On the general topic of swine production, the American Veterinary Medicine Association has been under fire for approving high heat and ventilation shut down to achieve mass slaughter of pigs in COVID-19 crisis situations.
Basically they have endorsed cranking up the heat and shutting off ventilation if you need to kill thousands of pigs at a time. It takes awhile and sure seems inhumane, but hey.
Years ago I spent a full month in India. When I returned to the US I couldn’t believe how salty everything tasted.
I think our palates become accustomed to the local fare. We have lots of additives, preservatives, hormones, etc. in foods and maybe the wild west beef would taste off. My brother stopped eating beef for awhile and when he came back to it, he thought it was gross. As you say,
I was thinking about Farmer Brown slaughtering an animal once every few months vs. a factory cranking them out.
Upton Sinclair wrote The Jungle to expose the appalling working conditions in the meat-packing industry. His description of diseased, rotten, and contaminated meat shocked the public and led to new federal food safety laws.
Although… I’ve been buying more pastured meat lately. The chickens are tougher and delicious. It’s hard to go back to bland box-raised chicken. The pork is delicious. I guess i don’t eat a lot of conventionally reared pork, because i have ethical issues with raising pigs in little boxes. But i eat it from time to time, and pastured tastes better to me. I adore the local pastured lamb, although honestly, mostly it just tastes fresher. (Although the Icelandic lamb is awesome, and that’s pastured.) But pastured beef often tastes…grassy? It seems to have a lot of off flavors to me, that vary from batch to patch, probably depending on what the cattle ate.
I’ve always liked grass-fed beef, but I don’t fully buy into “the more natural they live, the better they eat.” I’ve hunted white tail deer in the Appalachians since I was 14 years old. My family growing up was poor enough that processing a few deer a season wasn’t a fun get-back-to-nature exercise, it was a much-needed addition to our protein supply. I’ve had venison cooked every way one can imagine, and I’ve had it cooked by people that didn’t know what they were doing and I’ve had it cooked at world class restaurants who did know what they were doing.
Despite deer living as natural as can be, I’ve never found it in any shape or form to be as good as farmed beef / pork etc, which undercuts at least a little bit IMO the idea that the closer to nature you get, the better the taste. I’ll echo these comments on Elk as well, and honestly most wild game. I like game meat, eat plenty of it, but if I’m being asked to rank meat in a hierarchy of “how good it tastes” basically all of the farmed meats I can think of out rank the game meats, in fact this is even true when it’s the same species–farm raised pork is much better than “Razorbacks” (feral sus domesticus), farm raised turkey and duck is much superior to hunted versions of the wild animal.
When I cook veal for a meal my gf will be eating, I buy from a source she approves of that raises veal humanely and charges a small fortune. If I’m making a veal dish just for me, I buy the cheap veal that’s been tortured or whatever. To me it tastes better, plus it’s cheaper.
I don’t love veal. To me, it tastes like bland, washed-out beef, and costs more. So when i learned that veal is routinely tortured in the US, I stopped eating it. I still eat it in other countries, if that’s convenient. But i pretty much never choose veal, and actively avoid US veal.
That being said, I’ve read that veal rearing in the US is improving its ethical standards. Since it’s not really in my diet, i didn’t pay a lot of attention. But i did read that individually crating baby cows is going out of style.
For what it’s worth, almost all packaged meat in the US is shipped in some form of brine or saline solution, for preservation, for ‘plumpness’, to increase moistness when being cooked (esp things like boneless/skinless meat) and as a flavor enhancer. So yeah, unless you go out of your way to soak it in neutral water to remove the salt it is going to have a high salt content compared to some other countries or small-lot packages.
And that’s leaving out anything purchased that was pre-flavored but still uncooked, like the store packages of teriyaki / fajita / buffalo mixes, which are salt bombs.
Back to the OP - one thing that would likely be different is cooked final temperatures. The ‘wild west’ era in some ways gives us the worst of all worlds for food safety - in the cattle herds and shipping to market you get all the disadvantages of large numbers in close contact, possibly from a few different geographical regions. They are exposed to a much wider array of parasites/nematodes/etc by nature of being on the range, but without modern techniques to prevent and treat. And even with the railroads and best transportation options, spoilage is an issue.
If I was eating beef from that era, I would probably insist on cooking the hell out of it, at which point the nature of the flavor is going to be a far distant second to what else I’m cooking it with!
Robb Walsh goes into it a bit further back than the late 19th century Chili Queens in San Antonio. His theory is that it’s a dish that grew from native Mesoamerican chile-heavy stews, and cumin-heavy stews brought in the 1700s by Spanish Canary Islander immigrants to San Antonio. So in a cool sort of syncretic way, it’s a Native American dish, a Spanish dish, a Mexican dish and a Texan dish all at the same time.
FYI, Cincinnati chili is derived from the Greek stew “kima”, which is similar, but not from the same family tree as Texas chili. So it’s not some sort of abominable Yankee attempt at “real” chili, it’s a separate dish altogether.
This proves nothing, but strongly suggests to me that American beefsteak in 1880, when this description was written, could be really, really good, at least if an angel helped prepare it. From Mark Twain’s A Tramp Abroad:
…imagine an angel suddenly sweeping down out of a better land and setting before him a mighty porterhouse steak an inch and a half thick, hot and sputtering from the griddle; dusted with a fragrant pepper; enriched with little melting bits of butter of the most unimpeachable freshness and genuineness; the precious juices of the meat trickling out and joining the gravy, archipelagoed with mushrooms; a township or two of tender, yellowish fat gracing an outlying district of this ample county of beefsteak; the long white bone which divides the sirloin from the tenderloin still in its place; and imagine that the angel also adds a great cup of American home-made coffee, with a cream a-froth on top, some real butter, firm and yellow and fresh, some smoking hot-biscuits, a plate of hot buckwheat cakes, with transparent syrup–could words describe the gratitude of this exile?
I’ve often read in the past about settlers on the frontier letting their swine loose to forage in the forests. But don’t recall ever hearing how they would get them to return.
Anyone know? Bait? I wonder what percentage of such swine got recovered?
I seem to remember this happening in a movie with Gregory Peck playing a down-and-out American in 19th century London. As a joke, two English tycoons give him a £1 million note to spend. As an incentive, they promise to offer him a job once the money is gone.
Of course, no one will (or can) take a £1 million note as payment for anything, so Peck’s character lives high-on-the-hog on credit, and hilarity ensues.
I’m assuming the movie was based on Twain’s work?
Found it! Yes, it was based on one of Twain’s works, but apparently not A Tramp Abroad:
As for Cincinnati chili, there are a lot of articles on its origins. Here’s one:
With regard to the Mesoamerican origins of chili, the ICS cookbook also cites a report that meat from human sacrifices was served up in stews with chiles. Ew!
Now that the OP has been addressed, I mis-read this thread title as “Beer from the wild west compared to today” I wonder now about that.
Just like with free range chickens, you first get them used to your coop/barn. A safe enclosure offering protection from predators and the environment as well as a dependable source of water is a wonderful thing.
Isn’t it a concern that free-range livestock can pick up all sorts of nasty bugs out in the wild? I would imagine this is one reason for keeping them in pens, where the environment can be controlled.
Well, modern poultry houses stress bio security. Visitors wear foot coverings, sign in, share where they’ve been that day, etc.
For a small scale poultry operation, sparrows fly in and out and are a potential source of Salmonella, etc.
I guess that is possible, but from what I recall, they didn’t discuss feeding the pigs or taking them in at night. My impression was that at some point in the year, they just turned them loose to forage in the woods, and then later in the year (fall?) they somehow collected them to slaughter/sell.
Almost all of the “nasty bugs” that can infect and are transmissable in pigs (or any other domesticated animal) are more readily found amongst the housed animals.
In free range or uncontrolled range the problem is that a mild infection which can be easily controlled is not observed or treated until it becomes acute.
Those are flying rats. 
Sort of like riding the Metro at rush hour. I can relate to that.
Same for me, except in the northeast. I’ll also add to deer and elk - rabbit, squirrel and doves. None of this meat is even close to farmed beef or pork or chicken. Once I was on my own I never ate any game meat at all if I could help it. I still don’t, despite every deer hunter I know trying to unload extra meat on me every deer season for the last 35 years.