You know how I occasionally talk about food and recipes on this blog? Well, I thought it’d be fun to post Stephen Bly’s article about Menus On The Old West Trail! Interesting information, and some of this new knowledge makes me cringe a little bit! Don’t forget to access the links at the bottom of the article for Stephen’s Chili Recipe and to check out his new release, Creede Of Old Montana!

Pour The Coffee & Pass The Pooch
By Stephen Bly
Copyright©2008

While some big towns like Denver, San Francisco and Virginia City had fancy restaurants, most frontier cafes were of the simple sort. They were often called chophouses, because of the hunk of meat that hung in the backroom. They chopped off a slab and fried it up for you. Not too fancy. Nor sanitary. Most times it was only “slightly spoiled.”
Cowboys on the trail filled up with biscuits, bacon, and beans. There wasn’t much beef because no boss wanted to slaughter his own cattle. If a cow wandered in from some other herd, it could be butchered and fried, but for the most part bacon and salt pork dominated the menu.
Ah, good old boiled coffee. You can almost feel the coffee grounds strain between your teeth. The brand was probably Arbuckles, that tastes something like a Starbucks tall Americano with a quadruple shot…and mixed with a bit of mud.
There was plenty of sourdough bread on long trail drives. The cook’s prized possession was a 5-gallon, wooden sourdough keg. When getting ready for the trail drive or roundup, the cook put 3 or 4 quarts of flour and a dash of salt in the keg. He poured in enough water to make a medium thick batter. Sometimes a little vinegar or molasses was added to hasten fermentation.
When the dough got ripe, this whole batch was thrown away. The keg is seasoned. A new batch is mixed in the same way. Everyday new batter is mixed to fill the keg. Placed in sunlight during the day and wrapped in blankets at night kept it warm. Some cooks slept with their kegs on cold nights. An outfit that allowed harm to come to its sourdough keg suffered the consequence. Most cooks defended their kegs with their lives.
By the late 1880s air-tights (canned food) were available, such as peaches and tomatoes. That provided more ways for the camp cooks to make dessert.
One trail favorite was Hounds Ears & Whirlups. Thin sourdough batter was dropped onto hot grease and fried brown. The dough usually spread out in the shape of a dog’s ear Whirlup sauce was made with water, sugar, flavoring and spices. If available, dried fruit was chopped or mashed into the mixture and bring it to a boil. It thickened a tad as it cooled, then poured over the Hounds Ears. A big hit with hungry cowboys.
That sounds better to me than Pooch…a dessert made with tomatoes, sugar, and leftover bread or biscuits, cooked over the campfire.
Ah, life on the trail. Pour the coffee and pass the pooch.

Download Stephen Bly’s own Spicy Elk Chili recipe here. Other recipes are also listed on that file. There are some other things you can check out on the Free Stuff Page at Bly Books.

New Release October 1, 2009:
Creede of Old Montana (hardback)
Center Point Publishing/Thorndike
Order through any local quality bookstore, online bookstore, public library, or
Bly Books.

I hope you enjoyed this blog post! Check out Stephen’s book and if you try his chili recipe, let me know if you liked it!

~Cecelia Dowdy~