If you ever get the opportunity to experience a chuck wagon lunch—and unless you're 100 miles south of San Antonio, you might not—let's hope it's with Butch Dohmann. He's been cooking out of dutch ovens for 45 years and after buying a wagon, started a business called Soup Bone Cattle Company with his wife Sue. The couple teaches 20,000 students a year about the wagon's heritage at schools, rodeos, and stock shows.

When Carey and I recently ended up in the dusty town of Beeville, Texas, on the 5,000-acre Brown Ranch while touring cattle ranches, we pulled up to the chuck wagon lunch. There was Butch in his apron, stirring a big cast-iron. Something about his wide-brimmed hat and sun-loved skin said we were in for a real treat.

What's typical chuck wagon lunch fare, you ask? Usually beans and biscuits, sometimes but not always stew.

It was nearly 1p.m. and Butch had been outside setting up the lunch since 7 a.m. He did have some help from the Brown family, including ten-year-old "Quatro" (Austin Brown, the fourth) and his little sister Addie-Ruth. It takes a few hours to get a good fire going to heat up the wood chips for the steak and those big pots (the giant one he uses dates back to 1884) for beans.

Today's menu was beef kebabs (Texas sure likes its beef!), potatoes, green beans, and biscuits baked with Pioneer flour. Butch insists on using Pioneer, which also goes into Sue's dutch oven peach cobbler. Big sacks of it are stacked on the wagon.

Once you start chatting with Butch for a bit, he might pull out, if you're lucky, a framed black-and-white snapshot. "You heard of Danny Glover and Tommy Lee Jones?" he asked us. Unfortunately we didn't pick up on the Lonesome Dove reference at first (note to self: still need to Netflix the western miniseries based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel) but Butch was trying to tell us that he was the chuck wagon cook on the Lonesome Dove set (!).

"It's a classic. You also have to see The Cowboys with John Wayne. That's what it was really like back then—young boys, not much older than Quatro, learning to rope, brand, and herd the cattle."

See all the chuck wagon lunch photos in the slideshow »

Special thanks to the Texas Beef Council, who sponsored this trip!