User:Estudiante Cocinera/Jean Cates

Jean Shepherd Cates (1938-2015) new article content ... Jean Cates, born in Turkey, Texas, was an award-winning chuckwagon cook. She and her sister Sue Cunningham won the Western Heritage Classic Cook-Off in 1992 in Abilene, Texas. Cates and Cunningham were the first women to receive this honor.

Cates and Cunningham carried on their father’s tradition of genuine cowboy cooking, and their C-Bar-C Chuck Wagon Team catered meals for brandings, weddings, trail rides, and conventions. They also won first overall at the Festival of the West Chuckwagon Cook-off in Scottsdale, Arizona. From the start, Cates and Cunningham were award-winning cooks. They won the American Cowboy Culture Award and earned “Chuck-Wagon of the Year” honors from the Academy of Western Artists.

Before she was awarded championship status for chuck-wagon cooking, Cates worked as a cook in the Channing Café and prepared meals for cowboys at the headquarters for the JA Ranch in Clarendon, Texas. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, Cates was a farm and ranch cook in the Texas Panhandle. She also instructed leather stamping at Texas State Technical College and co-owned Cates Saddle Shop with Wayne Cates.

In addition to being practitioners of chuck-wagon cooking, Cates and Cunningham published three cookbooks: Chuckwagon Recipes, More Chuckwagon Recipes, and Chuck Wagon Recipes and Others #3 In these books, Cates and Cunningham offer recipes, personal stories, chuckwagon histories, information about western heritage, and details about the equipment and tools required for chuckwagon cooking. They also published a work titled “Its All About the Buckle: Cooking with the C Bar C, which won the 2011 Will Rogers Medallian Award for Photographic Essays.