Monahan - The cowboys cookbook : recipes and tales from campfires, cookouts, and chuck wagons

On the heels of her last cookbook, Frontier Fare, Sherry Monahan has culled stories and recipes from cattle trails, cow towns, cowboys, and cattle ranches. She has penned her Frontier Fare column since 2009 for True West magazine. She studied cooking in school and has a passion for all things food. She has a collection of over 150 cookbooks, with the oldest being from 1869.

Sherry is the author of several books on the Victorian West, including Frontier Fare: Recipes and Lore from the Old West; Mrs. Earp: The Wives and Lovers of the Earp Brothers; California Vines, Wines & Pioneers; Taste of Tombstone: A Hearty Helping of History; Pikes Peak: Adventurers, Communities, and Lifestyles; The Wicked West: Boozers, Cruisers, Gamblers, and More; and Tombstones Treasure: Silver Mines and Golden Saloons. She is currently working on books about holidays on the frontier, pie, sourdough, and an English frontier family who lost more than just its money.

Sherry has appeared on Legends and Lies, hosted by Bill OReilly, on Fox News and on Gunslingers on the American Heroes Channel. Shes also appeared on the History Channel in many shows, including Cowboys & Outlaws: The Real Wyatt Earp; Lost Worlds: Sin City of the West (Deadwood); Investigating History; and two of the Wild West Tech shows. She received a Wrangler at the Western Heritage Awards for her performance in Cowboys & Outlaws in 2010.

Sherry is president of Western Writers of America (20142016) and holds memberships in the following organizations: James Beard Foundation, Women Writing the West, the Authors Guild, Wild West History Association, Association of Professional Genealogists, and Westerners International. She is also a charter member of the National Womens History Museum.

Sherry is a marketing consultant, food stylist, and professional genealogist, and she also traces the genealogy of foods and wines. She calls it Winestry and says, History never tasted so good!

Visit her at sherrymonahan.com.

Also by Sherry Monahan

Frontier Fare: Recipes and Lore from the Old West

Mrs. Earp: The Wives and Lovers of the Earp Brothers

A TWODOT BOOK

An imprint and registered trademark of Rowman & Littlefield

Distributed by NATIONAL BOOK NETWORK

Copyright 2015 by Sherry Monahan

All photos courtesy of the author unless otherwise indicated.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Information available

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Monahan, Sherry.

The cowboys cookbook : recipes and tales from campfires, cookouts, and chuck wagons / Sherry Monahan.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-4930-1067-7 (pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN 978-1-4930-1610-5 (e-book)

1. Cooking, AmericanWestern style. 2. CowboysWest (U.S.) 3. Cooking, AmericanSouthwestern style. 4. CowboysSouthwest, New. I. Title.

TX715.2.W47M655 2015

641.5978dc23

2015017394

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information SciencesPermanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Thanks to Erin Turner at TwoDot/Globe Pequot for asking me to create this fun book. Special thanks to all those who shared recipes, photos, and stories: Steve Turner, Gail Jenner, and Kellen Cutsforth. Thanks also to the daring souls who volunteered to test some of these nineteenth-century recipes for me: Micki Fuhrman Milom, Rod Timanus, Jennifer Faircloth, Bev and Dave MacBrien, and Lyndsay Fogarty. Also thanks to my husband for eating many of the results of these recipes!

Sop, lick, sinkers, and whistle berries. Those all sound tasty, dont they? Well, the cowboys had a language all their own when it came to many things. Now, they really arent as bad as they sound. Sop was nothing more than gravy. Lick was molasses or some other kind of syrup. Sinkers were biscuits. And whistle berries, well, they were beans, and you can probably guess why they were called whistle berries.

Even the term cowboy had different meanings. It has been defined in many ways by many people over the years. I did a little research and found that in the 1860s it was more of a derogatory term than a description. An editorial in the 1869 Leavenworth Bulletin of Kansas included this statement: The Atchison Champion & Press flies at the Bulletin in a terrible rage and with the manners of a cow-boy...

Even though the term was being used at that time, it did not appear in Websters Complete Dictionary of the English Language until 1884. The entry did not describe the western cowboy, however; it referred to a marauder from the Revolutionary War era. That soon changed, and cowboy came to describe someone who worked with or watched cattle.

By 1895 the big cattle drives were over and a new definition for the word cowboy appeared in Websters Collegiate Dictionary: A Dictionary of the English Language. The definition was: a cattle herder; a drover. By 1913 the definition was expanded: A cattle herder, esp. one of a class of mounted herdsmen of the western United States. The cowboys themselves often called each other waddies, which was interchangeable with cowhand or cowpuncher.

When describing the cowboy, noted historian and award-winning author Robert Utley says it best. In his book, Encyclopedia of the American West, he writes, No figure more vividly personifies the Old West than the cowboythe plainsman who tended cattle during the heyday of the open range. The cattle drives lasted in earnest for about twenty years between 1866 and 1886. When the open ranges began to be fenced in with barbed wire in the late 1880s to prevent overgrazing, the cattle drives began to trail off.

Even though most cowboys loved sleeping under the stars and working with the cattle, they had a tough life. They earned about forty dollars per month. Not all cowboys working for a ranch rode horses during roundups or trail drives. Many started their work on a ranch by mending fences, cleaning stables, removing cows from bogs, and doing other miscellaneous tasks. Most worked their way up the ranks if they werent skilled horsemen. According to Agnes Morley Cleaveland, who was raised on a New Mexico ranch and later ran it, The ascending scale in open-range business is from horse wrangler at the lowest rung to range boss at the highest. Between them lie cook, riders, fence-line riders (after there were fences), and run-of-the-mill waddies.

J. T. Sad Gardenhire was one of those men and he recalled, I am Sad Gardenhire and I used to be a cow puncher when a man had to be a cow puncher and not just a range hand. Doing everything from slopping hogs to farming. Not only that, but he had to ride the first hoss he come to and couldnt be choicy. And, that was in a day when nigh unto every hoss was about half outlaw. Now, that all sounds pretty bad but when youre used to anything, it aint so bad. Thats the kind of life we were used to, so thats the kind of a life we lived. Rough and tough with a lot of hard work throwed in for good measure.