For cowboys mealtime was often very routine. While out on long cattle drives the staples of the diet were beef, beans, dried fruit, coffee, and sourdough bread or hard biscuits. As one cowboy named Lee D. Leverett said in an interview "We would have beans and beef for breakfast, then beef and beans for dinner, and at supper time we would get some more beef and beans."
Delicacies like wild game occasionally spiced up the menu. Your cowboy life would have been improved greatly if you had a chuck wagon in your party. Invented by a man named Charles Goodnight in 1866, these mobile kitchens kicked the quality of the food cowboys would enjoy while out on the trail up a few notches, but the offerings were still spartan compared to what they might enjoy back in town.
If you lived in a proper frontier town or settlement you might have had access to considerably more luxurious fare. In True West Magazine Sherry Monahan notes that despite the isolation and difficulty of importing ingredients, they liked to keep up with dining trends out west, and as French cuisine became all the rage in America in the late 19th century, so too did duck a l'orange end up on the menu at restaurants on the frontier.
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