Sonofabitch stew
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Sonofabitch stew (or son-of-a-bitch stew) was a cowboy dish of the American West.
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[edit] Recipes
A beef stew, various recipes exist, and some sources say its ingredients may vary according to whatever is on hand. Most recipes involve meat and offal from a calf, though, making sonofabitch stew something of a luxury item on the trail. Alan Davidson's Oxford Companion to Food specifies meats and organs from a freshly killed unweaned calf, including the brain, heart, liver, sweetbreads, tongue, pieces of tenderloin, and an item called the "marrow gut".
This last item, the "marrow gut", was a key ingredient. Davidson quotes Ramon Adam's 1952 Come An' Get It: The Story of the Old Cowboy Cook, which reports that this is a tube, between two of the calf's stomachs, filled with a substance resembling marrow, deemed edible only while the calf is young and still feeding on milk. This marrow-like substance was included in the stew and, according to Adams, was "what gave the stew such a delicious flavor." Davidson says this "marrow gut" probably was the passage leading to the abomasum as well as the abomasum itself (said to have a "distinctive flavour of rennin-curdled milk").
The stew also contained seasonings and sometimes onion.
Frank X. Tolbert's 1962 history of chili con carne, A Bowl of Red, discusses sonofabitch stew as well.[1] Tolbert suggests that the chuck wagon cooks borrowed the idea for the stew from the cooking of the Plains Indians. He also specifies a recipe that never includes onions, tomatoes, or potatoes.
[edit] Alternative Names
In addition to "sonofabitch stew", the dish was known as "rascal stew", "SOB stew", or fitted with the name of any unpopular figure at the time: for example, "Cleveland stew" in honor of Grover Cleveland, a president in disfavor with the cowboys displaced from the Cherokee Strip. "In the presence of ladies", reports a 1942 Gourmet magazine piece, the dish was commonly called "son-of-a-gun stew" instead.[2]
[edit] References
- Davidson, Alan (1999). "Sonofabitch Stew", The Oxford Companion to Food. Oxford University Press, p. 734. ISBN 0-19-211579-0.
[edit] Notes
- ^ This according to Link, Roach, and Sewell (1992). Eats: A Folk History of Texas Foods. TCU Press. ISBN 087565035X
- ^ The Gourmet article is excerpted within this Barry Popik Blog Entry of August 2, 2006. URL retrieved December 28, 2006.
