does aneybody know what a typical meal would be for cowboys out on the trail breakfast dinner and tea what?

Question

did they drink apart from water how was food preserved

Answer 1

Charles Goodnight & Oliver Loving (from Texas) are credited with *inventing* the chuckwagon in 1866 in order to accomodate the gustatory needs of American cowboys: "The nature of the cook's job required that he get up several hours earlier than the cowhands, so he worked longer hours with less sleep. When the outfit was on the move, he had to be at the next appointed camp and have a hot meal ready on time."

Although cattle drives took place in the United States as early as the 1790's, the chuck wagon tradition didn't develop until after the Civil War, when the opening of the northern markets expanded the western cattle industry. The need for some sort of mobile kitchen was obvious: Large trail drives required men, and men required large amounts of food.

Along with sourdough biscuits and coffee, most chuck wagon meals included beans, or frijoles, as they were often called. Beef was something that was never in short supply, and a good chuck wagon cook knew how to prepare it in many different ways. Fried steak was the most common – the cowboys never seemed to get tired of it – but pot roasts, short ribs, and stew showed up often on the menu.
If Cookie had time, and he was feeling kindly toward "the boys," as he called the cowhands, he would make a desert. Usually it was a two-crust pie made with apples or some other dried fruit. To let the steam out, he often cut the outfit’s brand into the top crust of the pie.

Cowboys had only a few basic necessities. One was beef, preferably fresh. Another was cigarettes or cigars. A telltale string from a Bull Durham pouch would hang from most cowboy's shirt pocket. Finally, cowboys liked hot strong coffee and lots of it. This usually meant Arbuckle's coffee in the United States or possibly English tea in Canada.
Breakfast Call: Fred Ings recalled a typical breakfast during a roundup in Canada in the 1880s: "Breakfast at daybreak was eaten in the mess tent, a hot substantial meal of meat, potatoes, bread, jam, with strong black coffee. Our dishes were tin and we ate sitting around on bed rolls or a box if one was handy, or on the ground."
Cowboys in the United States relished similar "chuck" (also called grub or chow). Canned and dried fruit, "overland trout" (bacon), beans, fresh meat, soda biscuits, tea, and coffee. Breakfast might include eggs or salt pork. Eggs, sometimes shipped west for considerable distances, sometimes went bad. According to Winfred Blevins, westerners called an old, spoiled egg a "souvenir."
Hands relished sourdough biscuits, which hands favored over those make with buttermilk or baking powder. Ranch cooks baked biscuits in the versatile Dutch oven. Dinner (the noon-time meal) evening and supper often looked very similar, with the addition of beef and beans. As Puny Martin, an Oklahoma cowboy put it, "Beef, beans, taters. That's what you had to have." One source attributed the often bowed legs and lean physique of the cowboy to his calcium- and calorie-deficient diet, although long hours on horseback likely played a bigger role.
Chuckwagon Cooking: Cowboys owe a hearty thanks to Charlie Goodnight, credited with inventing the chuck wagon. Needing to transport and cook food for a trail crew, Goodnight bought an Army surplus supply wagon and reinforced it. He replaced wooden axles with iron. He built a pantry-like chuck box on the back, strapped a water barrel on one side, and a toolbox on the other. Six oxen pulled his chuck wagon.
The chuck box held cast iron kettles, Dutch ovens, and three to five-gallon coffee pot, even held such luxuries as sugar. The cook also carried medical supplies, including at least on bottle of whiskey "for medicinal purposes." Goodnight's creative invention plus the availability of "airtights" (canned goods) gave cowboys in the United States a more diet much more varied than that of Latin America ranch hands.
Range Fare: While riding the range, a cowboy's noon dinner might include some dried beef, dried fruit, sourdough biscuits, and perhaps a cup of coffee if he carried a pot in his saddlebags. The bare necessities rolled into a slicker might include a "frying-pan, some flour, bacon, coffee, salt, and, as a substitute for yeast, either a bottle of sour dough or a can of baking-powder."
Meals at camp or at the bunkhouse offered greater variety and abundance. Pauline Barham cooked for Chapman-Barnard hands in Oklahoma during the 1940s. She recalled that They were hungry. They would eat everything, and they enjoyed it. Beef roast and beans is the main thing for cowboys, I think. Hot biscuits. We made our own biscuits. And potatoes fixed some way. Always coffee. The coffee pot was on all the time.
Syrups and stewed prunes usually served as dessert. Coosie might also made a fruit pie, perhaps a boggy-top (open-faced with no top crust.). A real range cooking artist might even dress up a pie with "calf slobbers" (meringue.) Another challenge was "son-of-a-*****-in-a-sack" (not to be confused with the stew described below.) Coosie would sew dried fruit and dough into a sack and steam the concoction.
On the trail, canned tomatoes helped to quench thirst. Philip Ashton Rollins notes that acidic tomato juice counteracted the ill effects of alkali dust inhaled by men on the trail. Even the greenest cook could whip up a batch of "pooch," stewed tomatoes mixed with bread and sugar.
Make Mine Beef: Cowboys everywhere liked fresh beef and lots of it. Steaks, fried well-done in a cast iron skillet, ranked high. A good cook would toss flour into the beef grease, let it brown up good, and serve up tasty gravy (called "Texas butter" or "sop") for the biscuits.
Almost any beef cut imaginable went into the legendary "son-of-a-*****" stew. (In polite company, cowboys would call the dish "son-of-a-gun" stew.) As Ramon F. Adams notes, "you throw ever'thing in the pot but the hair, horns, and holler." Cooks preferred to have meat and parts from an unweaned calf. To the choicest meat, they added sweetbreads, marrow gut from between the two stomachs, kidneys, heart, liver, and tongue. Brains and flour thickened the mix, and onions and chilis sometimes added flavor. This was cowboy cuisine at its finest.
Profit-minded ranchers and trail bosses did not always provide a bounty of fresh beef. Granville Stuart, the well known Montana rancher and politician, recorded that cowboys on the trail ate corn meal, sorghum molasses, beans, salt, and bacon. Game, including deer or, while they lasted, buffalo, might add meat to the regimen. As one cowboy remarked, "We could not keep ourselves in fresh meat like a cow outfit does on a roundup for the reason that we had a smaller crew than the average roundup uses, and we had no visitors to drop in for a meal. Another reason was that our animals were of large size, and with the weather so very hot, meat would not have kept fresh." Some ranchers practiced what the old range adage preached: "Only a fool eats his own beef!"
Calf Fries: At roundup, cowboys enjoyed another delicacy, variously called calf fries, mountain oysters, or prairie oysters. Whatever the term, these fried or roasted calves' testicles made gourmet eating for cowmen. Obviously, a large number of these prize delicacies could be gathered when hands castrated calves during roundup. Cowboys attributed to calf fries an amazing number of benefits. Some considered it a wonderful elixir or aphrodisiac.
Preparation might consist of nothing more than tossing the testicles into a branding fire and waiting for them to pop open, ready to eat. Stella Hughes, in Chuck Wagon Cookin', offers a tastier recipe. She suggests soaking the mess in salt water for an hour then drying them. The oysters are then seasoned, rolled in flour or cornmeal, and fried in hot grease until crisp-- a great end to a long day of branding. Another variant suggest soaking the harvest in buttermilk instead of salt water.
Meals provided a welcome break in the cowboy's long, hard-riding day. A good meal went a long way to keeping hands riding for the brand.

Answer 2

Food-wise, cowboys ate a diet mainly of fried beans and salt pork. Sometimes beef. Little if any drinking took place out on the actual trail, however, once they hit town all hell broke loose. Cowboys were extremely well paid and for the most part were men of leisure. The money earned from a single cattle drive from say Texas to Chicago, would probably set a person up for life. Not only was the cowboy paid a 'wage', he also had a share or bonus from the profits made on the sale of the cattle he had helped 'drive'.

The era of the 'cowboy' was very short - possibly only about 20 years. All this happened before the coming of the railroad. Once the railroad was in place cattle were shipped out using it instead.

How would you know if a man were a cowboy - he would have worn a red neckerchief.

Answer 3

If on a cattle drive they ate beef,dried peas,beans etc,travelling alone they ate jerky(dried meat) or a mushy porridge made with corn meal, also biscuits of same baked on a flat stone.

Answer 4

Beans, a type of pancake,sometimes cured bacon.They didn't have 3 meals a day.Just black coffee, followed by what ever when finshed work.

Answer 5

beans n' bacon x 3.
Coffee

Don't agree, Clive - it was a sweated industry.
Cowboys didn't own their horses - they only owned their saddles.
Many of them were drifters from the wreck of the Confederate armies.

"Don't listen to the enticing words
Of the men who own those droves and herds..."

Answer 6

Have you seen a film called Blazing Saddles ? I think one of the actors was Gene Wilder, there is one hilarious scene in it where they are all sitting around the chuck waggon and camp fire eating their meal of beans, and beans and beans.....

Answer 7

I prefer both fruits and fruit and vegetables better, regardless how they look and taste. You desire a little of both.

Answer 8

Usually, that is too long for me. I think it depends on the guy as well as his face though. Certain guys can pull off long hair and other people can't.

Answer 9

In the event that it's a fruit it includes seeds, otherwise it's a vegetable. And vegetables are usually grown in the ground while fruits are grown in trees.

Answer 10

I have pretty lengthy hair, I like them but I actually think I would have them cut short in about some two years

Answer 11

Baked beans, preserved in sugar. They drank Irish Whiskey.