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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• Nachos, our nosh of choice, are in dire peril. On the froufrou front, they’re becoming increasingly rococo as frenzied restaurateurs pile them with everything but the kitchen sink. On the degenerate front, ballpark nachos show signs of conquering the universe. Those paper bowls full of mass-produced corn chips, runny processed-cheese sauce, and carelessly strewn jalapeños are not what you’d call goodwill ambassadors for Texas cooking.
• Biscuits are in a general state of decline outside a ten-block stretch of Fort Worth’s West Magnolia Avenue, where you can still get splendid specimens at the Summerhill House (a.k.a. Dorothy’s) and the Paris Coffee Shop. Elsewhere, biscuits seem to grow heavier as the century marches on; they spend debilitating amounts of time in warming bins across the state. Few are the principled places, like Van Dyke’s in Amarillo, where sourdough biscuits are still baked in continuous shifts so that they come out of the oven and immediately onto your plate. While we’re on the subject, what’s with the tiny aluminum tubs of “Mixed Fruit Jelly” that certain restaurants try to pass off as fitting biscuit accompaniments? I mean, what kind of fruit goes into that mongrelized mush, and who decides? The public has a right to know.
• If our beloved Legislature cared anything about the bust-up of Western civilization, it would license all Texas pie makers immediately. Under the Pie Rehabilitation Act, crust workshops would be mandatory for periodic license renewal, and use of canned fruit fillings would result in an automatic $100 fine. Anna Woods of the Rusk St. Manor in Marshall, who buys yard eggs especially to use in her coconut cream pie filling and whose meringue is like a billowy cloud, would be honored in a special resolution. Freelance piewoman Billie Anderson of Houston would be appointed pie maker to His Majesty Mark White.
• Statewide, cobblers are in every bit as woeful a condition as pies. Same crust crisis. Same filling fiasco. Worse yet, the Neo-Texas entrepreneurs all feel obliged to put a token cobbler on their menus—invariably topped with that most overrated of Texas food totems, Blue Bell ice cream—but do they think they’re fooling anyone with that spongy, sticky, biscuity sludge that passes for cobbler dough? Yuck.
• Someone ought to organize ceviche seminars for those misguided restaurateurs who feel the need to cook the fish that goes into this newly fashionable dish, thereby turning it into ceviche stew. Let’s get one thing straight, guys: “ceviche” means raw fish that acquires a cooked texture from the workings of lime juice. Cooking the fish first shows a pusillanimous failure of nerve.
Skeletons in the Closet
And then there are the perennial Texas gastronomic embarrassments that it is time to consign to oblivion. I’m talking about things that can’t be ruined because they were terrible to begin with. No bleeding-heart whimpering; we must disown the following while we can.
Pralines. Face it, they’re always disgusting. Some are just less disgusting than others, but their identifying characteristics remain the same—stultifying sweetness and horrifying graininess. Sure, they’re the traditional finale to a Tex-Mex meal, but couldn’t we make do with flan, empanadas, bunuelos, or the kind of mango ice cream they make at El Mirador in San Antonio? If any sentiment lingers on behalf of pralines, consider that Ronald Reagan recently wrote Mi Tierra vice president Simon H. Castillo thanking him for a gift of the candies. “I became very fond of this type of confection when I was in Williamsburg for the economic summit,” Reagan alleged. Hey, a guy who’ll eat jelly beans will eat anything.
Not only do peanut patties have all the charms of pralines, they often are possessed of a bizarre pink color besides.
It has come to my attention that certain pinto bean recipes involving Dr Pepper are circulating in the state. This will not do.
Somewhere in Texas, some misguided soul is dropping peanuts into a bottle of Dr Pepper. This shameful practice must be stopped.
And somebody should do something about Big Red, a few retrograde bottles of which are still hanging around. So poisonously sweet and artificially crimson is this liquid that its half-life is probably in the neighborhood of 100,000 years.
Who would eat a salty, Styrofoamy Frito when there are real tortilla chips to be had? The same people who’d eat Doritos, that’s who. There’s no excuse for this when infinitely preferable substitutes—like El Galindo Natural Tortilla Quarters from Austin or the Avis of commercial tortilla chips, El Rio brand—are available. Restaurants have no business buying their tortilla chips, but the only obligation for folks at home is not to buy bad ones.
New skeleton in the closet: Bellville Potato Chips. Texas needs a boutique potato chip about as much as it needs Doritos. The country-slick packaging touts these chips as “the thicker, tastier gourmet potato chip.” Thicker, yes, but greasier and more inert-tasting as well. An idea whose time has not come.
The popularity of whole wheat tortillas in Austin can only be regarded as a granola-brained corruption of the genre. This sort of nonsense does nothing for Austin’s reputation.
Much as it pains me to admit it, 99 times out of 100 jalapeno jelly is a cloying, misbegotten substance that has few—if any—suitable uses Understanding Texans should pledge henceforth to refrain from giving it to unsuspecting non-natives as gifts and (even more important) from pouring it over bricks of cream cheese to serve at parties.
Ritual Meals/Food Rituals
We have reached a moment at which tinkering with certain hallowed dishes seems inevitable and possibly even healthy. But let us not lose sight of some things that do not bear tampering with—particularly ritual Texas meals that have been perfected over generations, the parts of which exist in a harmony that can only be mucked up by a little poblano chile here, a little cilantro there. If you changed the elements of these food entities one iota, they would simply cease to be themselves.
Take the catfish dinners served up around Caddo Lake. Every serious eater in Jefferson, Marshall, and Karnack knows exactly what to expect when he goes to the lake lodge of his choice. First, big bowls of coleslaw and green-tomato pickles—quartered, sweet-hot ones—materialize with a basket of cello-wrapped crackers. The pickles have a magical way of cutting through the heaviness of the fried items that follow: French fries, hushpuppies, and the catfish themselves, either filets or whole headless fingerlings with jauntily curved tails, which is the way serious catfish people insist on eating them. Aside from the filleted-or-whole question, the only other variable is the use of jalapenos in the hushpuppies.
Another meal governed by strict conventions is the Arkansas Traveler: split cornbread smothered with roast beef and brown gravy, served with those big-awkward Texas fries, pinto beans, and a slab of onion. You can still get this old-timey configuration at a few Fort Worth eateries like the Paris Coffee Shop and even the Cattlemen’s (lunch only).
Then there’s Frito pie, a.k.a. chili pie, which is either a lovable eccentricity or an abomination, according to your principles, but is nevertheless unvarying in its construction. The purist version, such as the one served at the Big Freezer in Pharr, calls for a bag of Fritos with its front torn off. A suitable amount of chili is ladled in, followed by some grated Longhorn cheese and freshly chopped onion. THIS DISTH MUST, REPEAT, MUST BE EATEN OUT OF THE SACK WITH A PLASTIC FORK OR SPOON, lest the whole effect be lost. Cynics may carp that this classic Texas junk-food dish is a recent aberration, but historians will be glad to note its appearance in the 1946 Fredericksburg Home Kitchen as Chili-Frito Loaf, submitted by Miss Viola Mae Schmidt.
The Brown Pig sandwich served at Neeley’s in Marshall since 1927 is another Texas meal to which the strict constructionist approach applies. Far greater than the sum of its parts, the Brown Pig depends on grilled buns, tender pork shredded to the consistency of baby food, a sweet-hot-smoky barbecue sauce, a discreet sprinkle of chopped lettuce, and a dab of mayonnaise. The locals order two as a matter of course; some returning servicemen have been known to stop in for a Brown Pig even before seeing their parents, an attitude Marshallites seem to find perfectly understandable. Could the Brown Pig be improved? Unthinkable.
In Praise of Iceberg
In these days of ever-more-esoteric salad greens, iceberg lettuce has fallen on hard times. While mache, arugula, and radicchio are the stuff of New Yorker cartoons and fawning press notices, poor unfashionable iceberg gets put down by food writer after food writer. I admit to having taken some cheap shots at iceberg myself, back when I had less to say and more to prove. Iceberg salads can be terminally boring, of course; endless bowls of roadhouse iceberg globbed with unspeakable commercial dressings haven’t helped the lettuce’s sagging reputation.
But enough already. It’s up to right-thinking Texans to restore some measure of dignity to the head lettuce of our childhood. Iceberg was never about taste (it hasn’t any to speak of) iceberg was always about texture. It’s crisp and crunchy and brisk. Asians value all sorts of relatively bland ingredients, from sea slugs to gelatinous fungi to bean curd, for texture alone; ironically, Thai and Chinese cooks in Texas understand iceberg better than do the status-conscious cooks who have deserted it in droves (just try to imagine Uncle Tai’s squab packages wrapped in leaf lettuce, for example).
Iceberg’s highest and best use is in Tex-Mex food, where trendier lettuces just won’t cut it. There is nothing sillier or more pointless than a plateful of chalupas and tacos showered with romaine strips. Equally pathetic is the use of leaf lettuce in the complex layering of the genuine Texas hamburger, grocery-store genre, to which iceberg is absolutely essential. Iceberg snaps nicely in this context, whereas fancy lettuce slides and tears.
Iceberg even has its rightful place in the salad world, though that place is small than Texans once thought. The original Hoffbrau steakhouse salad, an inexplicably wonderful wilted-lettuce affair dressed with brazen quantities of garlic and chopped olives, simply wouldn’t work with any other greens. And the unapologetic wedge of iceberg served with the house vinaigrette at the Warwick Hotel’s venerable Sunday brunch is a model of structural and conceptual integrity.
Recently some upscale Texas restaurants have tried to rehabilitate iceberg for their own miserable ends. The menu at Turtle Cove, the Dallas mesquite palace, goes so far as to list two salads: Romaine with Dijon and Lemon and Iceburg with Ranch Dressing. I can’t help but think that if this gesture bespoke sincere affection rather than crass co-optation, they would have at least spelled “iceberg” correctly.
Shut Up and Eat
It is all very well to have standards in cooking, as in life. But it is also well to remember the uselessness of pontificating where matters of the kitchen are concerned. A cook either has the art or has not. Take Chef Latin, the kitchen master at the Nacogdoches soul café of the same name.
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