One bite of the barbecued lamb says it all. The skin is salty and crisp, with a thin layer of fat, the meat so yielding it falls to pieces with just a gentle push of the fork. Seasoned with nothing but salt and pepper, its pale, herby flavor—as delicate as the smell of wild anise on the wind—comes through the strong char of the skin. This is no-frills eating; food that creates a bridge between the eater and the land, food that tells you where you are.
Where you are, exactly, is the town of Meeker, in the northwest corner of Colorado. So you might wonder why the leathery hands of the weathered rancher leaning against the split-rail fence are sticky with baklava. But this rugged country, more than a mile above sea level, is part of a great swath of territory along the Colorado-Utah border that was homesteaded by Greek families in the early 1900s. Sheepherders turned sheep ranchers, they adapted their trade from the Old World to the New.
Among the early arrivals was Angelo Theos, who as a youth had herded goats and sheep for his village in northern Greece. In 1903 he emigrated to Utah, and six years later he was running sheep in northeastern Utah and northwestern Colorado. By 1926, Angelo had homesteaded both his primary ranch and his summer ranch, and by the time of his death, in 1958, he had acquired 12,000 acres (plus 70,000 acres of grazing leases). Today the Meeker ranch, which pours over rolling, forested plateaus in the White River Valley, is still owned by Nick Theos and his brothers or their heirs.
“It’s almost unheard of in this country that every sibling in a family still does the same thing for work,” says 50-year-old Eleni Theos Stelter, Angelo’s granddaughter. “But all of my grandfather’s children stayed in sheep ranching. We’ve never lost touch with our roots.” To ensure this, every couple of years the extended family stages a giant lamb barbecue to remind themselves, and their children, who they are and where they come from.
On the night before this year’s barbecue, Eleni has come with a gaggle of friends and family to Nick’s ranch to help with the preparations. Crowded at the dinner table are aunts, uncles, nieces, nephews, and cousins. The smaller children vie for position near a large chocolate layer cake; the older ones listen to stories in Greek and English about relatives long dead, recently dead, or in the chair next to them. “We all learned the family history sitting at the table,” says Eleni.
“Is this Aunt Helen’s spanakopita?” asks a nephew, reaching for a heaped platter of the delicately crunchy pastries.
“Yes, precious,” says Eleni. “Now eat, and hush.”
Nick Theos, at 83 a lean, beef jerky of a man, sits at a separate table with the other old-timers: Nick Mahleres, who is married to Angelo’s only daughter, Helen; Trian Patsantaras, a former sheepherder; and the current foreman, Martin Inda, a Basque of few words. They wash down Eleni’s tender pork roast with the Greek white wine Rhoditis and discuss the next day’s activities. Opinionated statements—“I don’t give a goddamn about fruitwood, I’m using charcoal”—waft past.
Earlier that day, the men had slaughtered and dressed four 150-pound free-range lambs using pocket knives sharpened to stubs over the years. The offal was flopped into a bucket of cold water and the carcasses checked for signs of disease. “If we find anything wrong, we discard the whole thing,” says Rick Stelter, Eleni’s husband, who, at 46, is considered too young to do anything more important than change the water in the guts bucket. Nick used the innards to make kokorétsi, a sausage that will star in the festivities. There was much smacking of lips and rubbing of bellies as the sweetbreads, lungs, spleen, and hearts were laid out in ribbons on the fell, spiced with salt, pepper, and oregano, and then wrapped in the small intestine to make the fat, lumpy, three-foot-long sausage.
The lambs that provide this feast came from a herd of 3,800 ewes that Nick summered on the Meeker ranch and on land leased from the Bureau of Land Management in the White River area. One afternoon we take the long, bumpy ride into the high country. Nick’s daughter Connie, 59, keeps a sharp eye on her dad, who tends to be lulled to sleep by the steady jostling—even when he’s driving. Connie notes broken fences, roads that must be cleared, and the various “criks” between thick stands of trees that are the lifeblood of the region.
“Sheep are always on the move, so they don’t run a place down,” Connie says. “They aerate the soil with their pointy hooves and they eat the weeds that cows don’t like.” The feed, as Connie calls the local vegetation preferred by sheep, is sage, pea vines, and sweet anise, which lends a delicate licorice flavor to the meat. We see one of Nick’s Peruvian herders astride a sturdy horse, and Nick stops the truck. “You’ll see them sheep now,” he says, and points down a steep aspen-covered slope. All I can see are white trunks diminishing into a green haze, but I can hear the herd. It’s as if the trees are bleating.
On the day of the barbecue itself, everyone in the ranch house is up at dawn. The tidy kitchen smells like coffee and cinnamon rolls and furniture polish. Outside, it’s pure West. Outbuildings seem to have sprung up willy-nilly in the immensity of the landscape. Eleni disappears into the house to bake trays of spinach pie, stuff hundreds of grapes leaves, slip creamy pesto tortas from their molds, and toss pounds of Greek salad spiked with vinegar and sprinkled with dried oregano. On a blackboard behind her someone has written “Welcome!”
Nick Mahleres is in charge of the lambs today. Under his direction, the carcasses are skewered and secured on long stakes attached to a rotisserie motor. Hot coals in a large shallow pit are raked into glowing banks along the perimeter so the lambs, which are only a couple of inches from the ground, don’t burn. “We move the coals, or the fat from the lamb will cause flare-ups,” Nick explains. It will take four to five hours for the meat to cook, so he opens a bottle of ouzo.
The kokorétsi is thrown onto a large grill near the lamb, and when it is done, four hours later, the ancient matriarchs sit a little higher in their chairs and look expectantly in the direction of the barbecue pit. They are served first, and by the time a piece of kokorétsi is handed to me (a mere forty-something), the slices have become very thin indeed. But the sausage is rich and aromatic, luscious and salty, and full of surprises: a nugget of tender sweetbread, a mite of sweet, crunchy fat, a sliver of soft lung.
When the lamb is an hour away from being done, the men dump a case of potatoes wrapped in tinfoil and a few bushels of Olathe Sweet corn into the ashy pit. Melancholy recordings of Greek folk music play while the band rests between sets. Just about everybody in the local sheep industry is here: herders, packers, even bankers. “Especially the banker,” whispers Eleni. “My dad, Gus, said to always invite the banker.” Most conversations seem to be about the pitiful state of the industry.
American lamb production is on the decline due to a combination of factors, but ranchers may be most affected by the flood of cheap imports from New Zealand and Australia. Even without factoring in foreign competition and domestic production problems (like the consolidation of processing facilities), prime cuts of domestic lamb are expensive because the retailer has to raise the price to cover the losses from unsold secondary cuts. But the most profound obstacle families like the Theoses face is that their land is worth more as development property than can ever be made raising sheep. Indeed, Rose Casey, a local real-estate broker, says the Theos landholdings are worth around $60 million.
Connie Theos has been working with the Colorado Sheep and Wool Authority, a lobbying group, to improve sheep ranchers’ prospects. Among other efforts, they are pushing the government to require country-of-origin labels on lamb. They also want to encourage people to simply eat more of the homegrown variety. If they could get a hunk of this perfect barbecued lamb in the hands of every American meat eater, their job would be all but done.
The sun takes a long time to set, and every time you look around, there are a few more trucks bumping down the road toward home. It becomes exquisitely quiet. The sky is so thick with fat stars it seems like you can reach up and grab one, like an apple. Even the dogs are asleep, stuffed with stolen bones. I know there are predators circling the ranch all the time—and not just coyote and bear, which will take 10 percent of the herd—but in the dark this way of life seems eternal, and it is easy to imagine that the flock sleeping in the high country tonight will still be around tomorrow.
To order a whole or half fresh lamb from the Theos family, call Connie Theos at 970-878-4485. For smaller cuts, ask your butcher for Colorado grass-fed lamb.