As any husband knows, that's the right thing to say about your wife's favorite cake to make.

Saturday afternoon, visitors to the Reddick Mansion in Ottawa will be able to sample Mary Todd Lincoln's vanilla almond cake.

Samples from fresh-baked cakes by Esther Funk, president of the Reddick Mansion Association Board of Directors, will be served from 4 to 5:30 p.m. during the third of three Lincoln events to take place in Ottawa.

Mary Todd Lincoln enjoyed cooking and making sweets. Her collection of cookbooks now are in the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library in Springfield.

But the white almond cake recipe was obtained from a Mousieur Giron of Lexington, Ky., Mary's hometown. He invented it for the visit to Lexington in 1825 of the Marquis de Lafayette, the French aristocrat who was a general in the American Revolutionary War.

Mary is said to have served the cake to Abe when they were courting, and then many times after at their home in Springfield and at the Executive Mansion, as the White House was then known.

Over the years, the recipe for the cake has had different names, including Mary Todd's White Cake and Mary's Christmas Cake.

It also has had different versions.

One version is in the recent book "Lincoln's Table" by Donna M. McCreary, a Mary Lincoln impersonator from Indiana.

It was used and reused by California author Janis Cooke Newman, while she was writing "Mary," a novel based on the life of the former first lady.

"When I couldn't find her voice, I'd go into the kitchen and bake her white cake," Newman later wrote.

"Somehow, performing the same tasks that Mary must have -- sifting flour, beating stiffened egg whites -- put me inside her head. And I understood better why she shopped herself into irrecoverable debt, and how she knew her dead sons came to her in sˇance.

"In the three years it took me to write 'Mary,' I made a lot of white cakes."

When Newman would give readings from her book, she sometimes would bring the cake to serve.

"Bringing it felt more like a way of reaching across history; as if it would be impossible to understand Mary's story unless you had first filled your mouth with the vanilla-almond sweetness of her cake."

Saturday, those with a taste for history will be able to draw their own conclusions.