In the days of the TV western ”Wagon Train”, Rawhide”, and Bonanza”, and more recently in movies like “Brokeback Mountain” or “Open Range”, cowboy protagonists huddled around the campfire, warming their hands on tin cups of their favorite drink. In cattle drive movies, the drink was normally brewed by a feisty, older, chuck wagon driver called “Cookie”.
A barista, Cookie was not. Yet the Old American West was the domain of cowboys fueled on caffeine, in a part of the country where even Starbucks has yet to make inroads.
Cowboy coffee was made from whatever beans were available at the last town on the trail. How, exactly, was that cowboy coffee brewed?
Amazingly, the technique developed by generations of cowboys over thousands of square miles of wide open spaces was not so very different from the coffee brewing method of the ancient Turks. Turkish coffee, extremely strong, deeply flavored coffee, was prepared in small amounts, by floating extremely finely ground coffee on water in a small metal kettle, and heating it in the hot sand. When it foamed, it was removed from the sand, and when the foam subsided it was reheated. The process was repeated three or four times before the foam and grounds were stirred down into the water and the coffee was served, black.
The cowboy’s coffee preparation, less refined, and resulting in something resembling steaming black mud, consisted of boiling a gallon of water, throwing one-and-a-half cups of freshly ground coffee and one egg shell onto it, letting it return to a boil, and then removing it from the fire.
After two minutes, the cowboy, or Cookie, added enough cold water to settle the grounds; they might, or might not, be removed.
Convenience came 1865, when Pittsburgh’s Arbuckle’s Grocery coated their roasted coffee beans with and egg and sugar glaze, sealing their flavor so that even months under the prairie sun would not diminish it.
And they even added a peppermint stick to each bag. On occasions when Cookie was too tired to grind the beans, he simply bribed one of the cowpokes with the candy.
That’s one smart Cookie.
