Important: Safety Warning
This recipe calls for animal brains or related nervous-system tissue. Cattle brain and spinal tissue can transmit bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), the cause of variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans, which is fatal and has no treatment.
This information has been left in for historical purposes but should not be acted upon.
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Son-Of-A-Gun (This is a stew made)
This is a stew made of the "innards" of the beef, which are very popular on the ranches.
Chop (do not grind) into convenient pieces for serving the liver, heart, kidneys, sweetbreads, brains, milt, and marrow gut. In a large kettle heat 1 pound of fresh kidney suet, chopped fine. Add 2 large onions, chopped, 2 garlic cloves, minced, the chopped innards and water to cover. over a slow fire 3 hours or longer. Season with salt and pepper. When ready to serve, thicken with a flour and water mixture.
Cook Squid: Every Latin loves his ink fish-squid-and ritually stews it in its own ink-calamares en sua tinta-as the Spaniards quaintly put it. 4 SQUID
Son-of-a-gun stew is a genuine record of ranch cookery, but the version above cannot be cooked as given: it is built around bovine brain and spinal-associated tissue, which is now excluded from the food supply in most countries.
- Why the brains rule this outCattle brain, spinal cord and the nerve tissue attached to them are specified risk materials because they can carry the agent of bovine spongiform encephalopathy, which causes variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans. There is no cooking time or temperature that destroys it, so the three-hour simmer offers no protection.
- The other organs are also regulatedBeyond brains, the distal ileum is removed from cattle carcasses under the same rules, which affects "marrow gut" — usually described as a length of small intestine holding a soft, marrow-like substance, prized on the ranch for its richness — and it is effectively unobtainable at retail today. If you want an offal stew, use a current recipe built on liver, heart and kidney only.
- MiltOn a beef animal "milt" means the spleen, not fish roe as in older fish cookery. It was one of the standard components of the dish and is rarely butchered out for retail sale today.
- Kidney suetA pound of hard fat from around the kidneys, chopped fine, was the cooking medium and the body of the stew. Modern butchers sell suet by request; the shredded packaged kind is usually stabilised with flour and behaves differently.
- Chop, do not grindThe instruction is deliberate. Ground organ meat tends to break down into a paste over a long simmer, while hand-cut pieces keep separate textures.
- Fire and thickening"Over a slow fire" means a bare simmer rather than a boil. The flour-and-water slurry goes in only at the end, after the long cooking.
Son-of-a-gun stew — the printable half of a blunter cowboy name — belonged to the day a beef was killed on the range, when the organs had to be eaten immediately or wasted. Everything perishable went into one kettle over the fire, which is why the ingredient list reads as an inventory rather than a composition. The dish is closely associated with trail-drive and roundup cooking in Texas and the southern plains, and it appears in outdoor-cooking books of the mid-twentieth century as a piece of frontier color as much as a set of instructions. Cowboy lexicons also record "district attorney" as a name for the same stew.