Cowboy Coffee, Morning Fires

Last week I posted Sour Dough Flapjacks Cowboy Style and this cowboy coffee just has to go with that recipe. The old speckled pot went everywhere we went if cooking was to take place! From the kitchen to the fire pit and out on camp outs.We burned through at least 4 pots before I was a teenager.

This is not the original pot, but a scaled down version. The original could have eaten this little one for a snack!  

Cowboy Coffee, Morning Fires as I remember it!

   Whether summer or winter the morning would start the same everyday on the mountain. First the thumping of an axe as my father chopped kindling and the bang of the cook stove lids as he fired up the old Martha Washington cook stove. Soon the smell of wood smoke and warm currents of air drifted up the stairs to awaken everyone in the house.

The first order of business, after the fire was lit, was the making of his cowboy coffee. A large speckle ware coffee pot that held at least a gallon, was set over an open burner. Orange flames jumping against its blackened bottom and my father would add more dry oak wood. The water need to "roll with boil", as he said. Soon as the water was rolling up and small droplets jumped and spattered like tiny crystal marbles across the now hot iron of the stove top, my father would flip back the pots round lid.

“One, two, three, four, five, six,” he would count, adding heaping scoops of ground coffee to the bubbling water. I think he counted for the benefit of his young daughter who watched closely, trying to learn the exact science of this wonderful morning brew that everyone in the house drank, even ones perhaps too little. To know how to brew the coffee meant you had status among the sleepy family.

“Now” he would nod to me and I knew it was my turn.

“One thousand one, one thousand two…” and I would count for exactly 15 seconds. On 15 he pulled the coffee quickly off the hot burner and back to the cooler back of the stove.

“Now get the egg shells”, he ordered. Yes, eggs shells to trap the grounds at the bottom of the pot and I would hand him shells saved from yesterday’s breakfast. Into the pot they went and he would smile.

“Won’t be long now,” he would say. I would fetch the mugs and wait with him as we watched the time tick slowly out another five minutes on the old Seth Thomas clock above the stove. This was a precise art that could not be hurried.  Sweet smells teased our noses and made our mouths water. The second hand swept past 12.

Finally it was time; he would pour the black, strong liquid into the mugs. Only two thirds full, then the milk, swirling like the currents of the early spring floods, brown and dangerous.

Heaping spoons of sugar, a quick stir and a cup so full it always spilled on the way to our lips.

For  just a moment hesitation was best, just as the mug reached your waiting tongue and warm, sweet , coffee flavored steam condensed on your lip and nose and stirred your mind to awaken fully.

He would raise his eye brows and then wink.

“Good stuff,” he would tell me.

“Good stuff,” I would agree.

"Now lets feed them horses," he would say as he headed for the door.

"Yep, horses," I would run after him. After all I now had lots of energy.

At least three more times, the old speckled pot would be filled before the day burned out.