I'm Sam Arnold and welcome to Frying Pans West.

This is a show about the foods and drinks of the early West, the foods that the pioneers brought West with them, and the foods that they met on the trail.

The show is going to deal with the preserved foods that were brought west, and some of the items that you can use today, things that you can make with supermarket foods that are archaic in a fashion, in that they're not generally eaten today, but they are the foods that your grandfather's and great grandfathers ate especially if they were in the West.

We're going to show you a method of cooking salt pork, which is sort of the forgotten cousin in the supermarket hopping Jon, which is a traditional southern dish that was brought west.

How to how to do your own marrow bones, a very inexpensive and delicious dish that in fact, you can very often get the marrow bones for free from your supermarket.

Then I'm going to show you how to cut jerky and explain how that's done.

And pemmican, which is made from jerky.

The story of jerky is a very old one.

Jerky is nothing but sun dried meat.

It can be deer meat or elk meat.

Moose meat.

Any type of meat.

Today, the beef jerky that you find in most of the taverns around the country is commercially made.

You can get buffalo jerky in some places in Wyoming, but to make your own, it's very simple.

You simply start off with a big block of.

Steak, meat of some kind.

You can use top round or bottom round, or any type of a moderately tender meat, and then take a sharp, flat knife and cut down to within about a quarter of an inch of the bottom of the meat.

Then turn your knife on its side and begin unrolling this, and you unroll it as you would say, a jelly roll.

And if you have a nice sharp knife.

You need, of course, to be quite careful that you don't slice your fingers off, but by by moving this down.

You turn your block of meat into one big long strip or a couple of long, thin pieces.

Now, in the old days, the Indians didn't believe in cutting meat against the grain, and even many of the mountain men in the West felt that this was a meat that they didn't want to eat.

So they always cut it lengthwise with the grain.

Of course, when you're cutting jerky in this fashion, you have to just cut against all 360 degrees around, and then you see you have one big long strip of meat.

Then to make your jerky, you take a skewer.

And you hang it like this.

You have to be sure that the edges don't touch one another while it's drying.

And if you've cut it thin enough, then this this will harden.

And in about 3 or 4 days in a dry climate, it'll harden and be ready to eat.

Now you can use this as a snack for when you're watching television.

Or you can use it for hiking, mountain climbing.

You can reconstitute it very quickly by boiling it up into a soup, or use it in making stews.

It has its own inimitable flavor in stew meat.

If you're in an area where there are a lot of insects, why you can cover this all over with some cheesecloth and that keeps the bugs away.

Some people who are.

Purists refused to add any salt or pepper to it.

Most people like to pound a little coarse ground black pepper into it and a little seasoned salt or plain salt.

How you can.

Also, if you have a smoke oven, give it a little dose of smoke flavor.

The hickory or apple wood makes a really fine smoke taste.

The jerky in the west was also used to make what they call the iron ration of the Indian, and this was pemmican.

Many of the fellows who were in the ski patrols during World War Two, and mountain climbers today by commercially made permican.

And of course, it was an old Indian dish.

There's even a reference by Lewis and Clark on their trip west to running into and eating pemmican.

And it's a combination of jerky, suet or fat and cherries of some kind.

Choke cherries are the most commonly used cherries for making pemmican.

in historically, but if you don't happen to have choke cherries, you can use red cherries, bing or the sour reds and take your take commercially made jerky or your own toasted in an oven These are some pieces of commercially made jerky that we bought, and then we toast it in the oven until it is almost black and it's crisp like bacon, and it just breaks, breaks up in little pieces.

Then put that into a meat grinder, break it up, and then take some fat.

Now the the best fat that you can get is suet from around the kidneys.

And it is nice and white and pure and has very, very little flavor of its own.

Just just a slight beef taste and put it all in through your grinder and add add a couple cups of cherries, keep mixing it through and you may have to take the end off of your grinder because it tends to jam up unless you keep it well lubricated.

You can push it on down in here, and then it begins to squeeze out.

And you can take, take, take this mixture.

It's a one third cherries, one third fat and a third jerky.

And form it into a ball.

Got some here that we were squeezing just a little bit earlier.

And it has a really delicious taste.

If you make a ball out of it, kind of roll it up and then you can you can wrap these in aluminum foil and take these along with you on a on a trip.

And they're good forever.

They don't get rancid.

They don't get bad.

And it has a really very fine taste.

The cherries give it a sharpness and a sweetness, and the jerky gives it a taste, sort of like crisp bacon and the fat.

Well, it just it's sort of like sausage.

It really makes it very tasty.

And it's a good one to take with you on trips.

Good cherries.

I used frozen cherries on that one.

Now we're going to go over to the other cooking set and show you how they used to use salt pork in the days of the westward migration along the Oregon Trail.

They used to.

The settlers going west.

Used to buy books that were put out by somebody who obviously had never been on the trail, and these were lists of items that they were supposed to take west, and they used to take great quantities of salt pork, dried rice or rice, dried apples, dried fruits of various sorts, and the quantities that were listed as to be taken in the wagons were so large that by the time they got to the area in eastern Wyoming called Fort Laramie, their horses were all worn out.

So they used to put aside, quite literally, tons and tons of salt pork right by the fort there and just leave it.

They'd abandon it because if they expected to make the rest of the trip west, why, they surely wouldn't get there carrying such heavy loads.

Someone made a lot of money selling emigrant books, telling them what they should do.

But the poor fellow had never been on the trail himself.

The backbone of the Western migration food was salt pork, and this, of course, was preserved in brine originally.

And then you actually had a crust of salt over it.

And you can still find this in the grocery stores.

It's sort of usually is hidden over in the side of the meat counter, and not too many people buy it, but it's a really delicious, delicious meat, and there are only a few tricks that you need to know.

One is to soak this overnight in water so as to remove a good portion of the salt from it.

Now, if you haven't soaked it, here's a technique that you can use to get rid of the salt taste.

If you don't do that, why it's going to be just too salty for you to to eat.

You cut the rind off the edge here.

And cut it into pieces, so we'll cut them into bite sized pieces now.

You get a couple of kettles of really good hot boiling water ready, and you will put these in a colander and then pour the boiling water over them.

Let's see.

I've got this here.

Spread them around so that the water can hit it pretty evenly.

And take a couple of kettles of boiling water and over your sink.

Just pour the the water over it, move it around and about two kettles of boiling water like that, we'll remove most of the salt from it.

Then throw it into a frying pan.

And let it start to let us start to fry.

We'll turn this on almost to full up.

And you want it nice and browned.

Then after this is brown, I'll show you how to make the gravy.

Now, another dish that they used to eat a lot in the frontier was marrow bone.

They used buffalo primarily, whatever game they had.

But Buffalo was the basic staple of the frontier.

And eating of marrow is not strictly a Western idea.

It's been done.

And I guess about every country in England, you can buy these marvelous marrow scoops that looked like a cheese scoop, and they serve roasted or broiled marrow for what we would call dessert or a savory.

And it's not a sweet item at all.

And I got the butcher to take these, this, this shinbone and cut it into two pieces.

This is the easy way.

Usually the the stores will charge you maybe 3 or 4 or $0.05 a pound for these things, and many friendly butchers will give them away to you at no cost at all, and just throw them into a Pyrex pan like this and take them into the broiler.

In the days of the early West, they used to.

They used to call this prairie butter.

And you have a nice overhead heat.

Im gonna leave that open.

So we hear it sizzle.

And Prairie prairie butter the marrow spread over bread crisp hard roll is really a very fine, say, Sunday night supper dish.

A very good one to eat.

Now our salt pork is getting brown.

The French-Canadian voyageurs, the the men who came in the canoes into the North country and were the French-Canadian trappers, used a lot of salt pork, too.

And then, of course, they they very often called the the soldiers, the American soldiers, Monsieur de lard, or eaters of, of lard pork eaters.

Some of the American soldiers were also called other names too having to do with pork by the French Canadians who were in opposition.

Now, after you, after you get these fried up, I'm going to cook them a little higher heat.

Now for a moment, and then I'll make the gravy to go with it.

The.

Southerners who came west were quite accustomed to black eyed peas.

This was primarily a vegetable found in the South, and today is traditional to the south.

The black eyed peas, when mixed with with coconut and rice, makes a very fine dish, which they used to call hopping John.

This was traditionally a New Year's Day dish, usually served in the late morning or during New Year's main meal at noontime, the story being that children would go around the table doing a little dance, and then they would eat hopping John.

And this would bring good luck for the whole coming year.

An easy way, of course, to make hopping, John, is to get yourself black eyed peas, roughly.

This this is a normal what is it?

A two and a half size can about a cup and a half of black eyed peas.

Then I've prepared a little rice and you put the peas into the rice.

And then this is a bit more coconut than we should have, about a cup of coconut for cup, and three quarters of the peas.

Then we'll add and mix the coconut and black eyed peas and the rice together, and add a little bit of water.

It's about a cup of water there.

I have already cooked this rice, but for your own self, you can just put rice at a ratio of one and a third water to one part of rice, and then add your black eyed peas and your coconut and let it cook.

I think I'll put it over here and then we can let that heat up.

Now our you see how nice and crispy brown these things are getting.

And that's the good part about salt pork.

They're sort of sort of like bacon crisps.

Third of a cup of flour.

And just add that sprinkle it around and add it in.

And let the let the fat cook into the flour.

It'll give you a nice roux.

And this getting good hot.

Then add milk to make yourself a cream gravy.

About a cup of milk.

And this will boil down and make a thick nice gravy with a crisp bacon or salt pork taste into it.

Then add some.

Let's see, I have some black pepper here.

There we go.

I'll just put a whole batch of black pepper in it again according to your own taste, but it's delicious.

That way you don't need any salt because you your salt pork is already.

Now there's your gravy.

Getting a little thick.

I'll add a little bit of water to this.

Now let's take a look at our marrow bones.

And indeed they are just about ready.

And this is the way you serve them right to the table itself.

A good hot plate in the bottom of your table.

And the marrow is nice and brown.

Of course, when you when you put this on a big plate, you're going to need some kind of tongs to put them on.

This makes a very impressive dish for for a Sunday night.

They slide around like crazy.

Now you use some crisp bread, put that along with it, and then your guest will take this marrow and spread it over the bread.

And it's just like this, like butter.

It's just throw some on and and.

It's good.

Serving.

And we'll use some of the Hoppin John another side.

Saltt pork goes very well with the, the rice and the Hoppin John.

And for a bit of decoration some parsley flakes.

And there is a frontier meal that probably your granddad's ate.

marrow bone salt pork and Hoppin John.

Now in this series we do all sorts of the different dishes of the early West, and I want to show you.

However, a cookbook that we've produced, this is called obviously Frying Pans West, and it is a compilation of all the recipes that we have in the series.

And if you are interested in getting a copy of this cookbook, simply watch the at the end of this program and your station will show you how you can obtain one of them.

This has about 45 or 50 differen recipes in it for both food and drink of the early West Indian foods, early American, Southern and New England foods, and then the Mexican foods as well.

The in the days of the early West, it was pretty important for a man to know how to shoot a gun.

And because so many of the youngsters today think that guns always came with bullets in them, the cartridge type bullet I brought along an old 1861 Springfield rifle.

I also brought along a marlin buffalo gun.

And this.

This is a Pacific marlin made about 1871.

It has an octagonal barrel.

And I'd like to show it to you.

We were out shooting this not very long ago.

A friend brought over some of the cartridges for this one, and you see it drops down.

So.

And you put a cartridge in here and it's a great big long thing and it's about, I guess the cartridge is about 2.5in long, and it's full of black powder and has a lead bullet at the end of it, and you shove it in just one at a time and then pull this back and you have a set trigger.

The set trigger, you pull back to cock.

Then of course, when you let her go, I blam away.

A great big cloud of black smoke comes out of the front.

This heavy a barrel gun was used with a 45 caliber bullet.

Was used for shooting buffalo at quite a long distance.

Of course, originally the buffalo, being the basic staple animal on the prairie, was killed by the Indians by pumping arrows into them.

They'd ride alongside and shoot them with arrows, and then very often they'd take a long club on the end of a stick, and they would bring the buffalo that had been wounded.

Kit Carson had a good reputation for being a fine supplier of buffalo meat to expeditions such as Fremont's expedition.

The reason that he was able to command such a high price for his services was that Carson knew how to get into the front center of buffalo herd, and the buffalo herds are usually headed by the great big bulls in the front.

And then right behind them are the younger cows.

The younger cows are the best eating, of course.

Then as you go further back in the herd, you have the the young bulls and then the big old timers are the stragglers.

And of course the stragglers are the easiest ones to get, but they don't taste as good on the table.

Buffalo is like beef, but better in flavor, and there are now about 60,000 animals in both private and public herds around the country.

The the cost of buffalo is substantially more.

And buffalo steaks, for example.

And I happen to own a restaurant in Colorado and we serve buffalo steaks.

Buffalo steaks run about $7 and a half figuring a normal restaurant markup.

The cost is between 250 and $3 a pound.

And even at today's high prices of beef, this is a pretty good, pretty good amount.

Now I'm going to show you with the old 1861 Springfield how you load a muzzle loader.

This gun was at Gettysburg and it says US Springfield 1861 model.

Later on they had a trap door model, but this was a simple musket.

And in fact, they found many of these with as many as 8 or 9 loads.

The fellows were so scared during the battle that they they kept loading them and loading them and loading them and never shot them.

And if they had ever fired them with so many bullet and powder loads in them, of course the gun would have blown up.

But if you want to have fun and you're a black powder enthusiast, you get a flask like this.

This is a flask made by Dixon, Dixon and Sons in England.

And I found this near Wagon Mound, New Mexico.

And you can this is a measuring device on the top of your powder flask, and you have black powder.

And if you just want to make a bang without actually putting a mini bullet in it, you grab your paper.

And chew up your paper a little bit.

That'll give you your wad.

Then take this and put it down into the gun, and there's a particular clunk that it gets when it's packed down nicely.

Now, if you were going to load that with a bullet, you'd put the bullet down on top of a patch after your powder.

Then they have caps that are fulminated mercury caps.

And these, these are made of copper.

I don't know, perhaps if I get this box, you can see them all.

These are French musket caps still made today.

And the little top of this thing is.

Fulminated mercury inside.

Then we'll put the cap on top here and pull it back.

And going to suggest to you that you tune in to Frying Pans West next week on the same channel at the same time.

We're going to have quite an interesting show of early Indian foods on the on the next one, so please do tune in if you have any ears left after.

After we bang this thing off.

We blew out one microphone a little bit ago.

Here she goes.