23 Old West Cowboy Food Recipes (2024)

FAQs

What did cowboys eat in the old west? ›

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.

bread, coffee, beans, beef, and bacon at the chuckwagon daily during the drive. While food variety is something to be desired, cowboys generally eat only two meals a day, breakfast and dinner. There is always an option for a third meal, but cowboys prefer to eat less.

Sonofabitch stew (or son-of-a-bitch stew) was a cowboy dish of the American West.

They were most likely pinto or possibly red beans. Think southwest cuisine. They may have had tomatoes cooked with them, along with onions, garlic and chile peppers. Cooked beans spoil or sour quickly, so cowhands wouldn't have eaten beans on the trail unless they were traveling with the chuck wagon.

Each morning, the cowboys would cook breakfast in cast iron grills, skillets, and pots over a hot fire. Meals often consisted of hot coffee, a large pot of beans, and biscuits that were baked in a cast iron pot and slathered with lard and gravy.

Dried apples, raisins and apricots were common, but berries and prunes also were available. In addition to eating it plain, dried fruit reconstituted in water with crumbled biscuits formed the basis of simple steamed cobblers and puddings.

Usually, thick slabs of smoked bacon would keep as long as it was protected form the hot temperatures. One way to preserve bacon was to pack it inside a barrel of bran. Also, eggs could be protected by packing them in barrels of corn meal – as the eggs were used up, the meal was used to make bread.

Though horses were respected partners of the cowboy in those days, they were still essentially beasts of burden. Some were no doubt well cared for, but probably not by today's standards. The horses likely ate a simple diet of grains and forage.

Jerky allowed people to be able to store meat and then consume a high protein source when food was scarce. The early pioneers and cowboys came to rely on jerky as a main staple of their diet.

Beans, biscuits, potatoes and fruit were popular

Cowboys would have eaten hardtacks, a dense bread made with few ingredients that resemble modern-day biscuits. These were edible for years. The only downside is that they were rock hard, so had to be soaked in water or milk before eating.

What did the pioneers eat for breakfast? ›

Beans, cornmeal mush, Johnnycakes or pancakes, and coffee were the usual breakfast. Fresh milk was available from the dairy cows that some families brought along, and pioneers took advantage go the rough rides of the wagon to churn their butter.

I love breakfast any time of day, but I guarantee you back in Ol' Cookie's day going down the trail was a whole lot different to what we have today. Fellers back in the 1880's didn't eat very well. A typical breakfast for them consisted of: coffee, biscuits, maybe a little salt pork and even beans.