Pinto Beans and Bacon: The Quintessential Cowboy Meal

I am sitting on the back of a horse, urging a herd of Hereford cows and calves to move along, leaving no strays behind. These creatures are leaving their winter quarters near a dried-up salt lake in a California desert valley and heading to the grassy mountain pastures for the summer.

The work isn’t too taxing, riding back and forth behind them, encouraging slow, sure, forward motion. We need to get the cows from one end of the valley to the other, and we have all day. Our goal is to push them up the canyon by late afternoon so they can settle in for the night.

Then we’ll get to eat. Lunch was a couple of sandwiches and an apple. Dinner tonight will be the high point of the day.

For the first night of the drive, the menu is lusher than usual. We have hauled along some perishables. There’s fresh milk, butter and eggs. A parcel of T-bone steaks. We even have a watermelon (the rind is saved for making a batch of pickles). Living it up before the canned food regimen begins.

I’m not destined to be a real cowboy, but as a wet-behind-the-ears summer hand, it sure feels like a good way to live. I admire the elders — a seasoned old-time cowboy, his no-nonsense wife, a silent, smiling hired ranch hand — who have each seen enough roundups and cattle drives to feel at home in this high Sierra landscape, experiencing the rhythms and routines of a seasonal off-grid life.

Lazing by the campfire under clear skies with the faint sound of a running creek and the evening wailings of a coyote or two, as twilight turns into darkness, they know how to savor the setting. But they know very well too, about the constant labor involved, from fetching water to mending a fence, and they know the daily highs and lows of feeding the crew.

Now, decades later, when I conjure the image of the quintessential spartan cowboy meal, whether breakfast or dinner, there’s a big pot of pinto beans at the center. Not fancy and not spicy. Plain, brothy and eaten from a tin pie plate. There’s cowboy coffee — loose grounds simmered in a giant coffee pot (you throw in an egg shell for some reason). With luck, there’s cornbread from a carefully tended Dutch oven. Dessert is a can of peaches.

Somehow, though, everything cooked on a mountain in a beat-up pot over a fire made from scavenged wood tastes better.

Recipes: Simple Pinto Beans With Bacon | More Beans