The Great Outdoors : Old West Trail Food

On duty, Sam Arnold is a mild-mannered, well-respected restaurateur. Off-duty, he is the Indiana Jones of gourmets, armed with pots and pans and a fierce desire to learn about the foods that tantalized settlers of the West.

Arnold has sampled buffalo, raw liver and kidneys. He has even roasted moose nose over an open fire in his quest to duplicate dishes that were popular among the pioneers, Indians and soldiers living in the West in the 1800s.

“I hardly ever cook anything the same way twice,” says Arnold, who has written several historical cookbooks, including the recent “Eating Up the Santa Fe Trail.”

“I read recipes to see what’s going on, to see what they’re thinking about. I can visualize what it’s going to taste like and look like. I can taste it in my mouth by reading the recipe.”

For the past 40 years, Arnold, 63, has pursued the epicurean past by gleaning information from thousands of diaries, journals and newspapers written in the 1800s. In well-equipped kitchens at home and at his restaurant, The Fort, he has tested hundreds of recipes, whipping up concoctions designed to re-create the culinary past.

“You have to be authentic,” he says. “I’m always trying to think, ‘How would it be? What would it have tasted like?’ ”

Arnold grew up in Pittsburgh, graduated from Yale and spent several years in advertising, public relations and journalism. He worked in Pennsylvania and New Mexico before settling in Denver, where he tried sports car racing, and then took on British Motor Corp. as an advertising client to help pay the bills.

In the late ‘50s, Arnold and his wife, Carrie, who illustrated his latest book, decided to move to the suburbs to raise their children in a rural atmosphere. On seven wooded acres in Turkey Creek Canyon west of Denver, he began his journey into the past with a dream to build an authentic replica of Bent’s Fort, a garrison in southeastern Colorado along the Santa Fe Trail.

Captivated by the two-story structure with big round towers and a courtyard, Arnold wanted to turn the structure into a restaurant and a home. The Fort, which opened for business in 1962, is made of 80,000 adobe bricks and wood hand-planed to eliminate machine marks. The main floor is adobe, with 15 gallons of ox blood worked in with brooms to create a hard, smooth surface. Other floors are made of cement the color of dried blood.

Arnold’s zest for authenticity has carried over into his cookbooks as well as into the foods he serves at The Fort. His menu features dishes such as roast buffalo marrow bones, “The Bowl of the Wife of Kit Carson” (a type of stew) and “Elk Medallions, St. Verain” (broiled loin steaks with wild huckleberry sauce on the side).

Arnold finds recipes in his collection of 18th- and 19th-Century cookbooks and in stories about pioneers who crossed the West in wagon trains and the soldiers stationed in the forts. He has visited sites along the Santa Fe Trail from its start at Independence, Mo. to its end 780 miles later at Santa Fe, N.M.

From his research, Arnold has learned that the settlers were a hardy lot, subsisting on a diet of starch and animal fat. The pioneers who joined wagon trains, he says, usually started out with a barrel of flour, 150 pounds of salt pork or bacon, 100 pounds of dried hulled corn, 25 pounds of green apples or peaches, a barrel of molasses, vinegar, and a keg of beef suet as a butter substitute. Those who operated freight wagon trains subsisted on coffee, bread, salt pork and beans or cornmeal.

Delicacies included oysters, which were packed in tins in the early years and later shipped fresh, and alcoholic beverages such as French Champagne and claret.

“They put in 12- to 14-hour days, and they walked a lot and they exercised a lot,” Arnold says. “Things were tough and hard . . . so their diet was much heavier in animal fat than any of our diets are today, even the McDonald’s generation.

“You can’t really live on fat, pork and cornmeal without a lot of nutritional damage being done. They would do it all winter long, with a few slabs of salt pork and a big barrel of cornmeal.”

For Western Indian tribes, food staples included cornmeal, sunflower-seed meal, acorns, and deer, buffalo and dog, he says. Indian delicacies included buffalo hide shavings cooked with chokecherries.

With the Sante Fe Trail cookbook published, Arnold has begun work on another one, a translation of a cookbook written in 1780 by Geronimo Pelayo, a Mexican priest who worked in a monastery. “What I’m doing is taking the recipes and ingredients and what I know about how they cooked in those days, the kinds of pots, etc., and trying to adapt it for a modern American kitchen,” Arnold says.

In the course of his research, he’s tasted just about everything over the years. “I can tell you the worst thing I’ve ever eaten, in my estimation, and that was fish’s stomach,” he says. “It was sort of slippery and jelly and fishy and that was the hardest thing to eat. It was not tasty.

“I’ve eaten lots of raw liver and raw kidney, and those are fine hot out of the animal. I can do that, and do it cold,” he says. Beaver tail was “sort of like chewing solid chunks of gelatin. I didn’t care much for it.”

And that two- to three-foot moose nose, roasted over an open fire and then boiled, is “remarkably light,” Arnold says. “The meat itself is a very long-grain. There’s a lot of cartilage, and it doesn’t have much flavor to speak of. It’s sort of like pickled pig’s foot.”

When the Indians were introduced to grain and European cooking methods, they put them together in an unexpected way to create fry bread, which is basted with hot oil while it fries so that it puffs up. We usually hear of the Pueblos and Navajos making fry bread but, Arnold explains, it’s a Plains Indians bread too.

FRY BREAD

4 cups flour

4 teaspoons baking powder

2 teaspoons salt

2 heaping teaspoons sugar

1 1/3 cups lukewarm water

Oil for deep frying

Mix flour, baking powder, salt and sugar. Stir in water to form dough. Roll out 1/2 inch thick on lightly floured board, cut into rectangles and deep fry in hot oil until golden brown. Drain on paper towels. Makes about 6 to 8 servings.

This is a famous prairie Indian dish, originally made with dried corn on the cob (if you have it, substitute three ears for the ear of fresh corn), dried prairie potatoes ( Psoralea esculenta , a small wild tuber tasting very slightly like turnip; the recipe would need 24 of them) and a carrot-like root called commote. Make the jerked meat by slicing flank steak with the grain into thin strips, rubbing with lime juice and pepper and drying on a rack. Arnold learned this recipe from an Indian friend named Loves Horses.

WASH-TUNK-ALA

2 pounds jerked meat, cut in 1-inch chunks

1 ear fresh corn, cut in 1-inch disks

4 large red potatoes

2 carrots, sliced

6 green onions, cut in 1/2-inch lengths

1 large dried red chile, cut in chunks

2 teaspoons salt

3 tablespoons cornmeal

Pepper

Place jerky, corn, potatoes, carrots, green onions and salt in pot with water to cover. Blend cornmeal with cold water until smooth and stir in. Simmer 2 hours. Makes 4 to 6 servings.

Recipes from “Eating Up the Santa Fe Trail,” by Sam’l P. Arnold (University Press of Colorado: 1990).