High on the Hog_ A Culinary Journey From Africa to America - Jessica B. Harris [69]
One dish that most recalled with relish was Son of a Gun Stew, also known as Son of a Bitch Stew. It, like the apple pies made from dried apples and dough rolled out with a beer bottle, was a staple of the cowboy cooks. The stew was prepared when a nursing calf was slaughtered en route and cooked up from pieces of the tenderloin with the addition of the fresh heart, liver, tongue, and brains of the animal well seasoned in a rich broth. The essential item that gave Son of a Gun Stew its distinctive taste was the young calf’s “marrow gut” (a tube connecting the two stomachs of a calf that is filled with a marrowlike substance when a calf is on a milk diet). It added a flavor of rennin-curdled milk to the stew. For some, the use of a “skunk egg” (as onions were designated) was essential; for others, anathema. Some think that the dish was learned from the Comanche, but its use of innards and the fact that a sizable number of African Americans were chuck wagon cooks may indicate an African hand in the pot. What is certain is that from the molasses that seasoned the bread puddings, to the barbecuing of antelope ribs, to the ineffable spicing of the dishes, black cowboy cooks brought an African culinary hand to the pots of the West. They also subtly brought African American foods into the diets of Texas cowboys. As one food historian says, “Put together meat off the hoof, Mexican and Upper South foodways, the cooking tradition of the blacks, and you have West Texas eats.”
The freedom of the wide open range beckoned the men who became cowboy cooks. But while the job of cowboy cook guaranteed freedom, the job did not generate great fortunes. The West, though, did offer ample opportunity for those with initiative and creativity to create sizable wealth. Following the 1848 discovery of gold at Sutter’s Mill, a few blacks headed to California hoping to strike it rich, but the forty-niners were almost exclusively white males. Most of the blacks who traveled there sought their fortune by providing services to the newly minted millionaires. Some of them were women hoping to take advantage of the male-to-female ratio in post-Gold-Rush San Francisco, which was 158 to 100. Domestic services were much needed by the developing elite, and the highest wages in the early years of the gold rush went to female domestics. Black, Asian, and white women ran laundries and boarding houses and worked as domestic servants and seamstresses. In this world, one African American woman transformed her culinary skills and domestic acumen into great personal wealth; her name was Mary Ellen Pleasant.
Although Mary Ellen Pleasant is known to history as “Mammy” Pleasant, in her lifetime she was known to have refused the title, on more than one occasion saying, “DON’T call me Mammy.” Pleasant led a life that is the stuff of an eighteenth-century picaresque novel, crisscrossing the country in a series of adventures. Enough rumor and innuendo surround the shade of Pleasant to fuel a multipart miniseries. It almost seems as though the only hard information we have about her life is that she lived in San Francisco and made her fortune there.
Pleasant was given to embroidering the facts of her birth. It is thought that she was born sometime between 1814 and 1817. She turns up in Nantucket around 1827 working as an indentured servant for a storekeeper named Hussey After she served out the terms of her bond, she remained with Hussey and through him became active in abolitionist causes. She continued to work with the Underground Railroad and ultimately made her way to Gold Rush California, arriving by 1852.
Mary Ellen Pleasant passed for white in California and used her first husband’s name, Smith, among the whites. She found a job working for Case and Heiser, a company of commission