In my teens, during the 1950s, I spent summers on a hardscrabble West Texas ranch with the aunt and uncle who raised my dad. We had recently gotten electricity, courtesy of the Rural Electrification Administration. It improved our quality of life, but change took time and money, and for a while, we continued to cook on a wood-burning stove, pumped our water by hand from a cistern located just outside the ranch house kitchen window, and drove into town to wash our clothes in a boiler-fired outdoor laundromat. Saturday night baths were taken in a galvanized oval tub. Hot water came from a huge stove-top kettle.
Living a hard physical existence on the ranch changed my life. I remember much of it to this day, but perhaps most ingrained in my memory were the great outdoor meals and celebrations that we held when we gathered to socialize.
Meals Back Then
One such event was a Southern Baptist Church picnic. It was held on a prosperous member of the congregation’s ranch and coincided each year with the ripening of the corn crop. Members had cleared a picnic area adjacent to and above the high-water mark of a bottomland creek. A brick kitchen was built with donated labor, where you could cook a large animal on a spit, fry fish or chicken in large batches, and boil fresh-picked field corn that grew less than a hundred yards away.
After arriving, we jumped onto an aging pickup and bounced over the plowed rows of the field, hunting for the ripest corn. Others killed and plucked donated chickens, and men still wet from an immersion baptism ceremony stripped to shorts and seined the creek for catfish, bass, and crappies, which would be filleted, dredged in a cornmeal batter, and deep fried in bubbling, lard-filled iron cauldrons. Our organic kitchen waste found its way back to the cornfield. All the while, kids were running helter-skelter, yelling and playing games. It was heaven after sucking dust riding and pushing levers on a combine all week — row after row, mile after mile. Before we dug into our celebratory meal, which was on huge, wooden-plank communal tables, grace would be said and thanks given for our bounty. After supper and a dessert of huge slices of pecan pie made from wild creek-bottom tree nuts and free-range chicken eggs, members of the church choir would break into song.
Another memorable gathering was out at our municipal water-supply lake on the Fourth of July. Picnic lunches were spread out on gingham tablecloths, and an illicit beer from a bootlegger’s stash might be found chilled in a basket. My uncle was known to have said, “Vote dry for the Baptists and elect a wet sheriff.” When it was time to eat, we ran in anticipation to the barbecue concession, where you could buy a slab of juicy, caramelized roasted ox that had been cooked on a great spit for more than twenty-four hours. For an extra dime, you got an ear of corn smothered in butter and a scoop of collard greens. A band played patriotic songs, and white-suited politicians stood up one by one on an improvised stage and gave inspiring oratory, promising the world, just as they do today. Part of the fun was moving from group to group, again socializing, and taking our shoes off, rolling up our jeans, and dipping into the cool waters of Hoard’s Creek Reservoir next to our picnic ground.
Cooking for a Crowd Now
I don’t go to immersion baptisms these days, there are no roasted-ox barbecue concessions at Nevada County’s Fourth of July celebration, and gratefully, we leave the politicians off the stage. What we do have is some of the best communal picnic fare of the year, a patriotic concert, and heart-thumping emotion that swells up in your chest when it’s time for the vintage-plane fly-by, the singing of armed forces service-branch theme songs, and the joy of breaking bread with friends in large gatherings.
Today, 96 percent of our country lives in urban or near-urban situations, and most of the rural traditions that helped shape our land are rapidly disappearing. Perhaps that’s why we have such a good time when we do gather in outdoor settings and share meals with lots of other folks. One of the challenges in doing so is cooking for a large group.
Members of the Gold Country Fly Fishers like these gatherings so much that we have an annual Hamburger Night meeting, where our program involves nothing more than cooking a hundred or so cheeseburgers and sitting around and telling tall tales, usually about fish that got away. It’s amazing how many people will show up for a free hamburger.
Another event is our tri-tip and chicken barbecue and potluck. It is one of our best-attended events. A committee buys and cooks the food. It is an honor to be included in the pit crew. A generous member has been known to bring a magnum of Rombauer chardonnay to go with the appetizers and a hearty cabernet for the tri-tips. We serve a hundred folks or more, if you count the ravenous basketball guys playing on the court next to the barbeque pavilion. For years, we have gradually raised the bar, and the dishes are outstanding. Everything has to be homemade — perhaps it’s your mother’s or grandmother’s special dish — and the more ethnicity reflected in the food, the better. How do we handle large groups? For Hamburger Night, we bring in a four-by-eight-foot adjustable-grate barbecue. It all starts with a Costco run the day before, then a setup crew, a prep crew, and a four-man cooking team made up of repeat volunteers pulls it off. I load the perishables into ice chests at Costco and leave them stored this way overnight until I back my truck up to the barbecue pavilion the evening of our event. That way, we don’t have to load, unload, and reload. For the cooking, I’ve tried mesquite, but prefer the cooler, more even-burning Kingsford charcoal briquettes. When our club was smaller, I donated to a local firehouse and was gladly loaned back the use of a portable barbeque grill. For our annual tri-tip and chicken barbecue and potluck, we rent a city park pavilion and use their built-in barbecue grates, so cooking temperatures can be tailored to individual beef and chicken requirements.
I’ve done burgers for fifty or more at K-Arrow Ranch out of Oakdale with the crew using nothing more than two Webber kettles and foldable tables, again from Costco. Sometimes I use my fishing boat as a chuck wagon trailer and look like a Dust Bowl escapee leaving Oklahoma.
My wife and I are members of the Northern California chapter of the Antique and Classic Boat Society, which puts on a series of summer events called “Woodie Whoopies,” named for our passion for preserving historic wooden boats. The organization has a trailer that holds barbeque kettles, charcoal, utensils, folding tables, and so on, to the lakes where these events are held. They are potluck, and members bring meats of their choice to grill. It’s high-quality food and creative table settings to match the theme of the event, all in a lakeside setting. Many arrive in throaty-sounding boats.
My fly-fishing club likes outdoor gatherings so much that we have one in late spring at a Lake Davis fish-out, another in the fall at Frenchmans Lake, and a group chili feed at Crowley Lake. Logistics and food safety are more of a challenge in these campground situations, but nothing like what our pioneers had to deal with. I read several accounts in Home on the Range: A Culinary History of the West, by Cathy Luchetti, in which wagon train members had to abandon their heavy iron stoves because of problems with their weight. One diary account said that the loss was no big deal. They just dug a three-foot by one-foot-wide trench and used it like a stove, with cast iron frying pans and Dutch ovens straddled across the opening. The fuel, often brush or buffalo chips, didn’t burn as well in the stoves anyway. In unimproved campsites, you can build an above-ground stone trench and cook in much the same way.
However, campground hosts don’t like the idea of a trench, so I made a simple grate to fit over a Forest Service campfire ring to grill larger amounts of food. In a moment of wisdom, though, I drove up to White Cloud Campground east of Nevada City and found out that there are three different sizes of campfire rings in California. Now we use iron stock to support two K-Mart rectangular grills that sit on the campfire ring rim. We can grill tri-tips for forty on this simple setup. I’m working on an adjustable version for this year’s trout season.
Don’t overlook Dutch ovens. Fire pits provide the coals, and four or five dishes cooked in the larger cast iron ovens will serve a crowd. A few years ago, I attended the Smokin’ in the Oaks barbecue contest in Penn Valley. A commercial caterer provided dinner for the contestants, many of whom tended their slow-cooking meats all night. A cowboy-type cook used a long slit trench and fifteen large Dutch ovens, some placed directly over the trench and others hung above on iron rods.
When I was a member of Tri Valley Fly Fishers in Livermore, we held a spring bass-fishing tournament year after year. We drew more than regular meeting attendance numbers for this lakeside event because it was so much fun. One of our members borrowed a large adjustable commercial grill from his company and brought it to the lake in his pickup. Plan B was to rent one and haul it up. The grill gave us the ability to do sixty-five steaks, grilled corn, chili beans, and garlic bread. An adjustable grilling surface does wonders for food quality.
Save money by buying entire Costco beef loin or New York strips and hand-cutting your own steaks, or work out a deal with your local butcher. They usually accommodate large orders. These strips come in heavy-duty, sealed, leakproof plastic that facilitates food-safe transport. My butcher seals tri-tip roasts in vacuum packs along with a marinade. It eliminates the need for prep vessels and helps maintain food safety, in that the meat can go directly to a grilling surface with a minimum of handling.
It was at these outings that we coined the term “garbage bag salad.” Prewashed salad greens, again from one of the bigbox stores for best pricing, goes into a large plastic bag, along with a bottle of salad dressing, sun-dried tomatoes, garlic-ginger wonton strips, and the kitchen sink. Shake it up and you have a surprisingly good, quick-to-make salad for a large crew. For a rustic touch, serve the salad directly out of the trash bag.
Don’t forget fresh summer corn on the grill. At Lake Davis, I buy my corn at Romero’s Friday Farmer’s Market where you hit Highway 70 coming from Sierraville. Another thought that has worked well for our groups is a large stew. One of our members is CEO of a steak-house chain. He brought one of his chefs on an outing, and not only did the man turn out a fabulous beef bourguignon using industrial-sized cooking pots on a free-standing, high-BTU gas burner, he caught his first rainbow trout on a fly. For groups of up to twenty, I cook in advance a hearty Spanish pork stew using onions, roasted red peppers, and white beans, or an Irish beef stew using onions, carrots, and mushrooms. I transport it in leak-proof vinyl containers and warm the stew in a huge Dutch oven hung on an iron cooking tripod over the coals of the fire pit. All you need is some fresh artisan bread, grilled polenta triangles, and a hearty zin.
A Communal Meal
My dad was a cowboy early in his life, and I still relish memories of his bedtime stories about riding fence for a week at a time, roundup, and working on threshing crews. Riding fence was a lonely job with simple meals, but roundup brought neighbors from miles away to help, and many mouths had to be fed. Threshing crews moved north across Texas into Oklahoma and Kansas as spring sunshine spurred the growth and maturation of the grain. Huge industrial chuck wagons followed the crews and provided hearty meals loaded with thousands of calories that fueled hardy men and women who toiled all day. On the bigger ranches and in logging camps, there was always a bunkhouse crew that needed to be fed. A good cook was recognized for his cooking abilities and was rewarded with private sleeping quarters in the cook shack, away from the rowdy common housing. Those who didn’t scrape their plates clean and place them in the communal “wreckpan” were disliked. It’s much the same today in our fishing camps. We remember who pitched in and helped. That’s part of the fun, and the work is easy when everybody contributes.
Cooks don’t forget, either. In 2000, I journeyed with a friend to a remote part of western Kamchatka to fly fish the unexplored Kolpakova River. I helped bus the dishes to the “wreckpan,” and months of studying Russian paid off when our camp cook rewarded me with extra blueberry pancakes and second helpings of our precious meat entrees. She appreciated a smile and my Russian greeting, “Good morning! These are delicious!”
