The tantalizing smell of sizzling steak, spicy beans and creamy white gravy mingles with campfire smoke. In heavy cast-iron pots are huge mounds of mashed potatoes, cornbread and peach pie waiting to be served.
“It’s some of the best food you can eat,” says Lexie Dean of the Ramblin’ Rose cook team, keeping an eye on his campfire cuisine. “Anything you cook outside tastes better to me.”
Although he didn’t grow up helping his mother cook, Lexie has won enough Grand Champion awards to be considered an expert. “When I was a little boy, I wasn’t interested at all in cooking. But I did like to eat,” he says with a laugh.
What got Lexie involved in the culinary arts was serving as a Boy Scout leader. With three children – two boys and a girl – Dean volunteered to be a Boy Scout leader 25 years ago. He’s still at it.
“I’ve probably had 10,000 children crawling through my wagon and watching me cook,” he says. “I do this free for the Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, Vacation Bible School, whoever else asks me.”
For the past three years, Lexie and his wife “Ms. Katy” have driven from Greenville, North Carolina, to Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, to participate in the big Saddle Up weekend. Held Feb. 23-26, the 12th annual event is a tribute to the American West and is filled with concerts by cowboy musicians and poets, a chuck wagon cookoff, cowboy church and other activities for the entire family.
Set for Saturday, Feb. 25, the competitive chuck wagon cookoff spotlights chuck wagon cooks as they prepare lunch for guests and evaluation by a panel of judges. Lunch tickets are $10 for the noon meal. Beginning at 9 a.m., prior to the cookoff at Clabough’s Campground, visitors can hear cowboy entertainers and participate in cowboy-related activities free of charge.
Performers for the 2012 event include R.W. Hampton, Stephanie Davis, Cowboy Celtic, Saddle Cats, Andy Nelson, Ray Doyle, Chuck Pyle and Kent Rollins.
“Saddle Up is great,” says Lexie, who won the Grand Champion award at the 2011 cookoff. “I don’t sing or do poetry, I just cook. I really like the camaraderie at the cookoff and seeing that there are folks out there that are as crazy as I am.”
Turning back the clock to the 1860s is fun, Lexie says, but it is also a heap of work. With his rig, the Ramblin’ Rose chuck wagon, Lexie and about eight other chuck wagon cooks use ingredients, tools and techniques reminiscent of the Wild West period. Wearing his trademark stovepipe hat, white mutton chop whiskers, bandanna around his neck and cowboy boots, Lexie will be up bright and early to start cooking.
“I usually get up about 4:30 and have my fire started by 5,” he says. Lexie cooks in cast iron pots, which weigh about 30 pounds empty. He also has two 26-inch skillets, two 18-inch skillets and two 10-gallon bean pots. He piles hot coals on top the flat lids of his 12 16-inch Dutch ovens to get an authentic Wild West flavor.
“When they give us the ingredients, I’m ready to go. We never know ahead of time exactly what we’re going to be working with. But that’s the way it was for the camp cooks on cattle drives. You cooked whatever you could scrounge up.”
It’s the spices, herbs and cooking techniques of each cook that makes the grub taste different, Lexien says. “My beans are spicy. Can’t tell you what I put in them but I always make two kinds, hot and mild, for those who don’t like them too hot.”
Lexie’s specialty, however, is pie. “Some cooks make cobbler but I like pie,” he says. “I put a layer of pie dough on the bottom and then make a basket weave pattern for the top.”
The flour for all the cookoff contestants is supplied by The Old Mill, an historic water-powered mill in Pigeon Forge. “I came up with all my recipes,” Lexie says. “People ask me if I have a cookbook but I don’t. I learned through trial and error over the last many many years.”
The wagon he uses is a family antique. “My wagon was built in 1868 and has been in the family forever,” Dean says. “It was a 10-footer farm wagon with a 12-foot tongue to harness four mules to pull it. But back in the early 1900s, when the automobile came out, they put it in a barn and it was stored until I brought it out.”
To transport his Ramblin’ Rose to faraway cooking events, Lexie uses a 35-foot flatbed trailer. “People always look at it when they see it coming down the highway,” he says. “It’s really something to see.”
In “real life,” Lexie is a mechanical test engineer for NACCO Materials Handling Group, one of the world’s largest manufacturers of heavy-duty lift trucks. “My job is to tear things up,” he says. “When those engineers develop something new, I test it to see how strong it is, to see if I can tear it up.”
Dealing with modern technology, Lexie says, might be one reason he is so taken with the past. “I work in the future, in future technology,” he says. “I would like to have lived back in the cowboy days, to have worked on a cattle drive. This way, I think I get the best of both worlds.”
If you go:
Where: Saddle Up in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee.
When: Feb. 23-26.
For more information: Contact Pigeon Forge Tourism at (800) 251-9100 or www.MyPigeonForge.com
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