25 Depression-Era Meals Old Cowboys Survived On When Food Ran Out

A grown man could ride all day, chop ice out of a frozen tank until dark, then sit down to a plate of flour, salt and bacon grease. In the winter of 1932 that was supper across cattle country, and nobody out there made a speech about it. The wreck started before the weather. A steer that brought $10 to $12 per hundredweight in 1929 sold for $4 and change by 1932, and at some auctions a whole carload went for less than the freight to haul it. Then the rain quit. Grass disappeared clear across the southern plains by 1934, dust buried the tanks and windmills, and the government bought and killed cattle at $1 or $2 a head that had once been worth $50. Every camp kitchen stood on four things: flour, salt, coffee, and some form of fat, whether lard, bacon grease saved back in a coffee can, or tallow rendered off a beef. On top of that went whatever the country handed over. Wild greens in spring, chokecherries off the brush, potatoes in a cellar held at 32 to 40 degrees or buried in a haystack where the stack's own heat kept them from freezing, a sourdough crock fed every morning and carried inside somebody's coat on cold nights. The loin and ribs rode the rail to town, so what stayed behind was heart, liver, tongue, brains, oxtail. A 4 lb tongue had to be worth more than its own ice and it was not. Liver got an hour in salt water, then 2 minutes a side in snapping-hot bacon grease, which is what keeps it sweet instead of livery. A cottontail, a jackrabbit or a prairie chicken cost one .22 shell, about 2 cents, and an old hare went into the pot with a clean rock in the bottom to hold the meat down and cook it even. January on a cow camp was arithmetic. Six men eating a pound of potatoes apiece burn close to 20 bushels between October and April, while a man working horseback in the cold burns 4,000 to 5,000 calories a day and those plates might have added up to 1,800. A cup of cornmeal, boiled, set, sliced and fried, fed 2 men. One strip of salt pork went into a pot of pintos and made dinner for 8, then got fished out and saved for tomorrow. White gravy built on about 4 oz of meat covered biscuits for 10. Cracklin's went into cornbread and got eaten like candy, bones simmered 2 days with a splash of vinegar until the broth went thick, and men fought over pickled pig's feet. The plate old cowhands talked about into their nineties was a single milk-fed calf in one pot, liver, heart, kidneys, sweetbreads, brains and the marrow gut, simmered 4 or 5 hours until the gravy came out thick and sweet with no flour in it at all. Federal inspection will not let a marrow gut into commerce, the rules around nerve tissue tightened in the 1990s, and ranches quit butchering calves at home. It survives as son-of-a-gun stew in Oklahoma, goulash on the northern range, burgoo in Kentucky. Relief camps paid a dollar a day plus a bunk for beans, cornbread and a can of tomatoes. The cook ate last, standing up, off whatever was left, and a cook who ran out of food lost his job faster than one who burned the biscuits.