What Did Cowboys Keep In Their Saddlebags

Having to spend large amounts of time in the wilderness is normally quite uncomfortable, particularly when it comes to food. Cowboys and gunslingers of the wild west would spend months at a time away from civilization herding cattle and hiding from the police force, but what would someone eat if they were out in the one-time western wilderness for such long periods of time?

Food in the quondam west during the early on to mid 1800s would take been much improve than your standard wilderness menu of pretty much anywhere else, with the huge amount of cattle raised in the country playing a big part of their diet.

Beef – fresh and preserved

Common salt pork was the usual preservable meat of selection considering it had a much longer shelf life than other meats, simply with the widespread availability of cattle, beef played a huge part in the diet of a cowboy. Smoked jerky would exist the most common way of consuming beefiness because information technology lasted longer than fresh and could be boiled into a stew.

Pork

Salted pork was only called when beefiness wasn't on the carte du jour because information technology simply wasn't as dainty. The problem with salt pork is that y'all have to soak it in water for several hours with multiple changes to flush out enough of the salt to make it edible, as eating it directly would make you feel quite ill.

Pemmican

This is the nigh heavily traded food product with the native American population. Its simply nothing more than rendered fat mixed with stale meat that'south been footing into a powder and formed into bars. When kept away from the air information technology can be edible for years and was ordinarily used as a backup nutrient or for especially long journeys.

Biscuits

The discussion biscuit is the name given to what most people know equally hardtack, dense bread baked more than than once to remove every drop of moisture. They tin can be edible for years and provide a long-lasting preservable food, with the simply downside beingness they were then hard people would take to soak them in h2o or milk earlier eating them. At that place are various stories of people who would blast upwards a piece of hardtack with their rifle stocks to mix in to a stew as a thickener.

Beans and potatoes

The two virtually common vegetables by far in the one-time west were potatoes and beans. Potatoes provided a good meal and made the all-time filler for a stew, and beans could exist stale and would be safe to eat for months. One of the favorite recipes of people living in the erstwhile west was to rehydrate their beans by mixing them with some molasses and water and leaving them to tedious melt on the ashes for several hours.

Syrup and molasses

Both of these products were produced locally and used heavily beyond the continent. Maple syrup would be bachelor from the northern regions but molasses was a by-product of refining sugar, so any state that had a sugar plantation would be mass-producing molasses. They were most unremarkably used as flavorings, poured into anything from a pie to a stew, merely mostly with beans. The recipe below is the all-time use of molasses a cowboy could hope for, only finding a chef capable of providing such a meal was an entirely new challenge.

Cornmeal and grain

Corn is easier to mass produce by hand than wheat or barley and also contains a higher saccharide content. Corn would be dried and ground into corn meal for making sourdough staff of life or mixed whole into liquid dishes, it was likewise the grain of pick for making biscuits.

Stale fruit and basics

Pecan and almond plantations provided large quantities of basics that weren't proficient enough to sell over in Europe and added to the listing of preservable foods available. Apples were the most mutual fruit effectually and fabricated up the bulk of a dried fruit supply, but apricots, peaches, cherries and a range of others would be available depending on the location.

Imported goods

Before the Panama Culvert was congenital, most of the trade between the U.s. and south-east Asia was done by landing ships on the west coast and moving supplies across state. This meant that the closer to the west coast you were, the higher the chance of finding goods similar rice, coffee, tea and sometimes exotic spices.

Hunting and fishing

Both of these would be washed whenever the opportunity and time would allow. All the people in a cattle herding team would be in that location to do a chore and wouldn't have time to continue lengthy hunting trips, so whenever camp was made in the evening and a lake or river was shut enough, they would try their luck at some fishing. Wild game was quite express because the cattle would be grazed along the large flat plains and kept away from the mountains or forests were goat and deer could be found. Rabbits, Hares, pigeon and occasionally snakes and possums would be on the menu, just all the nutrient they needed was brought with them from the get-go and so hunting was nothing more meal variation instead of a necessity.

Spices and flavorings

Nutmeg was the virtually commonly available spice by a long shot and is found in more recipes from the 1700s than any other type of flavoring. Mustard and pepper followed in 2nd and 3rd place, with all the other flavors they had access to only condign available whenever a trader happened to take some. To make their meals more highly-seasoned the more than creative chefs would come up with flavorings or their own, similar the mushroom ketchup recipe shown in the video below.

Other ways of feeding the cowboys – The Chuck Wagon

During the 18th and 19th centuries people flooded to America in the millions to become a part of the aureate rush and abound greenbacks crops, or only merely wanted a new start. With this increase in the population the food demand too increased profoundly which meant that beef would need to be even more mass produced. The size of cowboy teams would increase to up to 30 men for the larger herds and all these people needed their strength to exercise their jobs, and so the chuck wagon was invented.

(A typical late 1800s chuck railroad vehicle)

Information technology was simply just a field kitchen that included a series of pots and small ovens every bit well every bit acting every bit the main food storage unit for the group. In the bigger teams a cook would exist hired to work full time making meals for the grouping out of whatever he had to work with. Some old records from people working as cattle handlers talk most the quality of their chefs, because some cattle bosses would oft rent the cheapest chef bachelor and the team would end up eating nil but beans and beef three times a day.

Source: https://bushcraftbuddy.com/what-did-cowboys-eat/

Posted by: bullockementer.blogspot.com

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