They Ate What?
Popular dishes eaten along the emigrant trail out West.
By: Sherry Monahan 03/01/2009
Sop, lick, sinkers and whistle berries. Those all sound tasty, don’t they?
Pioneers often ate these and other delicacies along the trails heading west. Now, they really aren’t as bad as they sound. Sop was nothing more than gravy. Lick was molasses or some kind of syrup. Sinkers were biscuits. And whistle berries, well, they were beans, and you can probably guess why they were called whistle berries.
Texas cowhand E.L. Murphy remembered whistle berries well, “Our food run strong to whistle berries, they were the red Mexican variety of beans. They were good food and fine while on the drift or on the range, but while in camp—not so good. In the dog house it became whiffy on the lee side at times.”
Beans & Coffee
Beans came in many varieties out West. While coffee was a main staple in most homesteads and at every camp, coffee beans weren’t always available. Ingenious pioneers learned to make coffee with substitute beans, using corn meal, barley or wheat to brew coffee. Jonathan Sanford Ater lived in Texas in the late 1800s. He recalled, “Coffee was made from parched corn, okra, diced sweet potatoes, wheat, or rye.”
Coffee and eggs sound good, right? How about eggs in your coffee? It’s true, brewing a pot of coffee was much different back in the day. The grounds were cooked in a pot, with no filter or strainer. The trick of adding egg shells to the pot was a way of keeping the coffee grounds at the bottom of the pot.
W.H. Thomas, an 1870s Texas cowhand, remembered camp coffee, “One thing you could depend on at any time of the day or night, especially in the winter and that was the blackest coffee that can be made. I can just see the old coffee pot now, big enough to hold a couple gallons at a time, and a couple of egg shells floating around in it to settle the grounds. We never got but few eggs to eat and we always accused cooky of carrying the same egg shells around from year to year.”
Son-of-a-Gun Stew
Son-of-a-Gun Stew, which also went by a stronger euphemism, was a real treat because it wasn’t made often. The stew included darn near everything from a slaughtered cow, including tripe, heart, liver, brains and kidneys. Murphy remembered, “it was made of everything but the hide an’ horns of the critter....”
Oysters
While oysters from the sea were a popular food staple in many Western towns, another type of oyster was eaten out West. It went by a few names—Rocky Mountain, prairie or calf fries. They became popular in cow camps, with Albert K. Erwin of Llano County, Texas, remembering: “during the spring, when we castrated the male yearlings, the chuck monotony would be broken with messes of mountain oysters.” Some cowboys considered them an aphrodisiac.
Comments (3)
Well, raw, unfiltered apple cider vinegar is supposed to be really healthy for us, so if someone made the Vinegar Pie using that, I'd be happy to eat it. OK, I'd be happy to eat any pie that anyone baked, especially the author.
i made vinegar pie from a old timey recipe..calls for condensed milk to make a custardy consistency...i will try this recipe as it is a really good pie...i would imagine apple cider vinegar would be mostly used, but i put plain white in mine..would use any vinegar but BALSAMIC...that would be a truly UNIQUE flavor....=)
I'm not going to let my wife see this.
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