Cowboy Dessert Recipes of the Old West

Campfire at Broken Arrow Crossing, Winchester, Idaho

Hounds Ears, Whirlups & Pooch, Cowboy Dessert Recipes of the Old West by western author Stephen Bly

Here’s several cowboy dessert favorites:

HOUNDS EARS AND WHIRLUPS*

Drop thin sourdough batter from a spoon into hot grease until dough spreads into shape of a dog’s ear.

Fry until brown.

Make Whirlup Sauce from water, sugar, and available flavoring and spices.

Mix with chopped or mashed dried fruit.

Bring to a boil. Sauce will thicken a tad when cooled.

Pour over hounds ears just until damp.

* legend rumors it that this cowboy dessert delight was originated by Lum Pagrum, a wagon cook from New Mexico

POOCH

Mix canned tomatoes, white or brown sugar to taste, and bread or biscuit cubes. Cook over campfire until firm. Or pour into square pan with a stick’s worth of melted butter on bottom. Bake about 30 minutes at 400 degrees. Serve this genuine cowboy dessert warm.

NOTE: What?! You expected more specific cowboy dessert recipe instructions? You must be kidding! These are the real deal…fresh off the trail!

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Here’s other cowboy dessert recipes you might want to try: http://www.yummly.com/recipes/cowboy-dessert  or  from Alan’s Kitchen at http://www.alanskitchen.com/Cowboy/Recipes/Dessert/default.htm

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Pour The Coffee & Pass The Cowboy Dessert
By western author Stephen Bly

Copyright©2008

While some big towns like Denver, San Francisco and Virginia City had fancy restaurants, most frontier cafes kept things simple. Often called chophouses, hunks of meat hung in the backroom. Cooks chopped off a slab and fried it up for you. Not too fancy. Nor sanitary. Most times it was only “slightly spoiled.”

For cowboys on the trail, they filled up with biscuits, bacon, and beans. There wasn’t much beef because no boss wanted to slaughter his own cattle. If a cow wandered in from some other herd, it could be butchered and fried, but for the most part bacon and salt pork dominated the menu.

But they had coffee. Ah, good old boiled coffee. I can almost feel the coffee grounds strain between my teeth. The brand was probably Arbuckles. That tastes something like a Starbucks tall Americano with a quadruple shot…and mixed with a bit of mud.

Plenty of Sourdough Bread

Plenty of sourdough bread thrived on long trail drives. The cook’s prized possession included a 5-gallon, wooden sourdough keg. When getting ready for the trail drive or roundup, the cook put 3 or 4 quarts of flour and a dash of salt in the keg. He poured in enough water to make a medium thick batter. Sometimes a little added vinegar or molasses hastened fermentation.

When the dough got ripe, this whole batch got dumped. The keg seasoned and a new batch again mixed in the same way. Everyday new batter filled the keg. Placed in sunlight during the day and wrapped in blankets at night kept it warm. Some cooks slept with their kegs on cold nights. An outfit that allowed harm to come to its sourdough keg suffered the consequence. Most cooks defended their kegs with their lives.

By the late 1880s air-tights (canned food) appeared, such as peaches and tomatoes. That provided more ways for the camp cooks to make dessert.

One trail favorite proved to be Hounds Ears & Whirlups. Thin sourdough batter dropped onto hot grease and fried brown. The dough usually spread out in the shape of a dog’s ear. Whirlup sauce consisted of water, sugar, flavoring and spices. If available, dried fruit was chopped or mashed into the mixture and bring it to a boil. It thickened a tad as it cooled, then poured over the Hounds Ears. A big hit with hungry cowboys.

That sounds better to me than Pooch…a dessert made with tomatoes, sugar, and leftover bread or biscuits, cooked over the campfire. Although my Oklahoma grandmother made something similar.

Ah, life on the trail. Pour the coffee and pass the pooch.

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