DEL.ICIO.USCowboy cooking tradition lives on
Cartersville man celebrates cattle-drive cuisine with competitions
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Tuesday, March 10, 2009
Here are the rules:
No supper in the saddle.
Elissa Eubanks/eeubanks@ajc.com
Richard Holmes of Cartersville reaches for some dried tabacco that hangs off the kitchen on his 1877 chuckwagon that he takes across the Southeast to compete in Chuckwagon Cookoffs.
Elissa Eubanks/eeubanks@ajc.com
The chuck wagon includes authentic Western forks and iron knives.
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Don’t tie your horse up to the cook wagon.
Clean your plate.
Complainers can go eat with the cows.
On Western trails the biscuits were tough, and the cooks were tougher. Yet they had a tender side, writing letters home to Mama for the cowboys, many of whom were illiterate. They gave the young cowpokes haircuts (many of the cowboys really were boys, still in their teens.) They’d read them the Bible, and they’d make do with very primitive cooking conditions.
“It was a great day if they came near a town, and the cook could get a can of peaches,” says modern-day cookie Richard Holmes, of Cartersville, looking every inch the chuck wagon boss, with his handlebar mustache, fancy tooled boots and 10-gallon black hat. “He might make a peach cobbler that night.”
Holmes has been practicing the rustic art of cattle-drive cuisine for eight years or so, piloting his 1877 Nissen farm wagon to cowboy events up and down the East Coast where he competes with other vintage cookies to see who can whip up the best chicken-fried steak, home-cooked potatoes, slow-simmered beans and sourdough biscuits.
At a February event in Pigeon Forge, Tenn., called Saddle Up!, Holmes took a first place in biscuits, first place in dessert and a second in potatoes. This week he’ll go up against at least nine other camp cooks at the Southeastern Cowboy Gathering at the Booth Western Art Museum in Cartersville.
Gathering attendees will sample cowboy cooking, be serenaded with cowboy songs, attend fiddling competitions and hear that durable, self-consciously homespun form of versification known as cowboy poetry.
Holmes, 62, is a retired high school band director and trumpet teacher who grew up in Conroe, Texas, and moved to Georgia in 1992 at the urging of his wife, Earline, a native of Savannah. For years he competed in chili cook-offs, until he turned to cowboy cookery in the new century. Being a Texas native, the lore of the cowboy was in his blood, and chuck wagon competitions combined his interest in cowboy heritage with his penchant for competitive cooking.
Like other modern-day camp cookies, Holmes has accumulated a wagon full of period gear, starting with the wagon itself (he calls it the Yellow Rose of Texas), which he discovered in a barn in Douglasville. He bakes his beans in heavy lidded Dutch ovens and grinds his coffee beans with a hand-cranked cast-iron grinder. He keeps an 1867 Winchester in a scabbard behind the seat, and dishes up the grub on enameled plates with wooden-handled knives and forks.
The food itself, cooked on an outdoor fire, is also authentic, with some concessions to food safety. Competitors are required to keep the meat in coolers and use a thermometer to assure that the ovens reach 350 degrees. Most of them hide the anachronistic equipment inside teepees erected near their wagons.
Their food is not sophisticated — trail drives from big ranches in Texas to the markets in Kansas and Missouri lasted five months or more, and traveling conditions didn’t allow for gastronomical refinement. Supper was usually cooked over a campfire of buffalo chips.
But, like the cooks of old, Holmes knows how to make eight pounds of dried beans into something memorable.
First, pick out the rocks. Then wash, rinse, cover with water and start the beans cooking Friday evening. He stays up through the night as they simmer, adding four onions, lots of pepper, lots of garlic and three pounds of fatback. About 11 in the morning he adds jalapeno peppers and diced tomatoes, just in time for the judging at noon.
“By this time,” he says with the pride of one who’ll gladly sacrifice sleep for properly cooked beans, “they’re all thick and soupy and doggone good.”
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