Eat beef because that is american...

..or also, the West wasn´t won on salad and so on...*yawn*

Beef is so american and cowboys and war and ...and..and..

Surprise, the west wasn´t won on beef either, it was  beans.Oh I can hear the angry scream..what beans?


Beans and corn(bread).  Just use a bit of healthy logic.

Cowboys...just imagine cowboys, getting a herd of hundreds of cows together, going for weeks or months through half deserts, bringing the herd to feedlots near the ports because the meat is shipped to europe..

What do you think they ate, a big nice steak every night, killing a cow that is not their own and dumping the rest of the meat?

No, the cook in his wagoon  took beans with him and cornmeal, onions and garlic and coffee.
Everything stuff that could be kept for a long time, sure there was lard and a bit of bacon because that also kept for long, but the most food that lasted a long time, was nutritous and didn´t turn bad was beans.

The cook would throw beans in his kettle to soak them over night or after breakfast which consisted mostly of cowboy coffee and skillet-cornbread...and maybe some beans from the night before.

The beans soaked and were cooked out of the back of the wagon on a small portable fireplace that was feed with dry cow shit, so the cowboys could eat beans when they stopped for the night.

If the boys were lucky the cows stopped during the day for a bit to drink and graze if they found a suitable place and than  they got coffee again, maybe the cook had some leftovers or zwieback, similiar dry and hard crackers for a meal.

But mostly it went on all during the day with a breakfast and a nightmeal.

They couldn´t slaughter a cow, it wasn´t theirs and there was not really the possibility to cook it..howI ask you should they have done that?

The nightmeal was done fast, new beans were made to soak, the water filled up if it wasn´t done in the morning, a fire started for the night.

And how should they have killed the cow?

One of the things most feared was a stampede when the cows got into a frenzy..one cow panicked and hundreds of them started to panic too,running and running...how do you stop a whole cow herd with some horses when they are terrified?

And what terrified them? The smell of blood and the sound of shooting..so how kill a cow?

And what with the rest of the cadaver that would turn bad because of the heat in the matter of hours, you couldn´t preserve the cow, you couldn´t make a steak, you had to make stew...

Cowboys cared for the cows, they didn´t get to eat them, only on special occassions.

It was more likely that one of the boys went out at night, prepared a trap and than they caught a squirrel, a hare, a praeriedog or something similiar and the cook put it to cook with the beans.

No cows..sorry.It was beans, plain and simple beans


Skilleted cornbread was a staple becaus it was cooked in a pan with lid and could be made on the side with the beans, the cast iron pan baking the bread.

Oh and also no bacon and eggs as breakfast..eggs..do you realise they were on the move, where to get fresh eggs and how fast they turned bad?

Don´t think about milking such a beef cow...also the treks were hard enough on the animals so their milk dried up and calfes born during the treck who died might have been the only beef the cowboys saw on their plate.

Also do you know how the housewifes were told in those cookbooks to prepare the beef?

To use a hammer and an icepick or a similiar instrument and make holes through the beef so they could put strings of pig fat through it to cook the meat soft.

And this was the advise for the good! beef...not a larding needle, they first needed to drill or pound holes into the meat.

Oh and steak..yeah that was pounded and slow cooked..the story of the steak under the saddle isn´t so untrue.

The steaks that were fast seared and than eaten..that were pampered young cows for the rich, not the cows that went on a treck..moving makes the meat tough.

You know why they ate the steaks in the saloons rare? Because if cooked through you couldn´t really get through it..but it also could be beef that had been hanged so long and ripened that it was already...softened through the enzymatic processes in there..but they also could catch themselves a food poisoning with it.

That even the beef that ripened on the ships, when shipped to england, was told to be prepared with wood drills so strips of fat could be put through it, should tell you something..and it still was better! beef than what the english housewife could get in england.

But maybe that was just american propaganda of these days...but I guess that was really the case...beef at this time was not something you ate very often. And I doubt those old cooking books lied, why should they?


And as it was jokingly told, the beans helped to keep cojotes and redskins away..you know what they meant with it.


In reality the west was won on beans..and coffee, lots and lots of coffee