Mulligan stew, it's a hobo stew, yes? That's what Wikipedia would have us believe -- that it was a communal stew, where every tramp that could would pitch in a little ingredient, one with chicken, one with potatoes, one with salt, one with onions, and then all would sup together. It's based on Irish stew, Wikipedia tells us. The website even quotes a 1900 newspaper describing this act of trampish collaboration.
I don't know. I find an 1898 reference to Mulligan stew in the Helena Independent, where they describe a Scotch terrier, adopted by a military company, as looking like a tarantula and having the color of a Mulligan stew. Later that year, soldiers complain about their diet in the same publication, saying it consists exclusively of "bacon, beans, and Mulligan stew."
The same year, I find a re ence to the meal in a Fresno Republican Weekly paper, a report from a soldier in Company C, who says "Alvin Akers and Topsy Faber are in charge of the culinary department now and the tasty manner in which they get up a 'Mulligan' stew would tickle the palate of the most critical epicure."
So maybe later the stew was a hobo thing, but, in its first appearance, it was a military thing; a 1905 Fresno Morning Republican article explicitly describes the making of a Mulligan stew in the "army style."
Later slang dictionaries say that "mulligan battery" was military jargon for a cook wagon, so maybe one influenced the other. We don't know what was in this stew yet, and the earliest ingredient I have found is from an 1899 article in the Fresno Republican about an impropriety part at a club thrown by some hunters who had collectively managed to bring down 90 doves. They used these as the constituent ingredient in a Mulligan stew.
We get a fuller recipe for the stew in an epic poem from Alaska from 1901, a description of making the stuff along the Alaska trail that reads as follows:
A "Mulligan stew!" do you ask what is that?To quickly clarify, "cheechawker" is apparently Chinook jargon for a newcomer, and ptarmigan is a gamebird that it common enough in Alaska, and also called the snow chicken.
You're just a "cheechawker," I'll bet my old hat!
Why, up in Alaska, it's just the right stuff!
One failing it has -- you can't get half enough.
It's odor you smell as it cooks, and it seems,
'Twill never be done, to fulfill your fond dreams.
It's ptarmigan , dumpling and spuds, in a slush,
Pork, onions, and beans (they all help one to "mush"),
Salt, pepper and garlic, hardtack and rice, too,
And all odds and ends -- that's a "Mulligan stew."
The meal seems to have been common in Alaska -- an author in the Bellingham Herald in Washington State described a trip to the northern state on a ship, and he described his meal as follows: "Breakfast consisted of wolly-gahow, slumgulleon, mulligan stew, 16 to 1, smear, bullets, etc. For dinner we just reversed the order."
I'll just come out and say I don't know what most of these foods are, but for Slumgullion, which is probably an old miner's term for any muddy beverage. Whatever he was eating, I would love to see these items offered on a contemporary menu.
I find what seem to be both our first Irishmen and our first hobos in 1905, in Missoula, where the Anaconda Standard reported on Charles O'Neill and James O'Brien, drunk and possessing stolen vegetables, who were on their way to the "tall timber" to make stew. The vegetables included green onions and cucumbers.
The first proper recipe I find comes from a printer's convention in Colorado Springs in 1906, when a collection of typographers made Mulligan stew for their guests.
Believe it or not, there's a hobo connection here -- there was a subculture of itinerant type specialists called "tramp printers" who would move from job to job, relying on the frequent need for typesetters to underwrite a restless life on the road. Their recipe is as follows:
Chicken, young or oldAs you can probably tell by now, a Mulligan stew is pretty much any old thing, as long as it involves meat and vegetables. Tramps liked it because it could be made out of whatever they could scavenge, and the military probably liked it because it made good use of leftovers.
Beef, tender or tough
Salt pork (plenty of salt)
Mutton (made from sheep)
Potatoes (commonly called "spuds")
Carrots, turnips, tomatoes, green corn (and other vegetables)
Take an ax (or similar device) and chop all into fine particles (more or less), throw entire mixture into a large receptacle and coil until all the ingredients are tender (the meat especially). Serve while steaming hot.
This is the recipe, which the Denver ex-delegates to the International Typographical union used yesterday in preparing the famous "Mulligan stew," -- the printer's delight -- which was the bill of fare at Bloomfield park, when 1,000 delegates to the annual convention which adjourned in Colorado Springs, which adjourned Saturday, with their friends, were guests of the Denver printers.
Ordinarily, "Mulligan stew" is made in a tomato can over a small fire at the side of a water tank, forty miles from nowhere, while the "cooks" are awaiting the arrival of a friendly freight train to take them on their way.
I suspect for this exact reason the soup also become popular in firehouses -- you start seeing the stew show up in a lot of stories about firemen. Fort Worth's Captain Frank Massengale, of the Seventh Ward Fore Company, apparently had a recipe that was quite celebrated, at least according to a 1908 article in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.
Massengale failed to share his recipe, so once again we must turn to the hobos to know how it's done. The following is from a Denver Post article from 1911 describing a raid on a hobo camp in which stolen chickens were discovered -- already in the meal:
Recipe for Mulligan stew by John J. Duggan, hobo:If ever there was a meal ready for some mixological invention, it is the Mulligan stew. It might be worth revisiting the original Irish stew recipe, where the base meat is mutton or kid, but the Americanized version inevitably seems to include some sort of bird meat. Potatoes, carrots, and turnips seem standard.
Two fat hens.
Three large onions, half a dozen turnips, two carrots, a bunch of parsley, some bread crusts, a hunk of bacon and a hambone. Boil until done in a wash boiler.
If you're going to make it, though, find out what wolly-gahow was. That seems like an important side-dish.
