Abraham Lincoln's Chicken Fricassee

The Man Who Forgot to Eat

Abraham Lincoln was the United States’ 16th president. Six foot four. He led a nation through a civil war, freed four million enslaved people, and had the eating habits of a man who simply could not be bothered.

Lincoln was famously indifferent to food. His White House secretary John Hay once said he was one of the most abstemious men he had ever known. If nobody reminded him to eat, he simply wouldn’t. Breakfast, if it happened, was a coffee and a single egg. Lunch was usually an apple and a biscuit. This was while running a country through a civil war.

As the war dragged on he got visibly thinner and more haggard, and his wife Mary grew increasingly worried. She’d invite old friends to the White House at mealtimes because the unspoken rule was — if you were there when dinner was ready, Lincoln would sit down out of politeness. When even that stopped working, she went to the White House kitchen and asked them to make this: chicken fricassee with biscuits and cream gravy. Because it was the one dish he couldn’t say no to.

The Recipe

The recipe comes from Eliza Leslie’s Directions for Cookery, published in 1837 — the bestselling American cookbook of the entire nineteenth century, and the book Mary Todd Lincoln kept in her kitchen. It sold over 150,000 copies. For context, that’s an extraordinary number for a mid-nineteenth century cookbook.

Leslie herself never ran her own kitchen. She learned to cook after her father died and her mother had to open a boardinghouse in Philadelphia. There’s something fitting about that — Lincoln learned to cook on the frontier after losing his own mother at nine years old. Two people who came to food through loss, connected decades apart by a chicken recipe.

Chicken Fricassee

Fricassee is a French technique that landed in American cooking early and stayed. The chicken is seasoned with a spice mix — mace, marjoram, nutmeg, salt, and pepper — dredged in flour, browned in butter, then finished in a cream and milk gravy that picks up all the browned bits from the pan. It is rich, deeply savoury, and gentle in a way that feels like it was designed to coax someone back to the table.

The biscuits are baked separately — layered, flaky, buttermilk biscuits — and served alongside to soak up the gravy. This is the American tradition of the dropped or cut biscuit: leavened with baking powder and soda rather than yeast, built for speed, designed for comfort.

Verdict

Incredible. The biscuits were the best I’ve had — flaky, buttery, with those layers from the folding technique working exactly as advertised. The chicken was tender, the seasoning complemented the creamy sauce perfectly. The fried parsley garnish was the one weak point — it doesn’t really add anything, and fresh parsley would be better. But the dish as a whole is an incredible treat of a meal. Not something you want to build your diet around, but as a once-in-a-while comfort food it completely delivers.

It’s also a small piece of history. This is the dish that Mary Todd Lincoln reached for when everything else had failed. That it worked makes complete sense.