Food on the frontier had to survive the same rough conditions as the people eating it, and the real menu was a lot more resourceful, and a lot funnier, than most of us picture.

A typical 1848 trail packing list called for 200 pounds of flour and 100 pounds of bacon per person for the journey, alongside dried apples, beans, rice, coffee, and enough hardtack to last months without spoiling, which tells you everything about how hard that hardtack actually was. Soldiers of the era joked it should be stamped “B.C.,” baked before the Christian era, and that it would take a man six feet tall with a sledgehammer and anvil to break one properly. Coffee fared no better, one traveler complained of “vile bread and viler coffee” at a relay station, and a British officer riding the frontier in 1860 described the traveling Dutch oven as “a triumph of convenience, cheapness, unwholesomeness and nastiness.” Beans got off easier, trail cooks affectionately nicknamed dried pinto beans “prairie strawberries,” since they were cheap, filling, and never spoiled.

Prices could swing wildly depending on where you landed. During the Gold Rush, a plain slice of bread cost a dollar in Placerville, two dollars buttered, while a full meal at a proper San Francisco restaurant ran as little as a nickel, boomtown economics at its most absurd.

Once a family finally settled somewhere, the kitchen improved considerably, though not by much. An 1890s farmhouse kitchen typically ran on a wood or coal cookstove that could heat flat irons for pressing clothes on one side while dinner cooked on the other, genuinely efficient multitasking. And during the brutal winter of 1880 to 1881 in Dakota Territory, one real frontier family famously ground their own seed wheat in a coffee grinder just to have bread, a small, exact detail that says more about frontier hunger than any dramatic scene could.

Communal meals mattered just as much as the food itself, barn raisings and harvest gatherings were often the only time an entire community sat down together, which made them some of the best settings in this genre for two people to end up seated a little closer than either one of them planned.

What’s one frontier-era dish you’d actually be brave enough to try?