The Familiar-Looking Cut Of Meat That Was A Cowboy Staple For Most Meals

While the media loves to portray the Wild West as a time full of heroic gunslingers and forbidden romances in merchant towns, making a life in the Old West was incredibly hard. Cowboys spent months moving their herds and, in doing so, much of their time away from home. Life on the road meant that food was scarce, and even if a drive's cook could whip up better meals, there was only so creative one could get in the wild, which is why salt pork became such a staple for cowboys at the time.

Salt pork looks fairly similar to a cut of bacon, but this slab of pork is made from the fattiest part of a pig (often the belly or back) and then cured in salt and dried for long journeys. It was salt pork's impressive lifespan that made this cut such a popular traveling meat since it was able to withstand the harsh conditions of the road without spoiling. Cowboys would reach for salt pork when the circumstances didn't allow for beef, which would be preferable if they needed a calorie and fat boost in their diet. Salt pork was an especially popular breakfast item for cowboys, among other campfire meals that built the American West; though it wasn't unheard of to find the meat in other parts of a cowboy's diet, either.

Bacon may share similarities with salt pork, but the distinct difference between the two is that while bacon moves on to a smokehouse for an additional boost of flavor, a slab of salt pork is only cured before it's ready to be sliced and diced into thick pieces. Back in the day, cooks would preserve the pork by quite literally leaving it to sit in a mountain of salt until it became shelf stable. Due to the nature of its creation, this meant that the meat often had to be soaked in several buckets of water to wash away excess salt, or else risk the cowboys getting sick.

For the cowboys and cooks of the Old West, salt pork may have been used alongside a breakfast of beans, biscuits, or any other canned goods a cook picked up along their travels. Salt pork also makes a tasty addition to stews and soups. Road food of the time was also heavily influenced by Mexican vaqueros, which can be exemplified in this cowboy bacon recipe, where salt pork could easily be swapped for bacon. While it can be eaten all on its own without any frills, some people prefer cooking salt pork with leafy greens or even adding it into stir-fries.