The Texas Cowboy Kitchen

Book excerpt: A cookbook with essays, photos and innovative recipes celebrating the mythology, culture and food of the American cowboy. As at home on the coffee table as it is on the kitchen counter, this definitive cowboy cookbook features historical essays and photographs depicting life on the Chisholm Trail alongside fresh takes on cowboy cuisine. Cowboy-turned-chef Grady Spears reinvents chuckwagon dishes from Barbecued Quail Tamales to Pork Tenderloin with Watermelon Salsa to Butterscotch Pie by elevating them to haute cowboy cuisine. Equal parts cookbook, history lesson, and photographic essay, The Texas Cowboy Kitchen blends Spears's distinctive culinary recipes with June Naylor's narrative of life on the Chisholm Trail and Erwin E. Smith's award-winning black-and-white cowboy photography and four-color culinary shots. Divided into 10 chapters ranging from “Campfire Cocktails” to “Things You Don't Rope” to “Chuckwagon Secrets,” The Texas Cowboy Kitchen contains 100 original recipes perfected at Spears's renowned former restaurants, the Chisholm Club in Fort Worth, Texas, and the Nutt House Restaurant in Granbury, Texas—both of which satisfied wags of hungry customers. “Grady's probably the only guy I know who could dress up a Frito pie and make it look pretty, and the only cook who'd think of marinating skirt steak in Dr. Pepper. . . . [He is equally] at ease in a worn pair of leather chaps as he is wielding a saute pan..” —Nolan Ryan, Baseball Hall of Fame pitcher and lifelong cowboy