The cost of eggs, then and now
In 1900, the Buffalo Bill Wild West used 3,360 eggs--for every breakfast!
The sticker shock from my most recent trip to the grocery store to get some eggs got me thinking about how many eggs the Buffalo Bill Wild West needed to feed its army of employees while the show was on the road—280 dozen eggs and 110 quarts of coffee—every day!
For more statistics about that enormous undertaking, I turned to Steve Friesen’s book, Galloping Gourmet: Eating and Drinking with Buffalo Bill.
To cook a breakfast for its 850 to 1,500 employees in the late 1800s, the cooking staff prepared 110 quarts of coffee, 125 quarts of tea, 150 pounds of bacon, and 120 dozen eggs. The coffee was brewed in a hundred-gallon pot, big enough to dance in.
In today’s world 120 dozen eggs would cost close to $1,000. Even if the show could negotiate a discounted price, which they usually did with local merchants in advance of the show’s arrival, the chunk of change spent just on eggs 125 years ago would have been sizeable.
In 1900 the show was larger and required even more food, including 280 dozen eggs. That’s 3,360 eggs. For every breakfast.
Everything was prepared in large quantities, according to Friesen, and for dinners that could include “one-yard-square meat pies, 350 square tarts ‘as big as your hand.’” Three kinds of vegetables were served with every dinner. The show employed two butchers to handle as many as a dozen cattle a day to feed its hungry employees.
A British columnist reported in 1903 that when the Wild West was at Madison Square Garden the troupe consumed “five hundred loaves of bread, five hundred bowls of soup, two thousand cups of tea and coffee, and a ton of meat and vegetables” daily.
And, all that food was not just set out buffet-style. No, at every show canvasmen, the men who erected and took down all the tents, set up the mammoth dining tent, and when dinner was served a flag was run up a pole on top of the tent. Long tables were set with cloth tablecloths and utensils, and waiters rushed around filling orders.
Buffalo Bill sat at the head table with the show’s leadership and special guests. Friesen reports that they dined off china and silver utensils. The cowboys, Indians, and performers ate off stoneware plates with pewter utensils. Support personnel, like the canvasmen, had their own tables and ate off graniteware plates with metal spoons.
Despite those differences, “everyone received the same food.” And good food it was. Buffalo Bill hired the best chefs and caterers, and a crew of 30 men used four large ranges for cooking. Even more amazing was that a breakfast of that magnitude could be served one hour after the cooking apparatus arrived at the show grounds.
The food service of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West was often compared to feeding an army, but it differed in one respect. Buffalo Bill brought his appreciation of fine dining to his shows, making sure that his employees were not only well fed and healthy, but that they enjoyed the best quality food available. One reporter noted, “It must be said that Mr. Cody looks well after the inner man and his necessities.”
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Friesen has also included recipes in his book, and here’s what he has to say about coffee, with an aside about hardtack. (Buffalo Bill wasn’t known to serve hardtack at his breakfasts.)
“Hardtack was usually served with coffee, into which it was dipped. While hardtack was less attractive to insects than other breads, it could become infested with weevils. If soaked for a few minutes in coffee, not only did it soften up, making it easier to eat, but any weevils or other insects that were in the bread would float to the surface. They could then be skimmed from the coffee which would be consumed with the hard bread.”
A recipe in a military manual from Fort Laramie called for: “adding three pounds of ground coffee to twelve gallons of boiling water. This was left on the fire for a few minutes, then removed and a half gallon of cold water added. After the dregs dropped to the bottom, about ten minutes, the liquid was poured off and six pounds of sugar were added to sweeten it. This provided one pint of coffee for each of one hundred men.”
Friesen notes that “to make a similar coffee in a smaller quantity and more to modern tastes, acquire some Arbuckle Ariosa Coffee. Perfected right after the Civil War, Arbuckle Coffee became popular as an alternative to the tedious process of roasting and grinding one’s own coffee beans.”
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Cowboy/Cowgirl Lingo of the Day
Griddle cakes: called pancakes today, they were standard fare for breakfasts at Buffalo Bill’s Wild West. The recipe in Galloping Gourmet says they were cooked on the large, flat frying surface of the stove that was central to the show’s range wagon. Eighty pounds of flour were used each day for the griddle cakes, which were smothered with 10 gallons of syrup over the course of one week.
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Source:
Galloping Gourmet: Eating and Drinking with Buffalo Bill, by Steven Friesen, University of Nebraska Press.
You also might want to check out Jill Stanford’s book, The Cowgirl's Cookbook: Recipes for Your Home on the Range.