The Great Plains and the Cattle Country

The Great Plains lie in the interior of the continent, a grassland running from the Canadian border to Texas and west from the Missouri River to the foot of the Rockies. The cooking of the region was shaped by the open range, by the cattle drives that followed the American Civil War, and by the settlers who ploughed the prairie for wheat. Before them the Plains nations, among them the Lakota, Pawnee, Comanche and Cheyenne, had lived from the American bison, Bison bison, and from the corn, beans and squash grown along the river valleys.

The defining fact of the Plains table is beef, and above all beef from cattle raised on grass. The longhorn herds of Texas were driven north to the railheads of Kansas and later to the stockyards of Kansas City and Chicago, and the meat that came back west and east alike made the steak the centre of the American meal. The method that suits the cut is plain: a thick steak, well seasoned with salt and pepper, seared hard over a hot fire or in an iron pan, and taken off while the middle is still red. Where the dish lives or dies is in the quality of the beef and the heat of the fire, since there is almost nothing else in it. The cattle camp and the chuck wagon fixed the other half of the repertoire. The cook worked from what would keep: flour, dried beans, salt pork, coffee, dried fruit and sourdough. Out of these came beans cooked slowly in an iron pot, biscuits and sourdough bread baked in a Dutch oven among the coals, and skillet-fried steak served with a gravy made from the pan. The cuts that were not roasted were braised or boiled, and the same economy produced chili in Texas, a stew of beef and dried chiles that belongs to the cattle country and the towns beside it. Beef on the Plains was also cooked in the open and in company. Barbecue in Texas and in Kansas City is a matter of smoke and patience: tougher cuts such as brisket are held at a low temperature, around 107°C (225°F), for many hours until the connective tissue gives way, and the result is judged by the bark outside and the tenderness within. The Time-Life volume treats this as a regional tradition of the range rather than of the kitchen, and the technique bears it out, being simple in equipment and exacting in time. The farmers who followed the herdsmen brought their own foods. Wheat, especially the hard red winter wheat of Kansas, made the region the country's bread basket, and the immigrant communities who settled it, including Germans, Czechs, Scandinavians and Russian Mennonites, kept their baking: dumplings, sausages, braided and filled breads, and pies made from the fruit that would grow. Corn, sunflowers and wild plums, the last gathered by native peoples long before, remained part of the table. The Plains kitchen is therefore two cuisines laid over each other, the meat of the range and the grain and preserved foods of the homestead. The bison had been the principal food of the Plains nations, eaten fresh, dried, or pounded with fat and berries into pemmican, and its near destruction in the nineteenth century removed that foodway from most tables. The cattle that replaced it grazed the same grass. What remains of the older cooking is the principle of using the whole animal, and that principle carried into the beef cookery of the cattle country.

The taste of the Plains is the taste of beef: the iron and fat of grass-fed meat, the crust of a hard sear, and the smoke of oak or mesquite in the barbecue of the southern range. Seasoning is restrained, salt and black pepper for the steak, chile and cumin for the chili, and the accompaniments are plain and starchy, beans, potatoes, biscuits and gravy. Sourdough, wheat bread and fruit pies supply the sweetness and acidity that the meat does not.