RICHMOND, TX -- Nick Castelberg was a jolly English lad, trailing his granny to her garden patch in rural Kent, then perching in the fragrant farmhouse kitchen, snapping beans and studying the old woman as she stirred the pots. On spring days, he trekked the greening woods with his granddad, looking to tap the perfect birch, one whose clear, sweet sap would make the grandest wine. Castelberg's mind drifts back to those boyhood days sometimes. He's 45 now, and everybody knows him as "Cookie," a regular feller with dinged-up boots, a born-again cowboy with callouses on his hands and cookin' in his heart.
Castelberg is head chef -- the only chef -- at Richmond's George Ranch Historical Park. King of the chuck wagon, Castelberg can whip up pinto beans 150 different ways, roast a raccoon and brew coffee so bracing that it'll strip paint off a barn door.
He drops Spanish phrases into his conversation as naturally as some people spit, says "Ya'll" so nicely it would near to break your heart and eruditely discourses on the cookpot philosophy of the old grand master of French cuisine, Auguste Escoffier.
To ranch visitors, Castelberg is an ambassador for a way of Texas life that faded more than 100 years ago.
"He has the ability to converse in a way that makes visitors use their senses," says Matt Driggers, the ranch's head of interpretation. "He'll ask people to close their eyes as he explains things. It's all so visual that when they open their eyes, it's as if they were in that time and place."
Castelberg has been top cook at the ranch, which traces its history to the state's earliest Anglo settlement, for 11 years. The son of a geophysicist, he spent much of his youth traveling the world. As a grade-schooler in Singapore, he was entranced by the odor of frying ginger, garlic and onion.
"That was the spark that fired me up," he says. "It was uplifting. . Even then I recognized the profound effect food could have on one's emotional state. That's probably the time I realized what I was here for."
As a boy, Castelberg was reared on a television diet of "Bonanza" and "Gunsmoke." Arriving in Houston with his newly divorced father in 1974, he expected to find an Indian warrior behind every cactus. When the jet door opened, though, "Everything felt, tasted and smelled just like Singapore. It was lush, subtropical, very humid," he says. "I felt a little at home at the get-go."
In Houston, Castelberg's life passed in a rush. He finished school, married, joined the Navy, then returned to take a job in security. Along the way, he developed a reputation as a kitchen whiz. Friends urged him to make cooking his career and, though initially resistant, he enrolled in culinary school.
Assuming the duties of fatherhood and still working full-time in security, the aspiring chef labored past midnight mastering the mysteries of sauces, stocks and eggs. Three and a half semesters through a four-semester program, he dropped out.
Castelberg might have spent his life in security, but Providence, he says, showed him another path: a classified ad for a cook's job at George Ranch.
"I'm your man," he told the ranch's recruiter. "I don't care what it pays."
Drawing on his academic training and skills honed as a Boy Scout leader, Castelberg set about recreating foodways of the Texas cattle drives -- a phenomenon that peaked 130 years ago. The first camp meal was offered visitors in spring 2001, and within six months "we had about 120 people coming, bringing their aunts and uncles. It was amazing," he says.
Today, Castelberg's Saturday ranch meals are prepared in a modern commercial kitchen before being transferred to campfires for serving. The chuck wagon, though, remains the soul of the operation.
On a recent afternoon, he regaled Taiwanese travel writers with tales of the Old West as they chowed on chili, beef stew, beans and peach cobbler. As he told how Panhandle cattleman Charles Goodnight invented the chuck wagon to appease disgruntled, hungry cowhands, the writers nodded appreciatively and snapped pictures.
Old-time trail cooks were doctors, counselors and enforcers, he told them, sliding into a full-tilt Texas drawl, pausing every two minutes for 45 seconds of translation.
Castelberg cooks with a pair of .45-caliber pistols cinched to his waist -- old-time trail cooks were fierce defenders of the code of the camp. Once, he interrupted a spiel to pretend to take a potshot at "a big yellow bird," chuckling at his young audience's alarm as the crop duster precipitously plunged over a cotton field.
Early Texas cattle drives, Castelberg said, easily lasted four months, taking the participants far from sources of staple foodstuffs. Chuck wagons were packed with rice, lard, flour, cornmeal, dried fruit and meat, coffee and a few canned goods. With those limited fixings, a cook's creativity was key to harmony.
"There are so many ways to build up flavor profiles," Castelberg says. "You can take a head of garlic and roast it over the fire and add it to the beans. That adds a little something extra. ... Or play around with sweet little things -- a little vinegar, mustard, fatback, a little coffee. Once you have that foundation, you have a pretty good idea of what you can put together and get decent results.
"I call it `del mero corazon' -- cooking from the heart."
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