Whenever you see an old west saloon in a TV
show or a movie they're always drinking but they're never eating but people did eat at
old west saloons. Not only did they eat but often the lunch was free, and that free lunch could be anything from a sandwich to oysters to a big bowl of the classic cowboy dish pork and beans. So thank you to Squarespace for sponsoring this video as we see what it was like to eat in an old west saloon this time on Tasting History. Today I am in the old mining town, the old ghost town of Cerro Gordo which is in California right off of Death Valley. Back in the late 19th and early 20th century it was home to miners working in the nearby silver, lead, and zinc mines so of course it included several saloons, saloons that would feed and water the miners when they came down from trying to find their fortune. Now whether you were in a big city like San Francisco
or a small mining to like Cerro Gordo when you walked into a saloon you could expect a drink and you could almost always expect some food. Now what that food was really ran the gamut; they had like
fancy French cuisine with French chefs in a lot of these places, even in small towns but then some saloons had you know pickled eggs and pretzels just like you would find in many bars today but George Ade when he was writing and I believe the 1930s he was writing about the saloons that he remembered when he was young, and he said "Right in the center of the soiled table-cover you might have found a bowl of baked beans and alongside of it a glass of troubled water and in the glass were immersed several forks which the evidence indicated had been used in hoisting beans." So the baked beans I'm making the troubled water with utensils in it which is basically dirty water that people have been using the utensils over and over, I'm not doing that 'cus that's gross. Now I found lots and lots of recipes for baked beans but since saloons were making these foods for profit I figured I would use the recipe from 'Cooking for Profit' which was produced with the restaurants and saloons of the old west in mind. It was originally published in the San Francisco Hotel Gazette in 1886 and says "Baked Pork and Beans. Wash and pick over a large heaping cupful of navy beans and steep them in water over night. Put them on next morning with fresh water to more
than cover, and baking soda the size of a bean and let boil about an hour. Then carry them to the sink pour all in a colander letting the water run away and put back into the saucepan with cold water enough to come up to a level. Boil again and in a few minutes they will be soft. Season
with a little salt and a tablespoon of molasses. Put them into four pint bowls or tin pans, lay an
ounce of salt pork on each and bake half an hour." Very simple, I actually found some even simpler
recipes that are literally just pork and beans, nothing else, no molasses or even salt. Then I found
some really complicated ones that have cayenne and and onion and lots of other seasoning so if
you want to add more season seasoning by all means do so but for me I'm following the recipe and starting with 1 and 1/4 cup of navy beans, 4 ounces of salt pork scored and then cut into four slices,
a pinch of baking soda a teaspoon of salt, and 1 tablespoon of molasses. So first take the beans and cover them with water and let them sit overnight. You can also rinse your pork at this time if you're
using salt pork which can be hard to find so you can also use bacon which you don't need to rinse
but if you're using salt pork you want to rinse it a couple times, put it in water let it sit for about an hour then dump it out add more water, let it sit because it is really, really salty. Now once the beans are soaked there shouldn't be any water left, they should have soaked up pretty much all of the water. If there is any water dump it out. Otherwise put them into a pot and sprinkle with
the baking soda and add fresh water just enough to cover them plus about a half inch. Now here we have a decision to make because every other recipe that I found for pork and beans has you add the pork at this point but this recipe doesn't have you add the pork until it's baking. The problem with that is the pork will not be cooked and it needs to be cooked, so I'm guessing the recipe author just skipped that step or missed that step or has the pork- pork cooked elsewhere you know like on a skillet. I don't know but I'm going to go ahead and add mine now because it is going to also add some much needed flavor. So add it to the beans and let the pot come to a boil and then set the lid on, and let the beans cook for 1 hour. Every once in a while lift the lid and try to skim off any of the scum but pretty much leave it for an hour. At that point strain the water out of the beans, then add
some cold water just enough to be level with the beans, and bring it to a boil until they're nice and soft, this should take about 10 minutes. Then remove the pork and add the salt and molasses
and stir them into the beans to coat them. Now this recipe has you putting it into four different
dishes because it's meant to be served to you know different people like at a restaurant but at a saloon would have often just been on the free lunch table one big old pot, so I'm just putting them into one big tin dish. So once the beans are in the dish set the pork on top and place the whole thing in the oven at 350° F 175° C for a half hour. Now saloons in the old west especially
in a small town like Cerro Gordo were so much more than just a watering hole, as the first building
that often went up a saloon might also act as the courtroom, a barber shop, the town hall, the
undertaker's parlor or even a church should a pastor come through. But on the daily it was for food and drink so other than baked beans what might you expect to get when walking into an old west saloon. So the exact definition of a saloon is kind of up for debate.
One definition is any place that serves food and drink but makes most of their money through the drink. Historically that definition doesn't always work but for our purposes it works. Now as towns grew up around the American West the saloon was often the first building to go up. At first it was usually nothing more than a tent with a few tables and chairs, a place to wet your whistle and it was only after the town began to establish itself that they would build a more permanent structure with wooden floors, a polished bar, and of course batwing doors. And yes those swinging saloon doors were real, it's not just a thing from the movies, at least after the 1870s once the hinge that lets
it do that was invented. Many saloons had those batwing doors, they were called bat wings 'cus they look like bat wings but behind those batwing doors they would have normal doors that could be closed in case it's cold or or whatever. One of the reasons for those batwing doors was to let the smoke out, people were always smoking and to let fresh cool air in, kind of create a breeze if you opened up a window but also it was at the height that if children were passing by they couldn't look in and see all the drinking and gambling going on, and there was always drinking and gambling going on. Now as far as gambling goes the most popular games were poker and pharaoh. Pharaoh isn't really played much today but in the 19th century it was often played more than poker because more people could play at once, the odds were better than most games of chance and it had very simple rules, and it was easy to follow along which is always a benefit if you have been drinking heavily, and many people were at least in a decent saloon drinking heavily. So what exactly were they drinking? Wellone of the most popular drinks at least when it came to spirits was whiskey and there were two types of whiskey usually available: the good stuff and the less than good stuff. The good stuff was usually the stuff that was bottled back east or else in other countries like Old Forester bourbon, or Dewar scotch and it usually came with a labeled bottle. The not so great stuff was usually produced and bottled Outback and usually it didn't have an actual name. People would give it wonderful names though like coffin varnish, cactus juice, sheep dip, tarantula juice, fire water, rot gut or any number of colorful appellations. These were usually locally distilled neutral grain spirits that were flavored with coffee chilies or tobacco and spiked with ingredients like strychnine, turpentine or sulfuric acid to give it some kick. Basically if it was the taste you were after then you get the good stuff and you paid for the privilege, but if it was just the effect that mattered then take the rot
gut and you'll get the same effect if not better at half the price. Now if neither of those drinks tickled your fancy then most saloons would offer beer and champagne. Yes, champagne. Champagne was actually far more common in the old west than you might think today. Even here in Cerro Gordo lots of champagne bottles were found and one reason was because you could water down whiskey or beer or pretty much whatever, but when you heard a champagne bottle pop you knew it was champagne. Now one thing I find really interesting about the whiskey and the other hard liquors is today the bartender pours you the drink, you're at their mercy of how much you get but back in the old west that wasn't always the case. "It was customary to belly up, nominate your 'pizen', drink fast, and make room for the next comer. The barkeep didn't put the liquor into glasses. If you asked for scotch or what-have-you, he'd grab the bottle in his right hand, a glass in his left, cross hands, and plunk the two down before you. You took a small or a big drink as you wished - for ten cents, the tariff didn't vary." Though I think it really depends on who the man behind the bar was because many bartenders especially if they own the saloon had a reputation for being sort of miserly. "In reviewing a rich and variegated personal experience of saloons,... the feature that stands out most prominently in my recollection is the hard, listless, unfeeling type of man who keeps saloons... The bonhomie, the goodfellowship supposed by some to prevail among saloon habitues, is totally lacking in saloon keepers. I never knew a saloon keeper who was a really good fellow." Though according to Mark Twain "The cheapest and easiest way to become an influential man and be looked up to by the community at large, was to stand behind a bar, wear a cluster-diamond pin, and sell whiskey." Now there were bartenders often called mixologists who were loved by their community and true bonvivants, and those bartenders typically made cocktails. Now not every saloon served cocktails but cocktails were
a lot more popular in the old west than you might think. They were usually made with whiskey, gin,
or brandy and had names like cobblers, smashes, julips, flips and crustas. They typically weren't as complicated as the cocktails of today but they were a great way to temper the flavor of poor liquor. They could also be an excellent tonic because very often they included bitters which were seen as medicinal and and supposedly they were. Though you should take the temperature of the room when ordering a cocktail because if you're in a place like Seattle or San Francisco
back in the day order a cocktail by all means but if you're in a little town like Cerro Gordo and
you order a hot gin fizz or a warm toddy you might be considered to have an educated thirst and
that was not a compliment, just stick to the whiskey neat. Now as different saloons offer
different drinks they also offer different foods because just like bars and restaurants today they ran the gamut. There were those saloons that were a single room with a handful of tables a few spatoon sawdust covered floors and a tinny piano in the corner. And then there were those that were multi-story buildings decorated with velvet curtains crystal chandeliers silver framed mirrors behind the bar, and can can dancers entertaining the men every night. For instance at the Occidental Saloon in Tombstone Arizona for Sunday dinner they offered things like chicken giblet soup, salmon,
leg of lamb with oysters, an assortment of cold meats, boiled meats, roast meat like suckling pig,
or pork with applesauce fash fashionable dishes like cream fricassee of chicken, and lapine domestique with desserts of custard and fruit pies and plum pudding. French cuisine had become all the rage in America at the time and that included the old west even over in Death Valley, which I think is that
way, there was there was a French restaurant in the 1800s which is just crazy, there is no French restaurant there now but for every one of these fancy saloons there were probably half a dozen that were more middle of the road. They offered merchant lunches which typically
cost 10 or 15 cents and included a beer along with a little stew or baked beans or roast beef
for mashed potatoes and gravy. Then there was the free lunch which was a staple of saloon culture throughout the country in the late 19th century. It wasn't exactly free essentially, what you did
was you went into the saloon and you bought a drink and for the price of that one drink you got full access to a lunch table. And usually the food that you got to eat was worth far more than the price of that drink, so it was incumbent on the bartender to make sure you kept drinking uh so they could make their money back. "The cheapest places for men are supposed to be the so-called free lunches, though this is probably a mistake; for these free lunches are attached to bars, and
it is expected that their guests shall patronize the bar sufficiently to pay all favors they get in the way of free food." San Francisco saloons were especially famous for their free lunches. In 1891 Rudyard Kipling who wrote 'The Jungle Book' came through San Francisco and went into a saloon "in which men with hats on the back of their heads were wolfing food from a counter. It was the institution of the 'free lunch' I had struck. You paid for a drink and got as much as you wanted to eat. For something less than a rupee a day a man can feed himself sumptuously in San Francisco even though he be a bankrupt. Remember this if ever you are stranded in these parts." Now just because it was free does not mean that it wasn't still quality food." One meal included "a monster silver boiler filled with a most excellent oyster soup, a round of beef that must have weighed at least
forty pounds vessels filled with potatoes, stewed mutton, stewed tomatoes and macaroni a la Francais." All that for the cost of a 15 cent drink which even with inflation would be like $4.25 basically for all you can eat, and you get a drink. The thing is especially in the larger cities where there was
a lot of competition the different saloons began upping the quality and the quantity of their food to outdo each other and eventually they made it so nobody could drink enough to to outweigh the cost of these free lunches, so all the saloons started losing money. As far back as November of 1854 the saloon owners of San Francisco got together to put a stop to these free lunches, but after two meetings they realized that even if just a few saloons held out and kept offering them then they would get all the patrons "So, free lunches are still on tap for the free-loaders." And there were indeed some freeloaders. It was not uncommon for people to just walk into the saloon, walk up to the lunch table, and start eating and "should this inexplicable lunch-fiend not happen to be called to drink, he devours whatever he can, and while the bartender is occupied tries to escape unnoticed." Of course in smaller towns like Cerro Gordo the free lunch usually wasn't so opulent partly because they didn't have as much competition with other saloons. Also what you got usually depended on who ran the saloon, who was the cook in the back or who was the owner. Like there were a lot of Chinese saloons that would serve chops suey, and chow mein very, very popular in the old west. Lots of
German saloons that had different sausages like bratwurst and and sauerkraut on the menu and then of course there were a lot of Mexican saloons because until 1848 California and most of the Southwest was Mexico, and so they would have pozole and tamales on the menu. And most all of the free lunches would have an assortment of things like cheeses and pickles and little cold meats, and clams, and oysters. Oysters were incredibly popular in America at the time as a whole but especially in the old west among cowboys and miners. You don't usually be watch an old western and see people
eating oysters but they did a lot. Sometimes they were fresh oysters, they were coming in on trains, and stuff from places like San Francisco but a lot of times especially in smaller towns that were further away from the trains you would have canned oysters. Then there was another category of food that was almost always sure to be available at a free lunch. These included "sundry pretzels, crackers, bits of cheese and sausage, and a salt pickle or a radish: a repast intended to provoke thirst rather than to satisfy hunger." Salty snacks are still common at bars today because they do make you more thirsty, and pretzels and salted peanuts those are still at many bars but one thing that didn't really make the leap to today is the sardellen a "limp, silver-coated minnow... a relative of the sardine...
saturated with brine and probably sold by the hogshead, became one of the staple stand-bys of every saloon catering to a reliable beer trade. They were saltier than the Seven Seas and were served whole. They were in great favor because a patron after he had taken a couple of them, draped across a slab of rye bread, had to rush to the bar and drink a lot of beer to get the taste out of his mouth. The sardellen were more than fish. They were silent partners." So now that we know what they drank and what they
ate at an old west saloon my question is how did they eat it? What did they look like when they were
eating because these were often communities where men outnumbered women 20, 30, 40 to 1 if not more, so table manners I'm thinking weren't so great. And luckily there was a rather prudish Englishman who
went into a saloon in Ogden, Utah in the 1880s and wrote about it. "...I saw a performance that filled me with astonishment and dismay. It was a man eating his dinner. And let me here remark with all possible courtesy that the American on his travels is the most reprehensible eater I have ever seen...
He never apparently chews his food, but dabs and pecks at the dishes one after the other with the rapidity which merely as a juggling trick might be performed in London to crowded houses every day... Every now and then he shuts his eyes, and strains his throat; this, I suppose, is when he swallows, for I have seen children getting rid of cake with the same sort of spasm." What I love is that next he includes a list of what the man is eating. "The mixture of his food, if it pleases him, does not
annoy me, for if a man likes to eat mouthfuls of huckleberries, bacon, apple-pie, pickled mackerel,
peas, mutton, gherkins, oysters, radishes, tomatoes, custard, poached eggs, (this is a bonafide meal copied from my notebook on the spot) in indiscriminate confusion, it has nothing to do with me." He says that this entire meal lasted all but 5 minutes then he grabbed a " handful of toothpicks and leans idly against the door post, as if time were without limit or end! The whole thing is a mystery to me." So to honor the rugged pioneers of the American West I feel that I should drop all semblance of civility as I eat my pork and beans which should be about ready. And here we are baked pork and beans from a wild west saloon. Bon appetit! [chomp] I love baked beans. Really good. They could be a little softer I will say that but they're not like too firm. I just like a soft- I like a softer bean but the flavor is outstanding. It's actually so much better than what you get in a can, even though there's like nothing to it, there's no onion, there's no spice or anything, It's just that molasses and the salt pork. That salt pork I think really adds a lot of flavor. Now I'm not a huge one to like just take- eat the pork from pork and beans 'cus it's usually just really fatty as is this but I'm going to take a bite just see just to see. That's really fatty. D: It's really good. Yeah these are really good. I'm going to be eating these tonight while I'm here. Mighty fine. So as always I will get this recipe up on the tasting history website tasting history.com which I made with help from today's sponsor Squarespace. Squarespace makes building a website so easy with their Dynamic Tools like their drag and drop technology for both desktop and mobile, and they have lots of templates which give you a wonderful base to start with and then you can customize it however you want and when you make a change on the desktop version it automatically makes it on the mobile version. And if you use your website for business Squarespace lets you create email campaigns to keep in contact with your customers so they are always apprised of new items or when there is a sale. So if you're looking to start a website go to squarespace.com for a free trial and then when you're ready to launch go to squarespace.com/tastinghistory to get 10% off of your first purchase of a website or domain, and I want to thank again Brent for letting me film in his
amazing town. Definitely go check out his fantastic channel Ghost Town Living and I will see you next time here again, I believe, on Tasting History.
