Frontier Cooking

Definitions:

Frontier: The border between settled and unsettled lands.

Great Appalachian Mountains: The mountain range East of the Mississippi River; it includes the Great Smoky Mountains and the Cumberland Mountains. They run North and South.

Cumberland Gap: The gap in the Cumberland Mountains that allowed heavy wagons laden with trade goods and people through the Mountain range and was the primary means by which the frontier further expanded West.

Much has been written about that time, including the exploits of Daniel Boone and his exploration and adventures in Ohio, where he lived, but the Frontier I want to talk about is the Post Civil War era. "The old West", especially the campfire cooking used by the honest man and outlaw alike.

What they all had in common, and had the added benefit of fitting easily in Saddle Bags was coffee, beans, bacon and flour for biscuits.

This article will start with the coffee.

Prior to Arbuckle Coffee, which was introduced in 1864, the roasting of coffee beans was so erratic that coffee beans were sold green and the buyer had to do the roasting. Just one burnt bean would spoil the whole batch.

John Arbuckle invented a way to consistently roast the beans so that none of them burned or became over-roasted. He then packaged whole beans in one pound bags and sold them. So wildly successful were these beans that at one point he was roasting over 800,000 pounds of beans a year, just to keep up with the demand.

He also patented a "glaze" that was sprayed on the roasted beans that kept them fresh until used and his Brand called Arioso Became known as "cowboy coffee". Today's production also includes Arioso ground coffee, decaf whole beans and decaf ground coffee.

Early coffee was not ground, more accurate is that it was crushed. A handful of beans placed in middle of a square of clothe, folded up into a sort of flat bag, a rock or butt of a revolver was then applied. The crushed result was added to a pot of boiling water and made so strong that in cowboy slang the coffee was only drinkable if it was strong enough to float a horseshoe.

You can still grind your own coffee with an electric coffee grinder or a manual coffee grinder. While the manual grinder can be a little labor intensive, it is well worth having when on a camping trip or when without power, as our early cowboys lived daily.

more to come.