The Cook - Part 2

If anyone could get away with being grumpy, it was the cook - provided he was a good cook.

But maybe cooks were all just a bunch of old grumps or perhaps they had an air about them, because they were relegated to doing what most considered woman's work.

Regardless, serious consequences resulted when a cowboy irritated or teased the cookie. And when cow prices were lower than wages, many a cowboy ended up working just for room and board.

Good food went a long way toward keeping the hands happy until the market improved.

When they weren't on a roundup or trail drive, cowboys worked out of ranch headquarters or a series of line shacks.

The bigger ranches could afford to keep a cook at the ranch, but more often it was the rancher's wife or daughters who handled most of the cooking.

When cowboys were sent to a line shack to punch cows or fix fences, they usually ended up cooking for themselves.

Cooking duties were shared, or more often one poor cowpoke with no seniority ended up wearing the apron. Only when there wasn't a designated cookie was the average cowboy involved in cooking.

The end result ranged all the way from starvation rations to sage brush gourmet.

Adaptability is a good trait regardless of one's occupation, but it was especially important for cookies.

Things were usually pretty easy when they cooked at the home ranch. In addition, to make life easier, firewood and water were usually easy to come by, and often there was produce from the garden.

Many ranches prided themselves on the wizardry of their grizzled old cooks. Given even those primitive conditions and the meager number of ingredients available, some ranch cooks became local legends.

Even today descendants of the original homesteaders enjoy recipes handed down several generations.

Whether laboring over a bed of mesquite coals or sweating over an old wood range, those old cowboy cooks could whip up delicious meals that not only tasted good but would stick to the cowboys' ribs, allowing them to perform rigorous work throughout the day.

Most ranchers were quick to figure out that happy cowboys made for happier cows and that a good cook went a long way toward keeping everyone happy.

As time passed civilization slowly encroached on the once-endless prairies and mountain valleys.

Homesteaders. or "nesters," as some cowboys called them, started the changes by plowing prairie sod and stringing "bob wire" fences.

Then it wasn't long before the transcontinental railroad and endless strings of telegraph poles became part of the western scenery. To those old trail drovers who'd pushed longhorn steers from Texas to the Kansas railheads,it was the end of an era.

But even today, 150 years since the heyday of the big-time cattle drives, the ranchers and cowboys of the American West continue the traditions started so long ago.

To the ranch cooks, what the cowboys derided as progress slowly began to change the culinary scenery as well. The chugging steam engines that headed west to load beef for the eastern markets hauled fresh produce, canned goods, kerosene for lamps, and a myriad of other products formerly unavailable to both homesteaders and ranchers.

By the early 1900s cooking for summer haying crews and fall threshing crews, in addition to normal fall roundups and spring brandings, added to the ranch cooks' duties.

With the advent of the Rural Electrification Program in the 1930s, some ranch cooks traded their old wood ranges for new-fangled electric stoves, which gave them more time to cook rather than wipe perspiration from their foreheads as they prepared meals during the summer heat.

Along with the electric ranges came refrigerators.

Gone were the worries about food spoilage and the ability to keep fresh produce for an extended time.

Those ranch cooks were just as savvy as the chuck wagon cookies of the mid 1800s. They quickly figured out ways to improve the grub and send the cowboys off to the bunk house with full bellies and grins.

And there you have it - a little history on chuck wagon cooks!! Join me tomorrow for something.