Prairie Oysters for Breakfast: Strange Eats of the Wild West is a rich, immersive journey through the culinary underbelly of the American frontier, told through the eyes of Eliza Marlowe-a fearless journalist with an iron stomach and a sharp pen. Traveling from cattle trails in Texas to desert kitchens in New Mexico, from saloon cookfires to railroad cholera camps, Eliza documents the bizarre, resourceful, and often shocking meals that sustained the people who shaped the West. Her mission begins with curiosity but quickly deepens into a meditation on hunger, survival, and the stories told through food.Through 15 vivid chapters, the book chronicles not only the meals themselves-prairie oysters, rattlesnake stew, beaver tail, cactus candy-but the people behind them: cowboys boiling boots in blizzards, outlaw cooks hosting midnight feasts, Indigenous women preserving ancestral recipes, and a French saloon chef who turns violence into fine dining. Eliza's observations evolve from journalistic distance to intimate understanding, capturing how food becomes a language of necessity, culture, and resilience in a land too wild to tame.By the end, Prairie Oysters for Breakfast is more than a culinary record-it's a testament to the ingenuity of frontier cooks and the grit of those who ate their way through droughts, disease, and war with whatever they could trap, fry, or ferment. Eliza's final feast-a meal composed of everything she's learned-serves as both a closing ritual and a celebration of the strange, beautiful, and utterly human ways food defines our place in the world.