Vail Ranch meals included beef, beans, avocados and sausage

It is no surprise that The Vail Cattle Company served beef to their cowboys. Every cookhouse meal featured platters of steak, beans and tortillas with full-bodied coffee and pie on the side.

People said if you had business with the Vails, plan to arrive just before lunch so you would be invited to join them. Good food was a perk for working for the Vails. Cowhands had a comfortable place to sleep and enough food to fuel their exertions.

Vail cooks prepared carne seca, beef jerky, for men to carry in their saddlebags. A hunk of uncooked beef roast was pounded thin, seasoned with salt, pepper and ground chiles. The raw beef was hung over ropes or fences to dry. To keep flies and bees away, muslin was sometimes put over it. After the beef dried hard, it was cut in long pieces and bound with string. Carne seca was a portable snack that could also be made into a stew over a campfire, cooking it with lard, chiles, onions and tomatoes.

Pinto beans were prepared for fast cooking during cattle drives. Cooks would pre-boil beans to the point when the skins would break, then they would pour off the liquid and dry the beans on tarps in the sun and put them in cloth bags. Parboiling the beans reduced cooking time to less than half when they set up camp for the night. No one had to wait for hours to get their evening meals.

The California Avocado Association called Juan Murrieta "one of the introducers and earliest growers of avocados in California." Murrieta enjoyed gardening and experimented with avocados. Coming from Spain, he was intrigued by the many plants that grew in the Americas. He corresponded with a Senor Fuentes, a Wells Fargo station agent in Mexico, who sent him some avocados. From the seeds of the fruit, he produced hybrid varieties including the Murrieta Green, the Two-Pound Green and the Colorado.

Juan's grandson Thomas recalled the avocado trees at his grandparents' Los Angeles home.

"One of the trees was two-stories tall. His avocados were delicious and buttery in taste and texture. Some of the fruit was so large, it took both hands to hold it," he said.

Maybe we should set up an annual Guacamole Day celebration in honor of Juan Murrieta.

Charles Sumner owned the Mexican Rancho La Laguna, now known as Lake Elsinore. They let hundreds of hogs run loose on their property every day and corralled them every night. Sumner called them home from foraging with a large cow's horn made into a bugle. The hogs could hear it from a distance and would come racing home.

Each fall, Sumners killed hogs and made bacon. They would salt the meat and hang it in a large adobe brick room without windows. They made a fire of corncobs, closed the door and left the meat to cure. Lard was saved in 5-gallon cans.

Sumner wrote an account about making sausage at his ranch. One fall, female visitors insisted on making sausage. They rolled up their sleeves and cut the meat by hand and minced it fine. They tested and agreed on the seasonings.

They were ready to stuff the skins, but the men had discarded the intestines. After scolding the men, the ladies conferred. They got out the sewing machine and some white muslin and made a huge tube.

All the women helped to stuff the tube. Some shoveled the minced meat into one end, while others pushed it down to the end. Finally, it looked like a cow's tail and as firm, but there was meat left over. Someone decided to squeeze more in, so they pushed it in until, Bang! The bag exploded and sausage meat flew everywhere. It was in the ladies' hair, on their dresses, on their hands and in their ears, all over the dining room table, on the ceiling, floor and windows. Wherever they looked, there was sausage meat. Everything was covered by bits of sausage.

Long after the lady visitors left, the Sumners ate sausage meat until they were sick of it. As long as Sumner lived, he found bits of pork sticking on the ceiling of the dining room and on the table legs, and he remembered the women who all had opinions that contributed to the disaster.

Rebecca Marshall Farnbach is an author and co-author of several history books about the Temecula area. The books are available for purchase at the Little Temecula History Center or online from booksellers and at http://www.temeculahistoricalsociety.org.

For more information, contact Farnbach at [email protected].

Visit Rebecca's Amazon author page at http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B01JQZVO5E.