The Texas Food Manifesto
The forces of culinary darkness are out to subvert our native cooking. They must be stopped. To arms! To arms!
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Of course, the Neo-Texas places aren’t selling food, they’re selling a framework of signs and symbols to urban Texans. One of the strangest things about the Neo-Texas restaurants is their almost shrill jingoism: they beat you over the head with relentless reminders that you’re in Texas eating Texas food. Even the menu prose reflects a pep-rally mentality, a propagandistic tone. Perhaps the best example of Neo-Texas menuspeak is the appearance of chicken-fried chicken—a truly mind-boggling redundancy—on Lawton’s Mama’s Restaurant menu. The Neo-Texas restaurants are essentially made-up places built on shifting cultural sands. Their ethnocentricity is probably nothing more complicated than a response to rapid social change as Texas transforms itself from a rural to an urban culture. Newly urban folks removed from the small towns of their youth find reassurance in the blatant iconology and familiar dishes of a Texas Tumbleweed, a Mama’s ersatz Hill Country café, a Black-Eyed Pea. Recently arrived Northerners find affirmation of a new identity; Neo-Texas joints convince them they’re going native. All parties find a usable—albeit phony—past in such restaurants; the country pose makes patrons feel rooted at the same time that the safely middle-class stylization of food and décor befits their status as city folk. This is powerful stuff—more powerful, in many cases, than the lure of a properly nasty barbecued pork rib or a really soulful chicken-fried steak.
The Neo-Texas phenomenon might be easier to take if only its entrepreneurs would sell their wretched food quietly. But whereas Texans once could live in peaceful ignorance of the doings of Messrs. Lawton and Street, now their every move is fodder for the press. We must read about the peregrinations of Street in his lavender jet, the Pea-Aire, as he globe-trots about, making plans to open a Mexican restaurant in Paris. (Tamale’s, his quasi-Mexican effort here at home, can’t even turn out decent chicken tacos, but why should a little detail like that stand in the way?) We are told that Cappy Lawton is the Texas version of the famous California neo-chef Alice Waters—a patently absurd comparison. While Lawton’s many kitchens churn out indifferent chicken-frieds and vegetables suffocating in black pepper, the innovative Waters, who owns a single small restaurant and upstairs café in Berkeley, is combing the countryside for just the right cheese, the perfect local fruit, the best possible oysters. Just because one Lawton enterprise, Cappy’s restaurant in San Antonio, serves a few Gulf seafood dishes with some tequila and cilantro thrown in doesn’t put him in Waters’ class, and it certainly doesn’t make him a standard-bearer of some fictional new Texas cuisine. That the Texas food press makes him out to be one is a measure of its gullibility.
Roots
There is genuine danger in the Neo-Texas food entrepreneurs’ rise to power and influence. Given enough ersatz cobbler, moribund fried okra, and insanely peppered cream gravy, our numbed palates may forget what real Texas food was like. Already Neo-Texas joints are popping up on every other street corner, places named the Texas this, the Longhorn that, the Bubba’s whatsit. Meanwhile the best Texas cooks pass into history, and the roster of real Texas eating places shrinks. Fred Fountaine will retire from his hallowed barbecue pit at Louie Mueller’s in four years or so, but it’s a safe bet that hordes of greaseless, preppy County Lines will spring up to take his place. As Carolina Borunda Humphries fixes her last Tex-Mex plate on that wood-burning stove in Marfa, Gene Street or Cappy Lawton or someone just like them will be opening up a branch in your neighborhood.
Danger lurks in the New Southwestern claptrap as well. We seem to be falling prey to our own regional insecurities—aping the New American Cuisine, following California’s lead, cooking and eating whatever the food press expects us to. Is the word out that New Southwestern cooks will use lots of red and green peppers? Our trendy eateries dutifully trot out the red and green peppers. It’s just another way of forgetting who we really are and what our food is really like. A cuisine assumes a sense of history, a conscious combining of disparate elements. Food writers and high-profile cooks and restaurant marketers can’t create a new cuisine by fiat; it happens slowly and organically, the way it did in France and China. America is only now in a position to have a cuisine at all, let alone a new one. Nattering about some New Southwestern Cuisine is really jumping the gun.
The movement to celebrate American food is well and good. Texas food is eminently worth celebrating, but in these perilous times we must pay heed to how and where we do it. If we ignore the crisis as a trivial matter, soon all Texas will be divided between the Black-Eyed Pea faction and the mesquite-abuse cult. The forces of evil will have usurped our food, and we’ll have nobody to blame but ourselves. Texans’ unite! We have nothing to lose but bad meals. We have the most intimate expression of our culture to win.
The Importance of Eating Tex-Mex
Every society needs its nursery food-soothing, predictable dishes that give comfort in time of adversity. In wimpier parts of the country, nursery food runs to the bland likes of rice pudding and milk toast. In Texas it’s Tex-Mex, that utterly reliable laundry list of nine basic items, combined and recombined, eternal verities. Even the sound of the litany is reassuring: enchiladas and tamales, rice and beans, tacos and chalupas, nachos and guacamole, chile con queso. There’s that dependable note of comino, the familiar strains of commercial chili powder, and—perhaps most gratifying of all—the gooey unity conferred by a coating of melted cheese and chili gravy. No surprises here; this hyped-up nursery fare makes no untoward demands on the palate (outlanders mistakenly think it’s hot stuff, but Texans know the picante factor is just a function of the table salsa). It makes no untoward demands on the brain, either. Only the combinations change; the momentous choices and exotic stimuli posed by Mex-Mex menus are but a distant nightmare to the diner pondering the Number One versus the Senorita Special.
Like all true nursery food, Tex-Mex harks back to childhood: the Wednesday Mexican plate at the elementary school cafeteria, the family’s weekly foray to eat your favorite gringofied enchiladas at the city café. Tex-Mex legatees know that rational dining standards don’t apply to their Tex-Mex restaurants. The attachment is emotional. Sneers and remonstrations (“Too greasy.” “But they use Velveeta!”) will not sway the true believer a jot. The Texan stands by his Tex-Mex restaurant. For without ever having to articulate it, he knows that his reason for being there is profoundly remedial—an antidote to traffic snarls, modern romance, a puny spell. Let the rough beast slouch toward Bethlehem. I’ll be sitting under the Christmas lights at the Spanish Village in Houston, listening to the police sirens wail down Almeda Street and taking solace in the Regular Dinner.
Texas Fried
“When in doubt, fry” has always been the unspoken credo of Texas kitchens. During his trek across East Texas in the 1850’s, Frederick Law Olmsted was driven to distraction by the ever-present “fry”—usually salt pork or bacon—served forth with cold corn pone and bad coffee. Hill Country Germans were perhaps less prone than their Anglo-Southern neighbors to fry by reflex (Olmsted spoke gratefully of two meat courses at a New Braunfels inn, “neither of them pork, and neither of them fried”), but a 1916 Fredericksburg recipe for “A Good Steak” is vintage Texas, calling for the meat to be egg-washed and floured before it is fried in lard and butter.
It is in that spirit that Texans have undertaken to fry everything from grits to ice cream (curiosity seekers can order that unfelicitous East Texas specialty in places like Dolly’s Ice-Cream Parlor in Cleveland). We fry little fruit pies. We fry cornbread in hushpuppy form or, less frequently nowadays, as hot-water cornbread cakes. When times got hard, we fired bologna and served it with red-eye gravy and white bread. An Austin native I know recalls her mother’s fried meat loaf with some nostalgia. We fry sliced tomatoes and onion rings and turkey and jalapeños. One Lufkin barbecue joint goes so far as to deep-fry its yeast rolls. Texans happily eat fried things they’d never touch otherwise: calf testicles, rattlesnake meat, chicken livers, gizzards, and okra. The admonition to “eat your vegetables” is more palatable to many Texans if the vegetables happen to be fried. Gene Street’s Dixie House in Dallas even fries corn on the cob, an idea destined to go down in history as a dreadful mistake. Texans are not averse to entire meals that have been fried, symphonies in brown, like the classic seafood platter (relieved only by a dab of coleslaw) or chicken-fried steak with french fries.
So what does it all mean? Part of it is the legacy of the frontier, where frying offered a degree of protection against bad ingredients and bad cooks. Frying also cushions us from the shock of the new: somehow, new, unaccustomed foods like frogs’ legs or sweetbreads lose their terrors when hidden beneath that familiar gold-brown mantle. The main thing, though, it that when properly done, fried food tastes great. There is no more perfect way of cooking an oyster than quickly frying it in a cornmeal crust—its natural juices are miraculously sealed in, and the contrast of the light, crackly exterior with the oyster inside is as stirring as anything you’ll experience in a la-di-da restaurant.
That point seems to be lost on certain evangelists of the New Southwestern Cuisine. They find mesquite-grilling, roasting, and broiling socially acceptable, but frying? How gauche. Next thing you know, they’ll be advocating that we broil our catfish. Life could be lived, however, without the knee-jerk wholesale frying that Texans are wont to engage in. Unfortunately, all those Neo-Texas restaurateurs have sized on frying, comfortable old culinary shoe that it is, to establish their country-boy credentials. Just a few weeks ago Jim Byrnes, the young owner of Houston’s Lone Star Cafes, earnestly assured a newspaper food columnist that readers could prepare a whole dinner in one fryer, so that “main dishes like fried chicken can be served with the necessary accompaniments like fried okra and onions.” Necessary to whom?
Frying has a further public relations problem because so few people do it well. Some shiftless cooks resort to commercial batters; others batter and bread so mercilessly that the results are a crust not unlike boiler plate. And rare is the cook who superintends his grease with sufficient care—keeping the temperature hot enough that the food doesn’t get grease-soaked and throwing the grease away when it’s worn out. Happily, there are a few practitioners around who may yet preserve this fine art for posterity. When the Frying Hall of Fame is built, it had better have places for Cap’n Dave Smith of Cap’n Dave’s Seafood and Waylon Whipple of Mr. Whipple’s in Houston, the crew at Captain Benny’s, the fry cooks at the King’s Inn in Loyola Beach, the catfish maestros up at the Lakeview Lodge, and Bill Knox of the Running Bear in Holiday Beach.
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