Back in the days of cowboys and cattle drives, the ranch cook and cattle team cook played an important role and wielded enormous power. Because the cook determined whether a cowboy received a decent meal after a hard day of wrangling cattle, cowboys were always on their best behavior with the cook. Not even the lawmen of the day could get such good behavior from cowboys.
In honor of the old Western ranch cook, we present four authentic cowboy recipes that you can fix next time you want to harness your inner John Wayne. Enjoy.
Cowboy Beans
2 pounds of pinto beans
2 pounds of ham hock
2 onions chopped
4 tablespoons sugar
2 green chilies
1 can of tomato paste
Wash the beans and soak them overnight. After you drain them, place the beans in a Dutch oven and cover with water. Add the rest of the ingredients and simmer until the beans are nice and tender.
Sourdough Biscuits
1 cup of sourdough starter (see below)
1 teaspoon of salt
1 teaspoon of sugar
1 teaspoon of baking soda
1 tablespoon of shortening
3-4 cups of flour
Place flour in a bowl and add the sourdough starter. Stir in the salt, soda, sugar, and shortening. Dough should begin to form. Add flour until the dough is firm. Pinch off some dough, form a ball, and roll it in melted shortening. Place the biscuits in a Dutch oven. Allow the biscuits to rise for about 20 minutes. Then bake until they’re done, about 30 minutes.
Sourdough Starter
In order to make sourdough, you’ll need some sourdough starter. Here’s how to make it.
2 cups of warm potato water
2 cups of flour
1 tablespoon sugar
First you need to make your potato water by cutting up a couple of medium sized potatoes into cubes and boiling them in 3 cups of water until the potatoes are tender. Measure two cups of the potato water, and mix it with flour and sugar into a paste. Set the mixture in a warm place to rise. It should double its original size after it’s done rising.
Sonofabitch Stew
This was a favorite beef stew dish among cowboys of the America West. It was also known as rascal stew or by the name of some unpopular figure of the time. For example, some cowboys called it Cleveland Stew in (dis)honor of President Grover Cleveland displacing cowboys from the Cherokee Strip. If you’re not into eating animal organs, pass this one up. However, if you want to put some hair on your chest, belly up to the table and pound this meal down.
2 pounds of lean beef
Half a calf heart
1 ½ pounds of calf liver
1 set sweetbreads (that’s the thymus gland for you city slickers)
1 set of brains
1 set of marrow gut
Salt, pepper to taste
Louisiana hot sauce
Cut the beef, liver, and heart into one inch cubes. Slice the marrow gut into rings. Place these ingredients into the Dutch oven and cover with water. Let it simmer for 2 to 3 hours. Add salt, pepper, and hot sauce. Chop sweetbreads and brains into small pieces and add to stew. Simmer another hour.
Cowboy Coffee
Out on the trail, coffee was a staple among cowboys. Piping hot coffee helped a cowboy shake off the stiffness from sleeping on the hard desert ground, and it was also a good beverage to wash down the morning sour dough biscuits. But cowboys didn’t have the luxury of fancy coffee brewers or french presses. They had to pack light, so all they usually had was a metal coffee pot, sans filter, to brew their coffee in. No matter. A cowboy could still make a decent cup of coffee. Here’s how.
- Bring water to a near boil over your campfire.
- Throw your coffee grounds right into the water. That’s right. Filters are for city slickers.
- Stir the coffee over the fire for a minute or two.
- Remove the pot from the fire and let the coffee sit for a minute or two to allow the grounds to settle at the bottom of the pot. Add a bit of cold water to help speed along the settling process.
- Carefully pour the coffee into your tin cup so that the grounds stay in the pot.
- Stand around the fire with your left thumb in your belt loop and your coffee cup in your right hand. Take slow sips and meditate on the trek ahead.
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{ 35 comments… read them below or add one }
Had a cup of coffee like that at philmont scout ranch in NM. Pot had been cooking for months, they just kept adding more water and scooping out some of the grounds when it got too high. Ocassionally egg shells were added and fresh water always had a couple shots of texas pete. All filtered through a green scouring pad stuck in the spout. Dang good coffee
Now here’s my kind of article. Gonna file this one away somewheres.
you missed the spinner method for coffee. You take the handle on the top of the pot and spin in around your head in a vertical circle about 5 times and gently catch the pot at the bottom of the rotation. Keep the speed up enough so the coffee doesn’t spill on your head and so the centrifugal forces pushes the grounds to the bottom. The added danger makes it more manly. This is how i do it while camping.
Of course, you knew your old cowboy had to chime in on this one. Two things to mention. First, rattlesnake chili, one example at http://tinyurl.com/nerfkw . And another variation on beans popular on the range (heh!) is at http://tinyurl.com/qq3hqy .
love those beans recipes.
Don’t understand those pounds though – any chance of a metric version?
1 Pound (lbs.) = 2.2 Kilograms
I thought all manly men knew that…
you got it backwards. 1Kg is 2.2lbs.
This post rocked. It inspired me to make some rascal stew next weekend. We’re going on a shoot out camp out. I just found our dutch oven menu for it. This post sure brought back some old memories.
The first coffee I ever had was my dad’s campfire coffee, made pretty much exactly how you described. That was good stuff.
Putting an egg shell in your cowboy coffee makes the grinds clump together at the bottom. Don’t know why, just know that it works.
Good stuff, but if you are going to eat like a cowboy you should learn to shoot like one, and spin your rifle like the Rifleman or Josh Randal of Wanted Dead or Alive Here is a video on the mare’s leg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D5E_N7X8a-E&eurl=http%3A%2F%2Fshilohtv.com%2F%3Fp%3D1773&feature=player_embedded
And all along I thought cowboys just ate jerky and dirt.
If the cook lost or damaged his coffeepot beyond repair, he’d just use the skillet — after frying up the ham or bacon, of course, and pouring off (most of) the grease.
The result, when you make coffee in a skillet that way, is red-eye gravy. Wonderful for scrambled eggs and biscuits. It also makes it much easier to clean the skillet.
I haven’t had cow heart, but deer heart is teh awesome!
Pickled pig brains and feet are available in some grocery stores here in GA, USA. I don’t know anyone who eats them though. I did have a chicken foot in Belize once.
That sonofabitch stew is absolutely disgusting.
Sounds like an interesting recipe. I am definitely going to try it soon.
On my last backpacking trip we made cowboy coffee. Being the fan of coffee that I am, it was some good coffee, considering how simple it was to make
I’ve had some good bbq’ed beef heart. Good stuff, tender. If your grossed out then you should be a vegetarian. Ever read the ingredients on a slim jim?
Man that there coffee is good!
During the dust-up between the Yankees and the Rebels, when there wasn’t enough time to make coffee (which the soldiers liked just as much as cowboys), they’d shove the grounds into their mouths and chew them with their tobacco.
I thought these recipes looked familiar. Subtract the coffee recipe, and add Red Bean Pie and Vinegar Pie, and you have page 87 from the Time-Life Old West Series book, “The Cowboys”.
My grandfather was an actual cowboy and a historian. I was just reading his account of making coffee on the range, and it was just like you described, except that they just continued to add water and grounds as necessary throughout the day.
There were always two things sitting over the fire: coffee and a pot of beans.
Although I use a french press once in a while I usually make cowboy coffee…12 cups of water to boil, mix 12 heaping Tablespoons of coffee (Kona) with one whole egg. Keep the shell with the coffee. When the water boils put the coffee/egg mix and shell into the water, take it off boil, put it back on (total of 3 times). Let it sit for 20 minutes or so…will stay fresh for 3 or 4 days while on the trail.
O.K. Tenderfoots, Good cowboy coffee receipe, but y’all forgot one important ingredient? The horseshoe! Drop the horseshoe in the pot, if it sinks, add more coffee til horseshoe floats. Now yer talk’n real cowboy-up coffee. See ya up ahead.
An old girlfriend from college had an old family (from the Dakotas) recipe for ‘Dirty Cake,’ AKA ‘McGee’s Cake,’ which was very easy to make, and went well with coffee. Well OK, it wasa basically coffee cake. Anybody here of it?
(sic) It was basically coffee cake. The name ‘Dirty Cake’ was because it was topped with cinnamon. Anybody hear of it?
When we go camping we make Curry Beans. Ya just grab a can of good ol’ baked beans and put them in a pot then add some of that tinned curry powder (few tablespoons or until it tastes the way you like it) then just stir it around until the beans are cooked and hot.
Serve em up on a plate or grab a bun and you got yourself a make-shift sloppy joe! (you can also add chilli powder which makes it really hot)
Hey Guys,
I found a reference to the dirty cake recipe. Try this URL
http://www.cooks.com/rec/view/0,185,150180-245204,00.html . I may try it this weekend
Just a note about the recipe for beans. Don’t add the tomato paste until the beans have fully softened. The acids in tomatoes prevent beans from properly softening, no matter how long you cook them. I made the recipe last night (had to use an electric slow cooker since my dutch oven isn’t big enough to fit the ham hocks in with even a split recipe) and added the tomato paste and the beans are hard as a rock, even after 18 hours of cooking. I even soaked the beans overnight but the bastards are like stones.
Just read this, made me some cowboy coffee’n'beans for breakfast. Twirled my mustache and made me feel like building a house for lunch.
The eggshells leech out calcium, which cuts the bitterness of stale grounds out. I actually occasionally throw a WASHED eggshell in my aging coffee maker with the grounds…improves the taste noticeably.
Or you could just do wildfire coffee. 1 teaspoon instant coffee applied as you would any modern chewing tobacco. That will get you started. Goes good with a smoke and a bowl of beans.
Hey hey! Ya gonna talk about cowboys ya better get your lingo straight! Never heard of a “cattle team cook” or of “wrangling cattle.” What the heck kinda cowboy is that??? :) Just sayin…….
So, where do you go to find all the organs in the stew? Brains? Marrow? Sweetbreads? I thought they sold all that stuff to the dogfood companies right at the packing plants.
@Mike
Where to find the organs? Local small butcher shop. Most cities have them, and small towns will too. The challenge is finding on in suburbia.