Mulligan "Hobo" Stew from the Great Depression

Today the term hobo is usually used in a derogatory manner, but that was not always the case, and during the period between the American Civil War and the end of the Great Depression hobos were a particular and important group of migrant workers that crisscrossed the country on freight trains often cooking outdoors, and their most famous recipe was something called mulligan stew which I am recreating today using a recipe from the Great Depression. So thank you to Squarespace for sponsoring this video as we make a meal for the hard times. This time on Tasting History. So I gotta admit before researching this video I had never really thought about the term hobo or the subculture that were hobos in the late 19th and early 20th century, but then I read this book called Riding the Rail, Teenagers on the Move During the Great Depression, and I quickly had a whole new appreciation for a very large group of people who by choice or by circumstance played a big role in that period of America's history. What I found really surprising was how cohesive and organized this group of people were at the time. In 1889 they held a national convention, they were often unionized, they had their own newspaper and colleges, and they lived together in groups called jungles, and that is where we first hear about this dish called mulligan stew. In 1923 it was written of the hobo that he not only cooks his own food but has even invented dishes that are peculiar to jungle life. Chief among these is mulligan stew, a throw together of vegetables and meat, and a book of hobo songs written in 1930 claims that mulligan is the hobo's one contribution to American vittory. Its ingredients are seldom the same. Any and all vegetables and meats that come to hand go into its making. The hobo regards it as his national dish, and many a dead one retains a liking for it that amounts to affection." A dead one actually just meant someone who had had too much to drink. So this stew is very simple. It's basically just a beef or even just a meat and vegetable stew of any kind that was usually made in a tin pot or a can over an open fire. But the issue is that very often these people would be on the move and so they didn't have a lot of access to fresh meat and fresh vegetables, and so it was often made with things that you could carry around with you for days or even weeks at a time, and I did find a recipe from the late depression that is basically that. It calls for one medium-sized can of corned beef minced, one onion minced fine, one number two canned peas with liquid. A number two can actually holds about two and a half cups of peas in liquid, and you probably can't find that today, at least I couldn't, so a standard can today is a little bit smaller so you need about one and a half cans. Then one medium-sized bottle tomato ketchup. Again the standard size at the time seems to be 12 ounces and I gotta say that is a lot of ketchup. Then one cup or 235 milliliters of water and salt and pepper to taste. I used about a quarter teaspoon of salt and one and a half teaspoons of pepper. Then the recipe just says put all the ingredients in saucepan and simmer gently over low flame for about one hour. The flavor improves with the length of cooking time. So it's very simple but also kind of interesting. I don't think I've ever cooked a soup with this much or any ketchup in it and I have never opened one of these cans of corned beef but it's kind of fun. Comes with this little key that you just stick into the bottom and you twist around the edge and it just opens up. What's not fun is the smell and look of the corned beef inside. It smells a bit like cat food and frankly it kind of looks like it as well. So let us hope that the cooking process is transformative. So to cook this mulligan stew all you do is add the water and the peas with the liquid to a pot and bring it to a simmer. Then while it heats mince the corned beef really fine and then add that to the pot along with the onion and the ketchup. Stir that in and then add in the salt and the pepper and you can add more salt and pepper later on to taste but I'll tell you there is a lot of salt in pretty much all of the other ingredients so you might not really need to add any at all. Once you've added everything lower the heat to its lowest setting and set the lid on. You want to have this at a very, very low setting because you don't want it to boil over. You just want it low enough that it's bubbling when you lift the lid. Now you can give it a stir every so often but really you just leave it be for an hour or even more. It does say that the flavor improves the longer that it cooks and that's going to be plenty of time for me to ask you to like this video, subscribe. It really does help out the channel a lot and it'll keep me around so I can tell you a little bit more about the history of mulligan stew, a stew that comes from a very interesting group of people. So like I said at the start the word hobo is often used in a derogatory manner today to refer to anyone who is homeless but it's not always been that case. It was used in a derogatory way by some but many used it not like that at all, and it really just applied to a subset of those people. H.L Mencken, the wonderful writer actually wrote down a definition that can explain it a lot better than I can. He wrote, Tramps and hobos are commonly lumped together but in their own sight they are sharply differentiated. A hobo or beau is simply a migratory laborer. He may take some longish holidays but soon or late he returns to work. A tramp never works if it can be avoided. He simply travels. This group of men and it was mostly men at least at the start first emerged in large numbers following the American Civil War. Many discharged veterans made their way home on freight trains and for one reason or another many had PTSD but some also wrote that they had gotten used to the itinerant life of being in the army. Many chose not to return home and instead they traveled the country looking for work. What's interesting is that while the lifestyle took off here in the US following the Civil War it was not just a United States phenomenon. There was hobo culture happening in the UK, in France, in Canada. Basically anywhere where there were a lot of freight trains and it was mostly because of those freight trains that this was a very dangerous lifestyle. A lot of people got seriously injured when getting on and off of the freight cars. Sometimes they would get locked inside of the freight cars and simply starve to death or freeze to death at night or if they happened to get in one of the refrigerated cars. One of the most dangerous ways that they would ride was something that they called riding the rods which instead of being in the car they would ride beneath the car right above the rails. Also since they were technically breaking the law by riding on these freight trains they would often get in trouble with either the law or with the train companies themselves, but even so they were an incredibly important part of the American workforce during that period from like 1870 through the end of the Great Depression around the early 1940s. There were many jobs which only required workers for part of the year whether that was working on farms in the midwest or in the lumber camps in the northeast and up in Canada or the fish canneries all along the west coast. Many of these jobs would provide housing and food during the months of employment but then typically during the winter the work would dry up and the hobos would have to travel back to the cities where they would set up these shanty towns that they called jungles, and it was here in these shanty towns that their culture really came together and there was a whole culture at the time. They even had their own language and a lot of the words were written down in the 19-teens and 20s and a lot of them had to do with food. Words like a pokeout which was a meal wrapped in paper given out by someone at a farmhouse, and there was gump which was chicken, punk and gut, bread and sausage, flatcars which were pancakes, alligator bait was fried liver, jamoke was just coffee in a paper cup, Irish turkey was corned beef and cabbage, minister's face was a stewed pig's head, and my favorite was mule which was raw white whiskey, and it was called mule because it gave you quite a kick. They also supposedly developed a system of symbols which they would leave on posts, and fences, and boxcars throughout the country letting others know directions or if a particular area was friendly or hostile to hobos. And I say supposedly because it is unclear just how common or even truthful this system was at least at the start because it came from the hobos. They were the ones who told people about this system, but the fact that they told people about it makes it less secret, and most of it came to light from a single author named Leon Ray Livingston alias A-number-one. He was the most famous hobo in the world at the beginning of the 20th century, and he wrote 12 books on his life traveling the hobo way. He romanticized the lifestyle and did share aspects of hobo culture that did exist but then there are other things that he absolutely exaggerated or just made up. He was all about romanticizing the lifestyle and creating a mystique around being a hobo, and the hobos at the time leaned into this mystique, and this romantic version of hobo culture actually led a lot of young men to want to live this lifestyle even when circumstances didn't necessarily dictate that they needed to and so there were approximately 700,000 hobos going throughout the United States by 1911, and with that many people the hobo culture became more and more organized largely due to the work of James Eads Howe who was often known as the millionaire hobo, and it wasn't just a moniker he was actually a millionaire. He was the heir to a vast fortune from a St. Louis family who just decided to live life as a hobo, and after some years living the life he spent much of his time trying to figure out ways to uplift that community. He founded the International Brotherhood Welfare Association which was a union for migrant workers, and they published a newspaper called Hobo News which included poems, and comics, and articles about how to live life as a hobo, as well as news about seasonal employment and organizing unions. They also organized hobo colleges which ran in several different cities during the winter months of unemployment. The most successful was in Chicago and that college not only provided food and lodging but also classes. Hobos could take classes in public speaking, and law, social sciences, and even philosophy and literature. As Howe himself wrote in 1907, the object of the welfare brotherhood is twofold. I want to make the hobos not only better citizens but better hobos, and I want the public to appreciate what the beat is, what his rights are, and how he should be looked upon. Now by the mid-20s the economy was booming and this led to less people joining the hobo lifestyle, but there was going to be one more major upswell in the number of people living the lifestyle, and that came with the Great Depression. By the end of 1930 as more and more people were losing their jobs, hobo jungles around the country began to fill with newcomers, and one of the largest was near Grant Park in Chicago, and as it grew in size it was dubbed Hooverville, a nod to President Herbert Hoover who many blamed for the lack of action in those early days of the Great Depression. Other shanty towns around the country whether started as hobo jungles or simply as groups of people who would newly become homeless would take on this term of Hooverville, but when it came to hobos specifically this period really saw a huge swell in their numbers, and with people from all walks of life, and this actually led to a lot more people living the culture and enjoying things like mulligan stew which some of the people who had been hobos for a long time kind of took umbrage with, and were kind of like you're not doing it right. There's an article from 1934 titled, Shucks That Ain't Mulligan, and in it one of the newcomers describes making a mulligan stew with potatoes, onions, and carrots which one of the old guard hobos scoffed at. Carrots? Great shades of epicurus. What verbal crimes are committed in the name of good eating? Who ever heard of carrots in a mulligan stew? Carrots have no more place in a self-respecting mulligan stew than as Worcester sauce in a steaming cup of coffee. Any person or any newspaper that would put carrots in a mulligan stew would pour yellow mustard over a sugar-baked ham. As much as the old-timers might want to protect their mulligan stew there was no stopping this new boom of hobos entering their culture during the Great Depression, but it wasn't just now hobos making mulligan, it was everybody. With the romanticization of hobo culture through things like the writings of Leon Ray Livingston, and the popularity of the Charlie Chaplin character The Tramp, even those who were not living the life began to adopt aspects of the culture including the making of mulligan stew. It's in the 30s that you start seeing a lot of mulligan stew recipes cropping up in cookbooks, and in newspapers. Though these recipes were usually made with fresh beef and fresh vegetables, basically a nice beef stew. It was even eaten by some of the wealthiest citizens of New York City in 1933. The New York Daily News announced that there were 400 to sample bread line slum just in case. Mulligan stew with rice, bread and butter, applesauce and donuts, coffee. This 25 cent table haute menu will be spread before the guests of Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt, to the Grand Duchess Marie and other members of the caviar crowd at a large and ritzy dinner party next Monday evening. And the guests can like it or lump it, because there aren't going to be any changes or additions to this menu. The dinner party promises to be one of the largest and swankiest of the year with hundreds of our best people seated at bare wooden tables, served by boy scouts and plum fascinated by mulligan stew, known in quaint and unsparing military parlance as slum. And with that many others who were far, far from living the hobo lifestyle jumped on the bandwagon and emulated some aspects of their culture. They would host these parties called depression parties, or hobo parties, or hard times socials where they would dress up as hobos or tramps, and then make food using very cheap ingredients. One depression party from 1934 announced that second and third prizes were given to those whose clothes best represented hard times. And in 1937 the Roseville Press announced that Townsend Club to hold hard times pie social. Those attending are asked to wear their old clothes. Persons who come dressed up will be fined 10 cents. When you look in the newspapers from the time the parties were really common. They were, everyone was having them and I think, I just think that's kind of odd. It's like outside in the real world during this time so many people were losing their houses, and their possessions, and having trouble finding work, and then here's another group of society who's like let's dress up as these people, and it was just a form of entertainment. As for the real hobos, those many young men who had taken to the road when they couldn't find work quickly realized that the romantic fantasy sold to them in movies like the 1933 film Wild Boys of the Road was not all it was cracked up to be. Finding food was often the most difficult part of this lifestyle, and a lot of the firsthand accounts in the book Riding the Rails, it talks about people just trying to find food, and how they would have to do it. Sometimes it was begging, sometimes it was stealing, or in one case of one guy he figured out a way to make a meal by going to a diner or a cafe even when he couldn't afford to buy anything. Almost all cafes brought you a glass of water. The tables had ketchup and crackers. I'd drink some water, pour ketchup in the glass, and mix in the crackers. It helped when it was your only meal of the day. But perhaps Kingsley Davis who was a sociologist studying this group in the 1930s put it best when he talked about this new crop of hobos. He said, "...half a million American boys set out to look for the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. They found it, but instead of gold it contained only traces of mulligan stew." Now many of these young men were given a reprieve when they found work with the Civilian Conservation Corps. This was a program which did everything from help build the state and national parks in our country to laying out many of the roads and trails. They planted trees. They restored land that had been damaged during the Dust Bowl amongst so many other works programs across the country. And along with their average pay of $30 a month they received housing, clothing, and food. So at least if they were going to have to make a mulligan stew it would be with fresh ingredients unlike the one that I'm about to eat right now. And here we are. Mulligan stew from the Great Depression. It actually smells really good. It smells much better than I expected. So let's see how it tastes. Um, I don't know how I feel about this. Another taste. So overall the flavor is really nice. It's um, this may be the only time I've ever said this in my life. It's a little too sweet. I think the amount of ketchup that is in there, it's a lot of ketchup. And that is the dominant flavor that you're, that I'm getting. And I'm wondering maybe the ketchup in the 1930s was not quite as sweet as we use today. I don't know. It's a little, it's a little sweet but the flavor is very nice. So I think if you backed off the ketchup and added maybe just some more canned vegetables or something that actually would be pretty nice. And it's, it's hearty. The um, the meat, the corned beef has just disintegrated into just like little crumbles. But, so you're getting that texture but you're not really getting a lot of flavor from it. But it's not bad. No longer has the cat food flavor, smell, which is a-okay. You know, if you're really hungry and you're out on the road this would be a good meal. 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