[Sca-cooks] S.O.B Stew

[Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius]

Also sprach Michael Gunter:
>>Uhm...what is it?
>>--maire
>
>I'll leave it to Master A to provide the details but Sonnavab**** stew was
>made after a cow was slaughtered to feed the wranglers. It's basically a
>stew made from the innards. Heart, liver, tripe, stomach...whatever.
>
>It's been a very long time since I read the recipe but it sounded pretty
>icky. And a standard of chuckwagon cuisine.
>
>I also recall that it would be renamed to "honor" whatever person the
>cook happened to be angry at at the time.  Most often a boss or a
>governor.

That's about right. One version of the story behind it is that it's 
made from the parts of the slaughtered animal that won't keep, and 
only a real sonofabitch would eat it. It's also been speculated that 
since organ meats are so high in vitamins and minerals compared to 
muscle meat (they're also significantly higher in cholesterol, as a 
rule), cowboys on the range might begin to display various food 
cravings, mood swings, and generally bad behavior. When they became 
real SOB's, it was time to cook up some SOB, which cured them until 
next time.

Whatever the explanation, it's pretty much considered a test of 
manhood (much more so, to my mind, than haggis, which is ground up 
and pretty much resembles some forms of Jewish kishka, and not much 
more strongly flavored than, say, the average liverwurst).

There's a fairly standard SOB recipe here:

http://www.thewildwest.org/cowboys/cow_west_facts/trail_recipes/son.html

Be careful if you do a Web search for SOB Stew -- there's a recipe 
proliferating many different Web sites (probably the winner of some 
silly contest) for Son Of A Son Of A Bitch Stew; it's made with 
muscle meat (beef chuck) and vegetables, and doesn't resemble SOB in 
any way, really.

Real SOB, as best as I can recall, is pretty much a mix of different 
organ meats cooked in water, or maybe a little tomato juice if 
palatable water is scarce (which seems to be how tomatoes entered the 
canonical Texas chili recipe when wiser heads had tried to prevent 
this catastrophe ;-)  ), possibly with onions, until all the meats 
are tender, the flavors blended, and some of the gelatin from the 
meats have thickened the broth a bit. Both black and red pepper 
appear as seasonings.

Typical meats would include calves' liver, heart, tongue, 
sweetbreads, with perhaps some muscle meat in there to stretch it all 
a little (but this, I think, is frowned upon), and most serious 
authorities agree it's not real SOB without the margut or marrowgut, 
which is a secondary esophagus connecting two of the four stomachs of 
certain ruminants (this appears in Elizabethan recipes as "mugget", 
BTW, commonly used in pies). It's kind of like a gelatinous tube made 
out of tripe-ey stuff, which you cut into rings that look a little 
like calamari ready for frying. The reason you want this to be 
calves' innards is because ideally, the margut of an unweaned calf is 
best -- when the animal starts eating grass, it becomes tough, like 
the lining of a bird's crop -- so if you're going to make SOB, you 
want a young animal, and presumably using the same animal for all the 
organs needed is a pretty straightforward and sensible plan.

Somewhere I have a copy of Frank X. Tolbert's "A Bowl Of Red", which, 
I believe, has a long and detailed recipe. If I find the book before 
I forget about this thread, I'll see about posting the recipe...

Adamantius