By the 1850s. French-inspired dishes had already made their way to the Westernmost edges of settlement. Eighmey says she has seen menus from those early years—when people had cows in their backyards and Native Americans walked the streets in tribal dress. A menu she found in St. Paul, Minnesota featured the same kinds of lavish dishes that the chefs at the Astor House had prepared for the Lincolns in New York City in 1860.

According to Eighmey, seventeen people joined the Lincolns for their first meal in the executive mansion. It was arranged by Elizabeth Todd Grimsley, one of Mary Todd’s cousins. Grimsley then reported how former President Buchanan escorted President Lincoln to the vestibule of the executive mansion, “where, after courteous words of welcome, he left him.”

Grimsley said that the White House was “in a perfect state of readiness for the incomers—A competent chef with efficient butler and waiters under the direction of Miss Harriet Lane," the niece and official hostess of the outgoing president, James Buchanan. "She had an elegant dinner prepared.”(Unfortunately, Mrs. Grimsley failed to record the night’s menu.)

But what was food to Lincoln? In stark contrast to him eating fancy state meals is this homey observation from Alexander Williamson, the Lincoln boys’ White House tutor. He wrote of Lincoln "scarcely having time, even for his meals. I have found him in the office squatting on the rug in front of the fire trying to heat his cup of coffee, which, owing to early visitors, had been allowed to cool."