Breakfast in the Old West

As restless Americans and newcomers moved west, away from the Eastern Seaboard, new challenges and new situations helped to develop new foods. Bishop’s bread, a kind of crumb coffee cake, was supposed to have been invented on the Kentucky frontier one Sunday morning when the circuit preacher dropped in unexpectedly for breakfast (although a similarly named sweet bread existed in Europe). But not everything was as appetizing as bishop’s bread. The Englishman Sir Richard Burton commented on a meal he was served in pioneer Nebraska:

• Our breakfast was prepared in the usual prairie style: First the coffee—three parts burnt beans—which had been duly ground to a fine powder and exposed to the air, lest the aroma should prove too strong for us….then the rusty bacon, cut into thick slices, was thrown in the fry-pan…. Thirdly, antelope steak, cut off a corpse suspended for the benefit of flies outside, was placed to stew within influence of the bacon’s aroma. Lastly came the bread, which of course should have been cooked first. (Graber, 1974)