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One Christmas when my granddaughter
Amanda and her husband Clint and her daughter were visiting, we were
sitting around the breakfast table talking. I was telling her how I had
been the cook for our group of hunters on our deer lease at Llano,
Texas, on the old moss ranch. There were eight of us that hunted
together for 27 years.
Well, to say that I was ???the cook??? is
misleading. I was one of the cooks. Each member had his own specialty.
One member, Bob, would cook steaks when we had steaks. John??™s Specialty
was Mexican beans and cornbread. Larry??™s specialty was stew. Dan??™s
specialty was spaghetti. Tom??™s specialty was salad. He would make a big
lettuce and onion and tomato salad with his home made dressing in our
dish pan. Then he would walk around the table reach into the dish pan
with his hand grab a hand full of salad and throw it on each plate. We
all sure hoped he had washed his hands good.
I remember one time when Bob was going
to cook steaks and he almost burned the cabin down. He was late coming
in from his deer stand that night. We had a big bar-b-que pit on wheels.
That was what Bob cooked his steaks on. It was drizzling rain that night
so Bob rolled the bar-b-que pit under the front porch of the cabin.
Because he was late getting started, he wanted the charcoal to burn down
to coals in a hurry. He poured a half a gallon of gasoline on the
charcoal, stood back, and threw a match on it. Well, you can imagine
what happened. After we got the fire out, we went to bed that night
without any supper.
John liked his beans hot. Not with
fire but with pepper. One day he found some wild peppers growing out on
the deer lease. He picked some and put them in the pocket of his hunting
coat. That night when he cooked his beans he put a hand full of those
wild peppers in the pot. His beans weren??™t very good that night. They
did not have that hot zingy taste they usually had. He said he didn??™t
understand why either. He had used a whole handful of those wild peppers
in the beans. None of us ate much that night because the beans weren??™t
very good. But then I guess it was a good thing because we all got
Montazoma??™s revenge. Without a bathroom in the cabin, it was tough.
Needless to say, none of us got any sleep that night. No telling what
those wild peppers were, but I??™ll bet they weren??™t peppers.
Larry made some of the best stew you
ever laid a tongue to. He used whatever he could kill on the lease to
make his stew. Why, I remember him making stew out of squirrel, rabbit,
armadillo, nutria, deer, and once even a rattlesnake. It was all good.
Larry was a real artist when it came to making stew. One night as we
sat down to his prize stew the first bite was so hot with pepper we
could Hardly eat it. So we each buttered a piece of bread. We Would take
a bite of stew, a bite of buttered bread, and a drink of water. This was
the only way we could eat that Stew. We figured out later what must have
happened. Larry had been sampling Dan??™s spaghetti wine pretty heavy
while he was cooling and he peppered the stew twice. Maybe three times,
or more, who knows. Larry sure didn??™t.
Dan liked spaghetti. So he would cook
his spaghetti sauce and we would have a spaghetti dinner. He always
brought a case of good wine to go with dinner. I always thought a case
was a little much but that??™s what he would bring. One time we found out
why it took a whole case of wine for each dinner. Dan would sample the
wine as he made the sauce. He sampled the wine so much while he was
cooking the sauce that two bottles disappeared. By the time the sauce
was done, Dan
Was soused. When we served dinner that
night, he had to have help. Lot??™s of help! When we all sat down to eat,
it was our habit to bow our heads and one of us would ask the blessing.
That night, as Dan bowed his head he was so soused from the wine, his
head didn??™t stop bowing until his face was resting
In his plate of spaghetti and sauce.
Someone helped him sit back up. His face was covered with sauce and
spaghetti. He even had spaghetti hanging from one ear. We got him
cleaned up and put him to bed. Somehow, everyone lost their appetite for
spaghetti. So we all drank a bottle of wine apiece and went to bed.
Anyway, back to the specialty cooks.
My specialty was the fish fry. We had two stock tanks on our lease and
when it came time for a fish fry, I would go down to one of the tanks we
called ???moon tank??? because of it??™s shape. It was shaped like the moon in
it??™s last quarter. That is the best time to catch fish, in the last
quarter of the moon phase. But that??™s a whole nother story for a
different time.
Anyhow, I would catch a mess of fish,
clean them, and have them ready to fry that night for supper. Sometimes
when we would have a fish fry we would invite the hunters on the lease
next to ours to come eat with us. At those times there would be 16
people for supper. When we had that many people,
I would have two weevils to help me.
My granddaughter Amanda said ???da???, (that??™s what she called me) ???what do
you mean two weevils to help you? What is a weevil???? So I had to stop my
story of the specialty cooks to explain what a weevil was. My wife said
that??™s fine that you have to stop your story about specialty cooks
because you are so long winded if you keep on it??™s going to be lunch
time and I haven??™t even cleaned the dirty dishes off the table from
breakfast yet!
I explained a weevil is the nickname
of a cooks helper. Then I had to explain how a cooks helper got that
name. Back in the middle 1800??™s, when John Chisolm and his partner
Charles Goodnight started driving Texas Long Horns from the brush
country of South Texas to the Kansas railheads, he had to have a crew of
about 20 cowboys to drive the long horns. He designed and built the
first chuck wagon for his cook. With 20 cowboys, his cook had his hands
full driving the chuck wagon, building a fire and cooking for that big a
crew. He had two helpers to be able to get everything done. The helpers
would help drive the wagon, load and unload it, chop wood, and build the
fire. They even peeled potatoes. They did everything except the actual
cooking. One of the weevil??™s most important jobs was what got him his
nickname. Back in the trail driving days they brought their flour in 25
pound wooden kegs. The flour always had weevils in it and before the
cook could bake biscuits, one of the helpers would pick the weevils out
of the flour. Hence the nickname ???weevil???. That??™s how the cook??™s helper
got his name.
Amanda said, ???Da, you have only told
us about six of the eight people that were on your deer lease. What
about the other two???? ???Oh??? I said, ???that would be Don and David. They
didn??™t have any specialty, they were just weevils.???
(c)
1999 by Loren Moore |
