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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The Texas Palate
One of the best things about living in Texas is that we have our own food. Think about it—you could be stuck in Washington, D.C., where deprived citizens do not have so much as a single civic dish to call their own and must spend their miserable lives eating the food of others. The lucky Texas cook and the even luckier Texas eater, on the other hand, have an embarrassment of riches specific unto themselves. Nowhere else did the antebellum South collide with Mexico and meet a large mass of Central Europeans and produce a whole breed of chuck-wagon cooks, with a bunch of food-crazy Louisianans and conservative Midwesterners throwing in their two cents’ worth on the fringes. The inspired mishmash that resulted is all ours: our food is Texan, not Southwestern.
The main thing about the collective Texas palate is that it ain’t subtle. A Texan wants his food to speak with authority; he’s got to have emphatic quantities of pepper and salt, jolts of red and green chile, big Tex-Mex doses of comino, unrepentant amounts of onion (raw “eating onions” are paramount, which is why those yellow Granexes we grow down in the Valley are so sweet that they throw your recipes off when cooked). A certain amount of garlic is okay by us; likewise lime, cinnamon, and the Southwestern marjoram called oregano. Texans find it natural to use salt pork and bacon as flavoring in slews of dishes. Is it smoked? We like it. Even the national sweet tooth is writ larger here—not always a good thing, but a fact of Texas life.
Given our enviable indigenous food, it would behoove a grateful populace to give credit where credit due rather than riding off pell-mell into the cuisinoid sunset. We owe a lot to the Southern influence in East and Central Texas: our manifold corn dishes, from grits to hushpuppies; the buttermilk school of baking; pork and chicken dishes (even East Texas barbecue bespeaks the barnyard rather than the cattle range). Not to mention the only decent Texas vegetable genre, which is the Southern black way of simmering anything green for hours with a bit of fat meat and finishing it off with an African shot of vinegary pickled pepper juice. Let them eat green beans al dente in New York. I want mine swimming with salt pork and new potatoes in a mess of pot liquor, thank you very much.
Texas owes a massive debt to its Mexican cooks. Theirs was the first modern Texas food, arriving with those ill-fated seventeenth-century Spanish missions and developing along both norteño and Tex-Mex lines. The former contributed a taste for grilled and roasted meats (particularly beef), which derived from Northern Mexico’s Spanish rancho culture. The latter, Texas’ own native style, added chili con carne and all that that entails. By now the tortilla, the bean, and the chile are central to life as we know it. No other branch of cookery has had such a galvanic effect on the state; no other branch has affected so many other styles and been changed so little in return.
Central Texas’ European—the Germans, Czechs, Alsatians, and to a lesser extent the Poles and Wends—deserve a vote of thanks for establishing a vital smokehouse tradition in the state. Taking a cue from their Mexican neighbors, they came up with sausages far livelier than any in the old country. The Germans in particular fell hard for the romance of Texas beef, setting up the premier meat markets and turning themselves into such superb barbecue pitmasters that sauce was (and still is) beside the point. The best steak chefs in Texas have always been Germans. And the Europeans gave Texas serious pickling, baking, and beer-drinking traditions. Remnants of their illustrious corridor of icehouses still stretch from San Antonio to Houston, fading reminders of the way beer was meant to be drunk: bottled, iced down to a fare-thee-well, and wrapped in a scrap of paper.
The Texasmost of all cooks worked on the cattle range, where out of dire necessity they created the first cooking style to be wholly identifiable with the state. Beef, beans, bacon, and sourdough were the range cook’s central realities. What couldn’t be cooked in a single Skillet or a Dutch oven didn’t get cooked at all. Milk and vegetables came from a can (there were no kitchen gardens on the sea of grass); that legacy lingers on in West Texas eateries, where the vegetable kingdom is often represented by a lone sprig of parsley. With all its limitations, cowboy food left an indelible imprint on Texas. Our lingering taste for the flavor and texture of range beef, our consuming interest in chili and chicken-fried steak—the very dishes that make the most of such beef—and the short shrift we give to vegetables all spring directly from the back of the nineteenth-century chuck wagons.
The Jalapeno as Totem-Missing Link
In some strange way, Texans’ sense of identity is tied to the jalapeño. This is a relatively recent development; when I arrived here in 1965, the jalapeño was not yet a cult object. Now it has penetrated every level of life, from the high (Mark White wagging a jalapeño pepper at Congressman Kika de la Garza is one of the weirder images in recent memory) to the mundane (the pages of any Texas community cookbook attest to the jalapeño’s ubiquity). There is something disarmingly childlike in our fixation on these little green bullets: they’re like our secret handshake, our fleur-de-lis, a Masonic rite that sets us apart. Oh, we feign delight when an outlander measures up to the jalapeño challenge, but how much greater is our pleasure when he can’t take it. The jalapeño has become a litmus test for imperially minded Texans.
The catalog of current jalapeño usage is dazzling in its catholicity. Apart from its natural role in nachos and table salsas, the jalapeño has found a home in ranch-style beans, hamburgers, jellies, quiches, pizzas, and potatoes (the Tassos baked potato at San Antonio’s venerable Barn Door is laced with chopped jalapenos). It is a necessary barbecue adjunct. The jalapeño shows up in tourist tomfoolery like lollipops and jellybeans; grandstanding bartenders use it to make daiquiris and to garnish the rims of Bloody Mary glasses. It has infiltrated party food, that great culinary leveler, in the form of sundry quasi-Mexican dips and pickled jalapeno boats stuffed with Middle-Americana like tuna salad and pimento cheese. Even as you read, Washington-on-the-Brazos herbalist Libbie Rice Winston is aging her 1983 vintage jalapeno wine; it is said to have the qualities of a Spanish sherry, and then some. If Texans hold any truth to be self-evident, it is that there is nothing that would not be improved by the addition of a little jalapeño.
The jalapeno’s most significant function has less to do with matters of taste than with cultural linkage: it has been a cement in Texans’ vision of themselves as a single people. It has insinuated itself all over the cooking map, in Smrkovsky’s knockout Czech sausages at City Market in Schulenburg, in Deep South cornbread and hushpuppies, in Louisiana-style dishes like gumbo and red beans and rice. The jalapeno, in fact, is virtually the only thing we all agree on. The one drawback to its primacy is that other, equally worthy chiles have been eclipsed as a consequence. But perhaps that is as it should be: so plump, symmetrical, and comely is the jalapeño that it makes the Serrano look niggardly, the poblano awkward, the tiny pequin negligible. As totems go, it’s the best-looking one on the block.
The Modern Kolache and Other Unnatural Disasters
As long as we’re taking stock of Texas cookery, how about a little of that self-criticism the Maoists were so good at? There are certain recent developments on the food front that are appropriate to view with alarm.
•In the best of times, kolaches, the Czech version of the Danish, never had a shelf life of more than about twenty minutes, so people were always trying to palm off stale ones on unsuspecting wayfarers. Now insult is added to injury in the form of viscous commercial fruit toppings with only the most tenuous connection to Mother Nature—sticky peach glue, icky cherry goo, and worse. The only cook I’ve been able to find who still makes her fillings from dried apricots, apples, and prunes the way her Czech forebears did is Mary Vitek of Vitek’s Kolache Bakery in Fort Worth.
• The machine age has not been kind to margaritas. I’d rather attend Colander-Head Night at my local Showbiz Pizza than drink the awful sweet-sour junk that emerges from frozen-margarita-machine spigots. What happended to cocktail shakers? What happened to those funny little Mexican limes? What happened to pride of craftsmanship, for gosh sakes? Just asking.
• Given the prodigious amounts of iced tea Texans consume, you’d think it wouldn’t be too much trouble to brew fresh. But no. Everywhere Texans must endure the Curse of the Instant Iced Tea, even in places that should know better.
• More and more restaurants are resorting to canned mustard greens because it’s too much trouble—there’s that phrase again—to wash all the bugs and grit off fresh ones.
• Considering the short time fajitas have been with us, they have entered a state of devolution with astonishing rapidity. Far too many of these charcoaled skirt steaks seem to have been marinated in sugar and soy sauce so that they come out tasting like fajitas teriyaki. Some versions eschew the soy sauce but use so much sweetener that the fajitas turn into meat candy. (Are you listening, you folks at Tenochtitlan in San Antonio?) A couple of Houston restaurants are serving a blasphemous version called chicken-fried fajitas. One of the first priorities of my proposed food police will be to raid Mary Nell’s in Houston and explain to proprietor Mary Nell Reck—an accomplished cook in other respects—that selling beef stew on pita bread as fajitas is unconscionable, pico de gallo or no pico de gallo. And while we’re at it, let’s go on record against (1) those restaurateurs who rename any cut of beef on their menu fajitas just to cash in on the craze and (2) that annoying affectation, now sweeping San Antonio, of selling fajitas by the kilo.
• A permanent injunction, please, against perfidious cooks who extend their guacamole with all manner of fillers. You know the cheapskate guacamole I mean—pasty, chalky, pallid mush. Recipes calling for deviant ingredients have exacerbated the guacamole crises. Houston’s new Junior League cookbook contains a version incorporating blue cheese, mayonnaise, and artificial bacon bits, to cite just one chilling example. The only permissible elaborations on the elemental version (the roughly mashed, unadorned avocado at Austin’s El Taquito Chef provides a point of reference) are grated onion, lime, chopped tomato, salt, and cilantro. Period.
My Library
