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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Not long ago I ate a lunch at Chef Latin’s that broke every one of my rules about the Way Things Are Supposed to Be. The fried chicken was cut into boneless strips, a sure way, in the gospel according to Cook, to reduce flavor. The black-eyed peas were not fresh. Both the peas and the fresh cabbage needed shots of vinegar from a bottle of pickled peppers to bring them to life. The gravy on the mashed potatoes had almost certainly had congress with a can of cream-of-mushroom soup. The cornbread was a sissy latter-day version, sweet and devoid of the crisp, browned bottom crust that comes from cooking it in a heavy iron pan. There were oleo pats. I strongly suspect that the iced tea was instant. My view consisted of a red-mud driveway containing a hearse. In the window sat a sign announcing, “We welcome American Express,” seldom a good omen when you’re after country cooking. Everything, in short, was all wrong. And I can hardly wait to go back.
Big As a Culinary Ethic
Bigness is a concept central to Texas thought. Its culinary applications are familiar: the Big Iced Tea in a quart-size plastic tumbler; Texas Toast, the consort of cheap steaks, sliced as thick as an arm; Beeg Margaritas that would be regarded with gaping astonishment south of the border. In Amarillo a restaurant called the Big Texan serves a 72-ounce steak (that’s four and a half pounds of red meat, sports fans). Who among us has not uttered that ultimate chicken-fried-stead encomium, “It’s so beg it hangs off the edges of the play!” Texas eateries like Chicken Charlie’s in Balmorhea and Goodson’s in Hufsmith have actually made their reputations by serving food bigger than anyone else’s. The cream pies we hold dear are inevitably towering, formidable affairs. As a tribe we tend to want even our hamburgers big: double meat, double cheese, with layers that slip and slide and reach up inexorably.
In part, our affinity for the outsized is an expression of that don’t-fence-me-in expansiveness Texans imagine they are heir to. Part of it may be the folk memory of the not-so-distant rural frontier; 150 years ago, Texans were eating like field hands, and every calorie counted. The dark side of big is the hereditary insecurity of Texans in the face of Eastern savoir faire; the remnants, lingering on, still whisper that we can assert ourselves through quantity.
Small wonder, then, that nouvelle cuisine never took Texas’ big cities by storm. Three snow peas on a plate, no matter how cunningly arranged, is not our idea of a good time. We want something we can bite into, evidence of substance and reality, an anchor to the here and now. That’s why true Texans will never be satisfied with the itty-bitty biscuits and orange muffins served at Jefferson’s Excelsior House. Those miniature tacos, those teeny-weeny burgers, those little beef-n-buns served at society dos? A mere perversion of the upper class.
Unfortunately, a symbolism so readily grasped is also readily co-opted. Neo-Texas food entrepreneurs have embraced big with a will, from Big Iced Tea to Gene Street’s grotesque mutant at Tamale’s: a hamburger and a hot dog smothered in chili and barbecue sauce, served (where it belongs) in a trough. As the Ching scholar and gastronome Yuan Mei observed during a banquet where boiled swallow’s nest was served in flowerpot-sized vases, “We are here to eat swallows-nest, not to take delivery of it wholesale.”
Why Dallas Will Never Be Taken Seriously As a Food Town
There is no median cut-through on Inwood to give the southbound gastronome access to Sonny Bryan’s. Case closed.
Steaks
I wish there were some way to write this story without mentioning steaks. Four or five steaks a year are plenty for this kid, but for most Texans steaks are a cultural imperative—a sign of the old beef lust that held over with hats and boots from the nineteenth-century cattle culture. What I want to know, all you steak lovers out there, is whether you’ve given any thought to what makes a real Texas steak, as opposed to the steak you get in New York or Cleveland. I thought so.
Now here’s the deal, as John Zentner (who happens to be West Texas’ foremost meat man) is fond of saying. You’ve got your big-city steak, a three-inch thick, satiny tender one that costs a small fortune. Odds are, it’s broiled or charcoaled so as to have a thin charred crust. It sits politely on your plate, minding its manners. Then you’ve got your real Texas steak, a sprawling, disorderly plate-filler cut about an inch thick and threatening to lap over onto the table. You can afford it. It bears more relation to a range cow than to a pampered feedlot animal. It conforms to a ranchman’s idea of tender, which is chewy tender, meaning you don’t have to saw it. And it tends to be cooked one gradation more than the way you ordered it, a holdover from the days when cowboys wanted their beef bloodlessly well done. Some cuts are more Texan than others, so it’s likely to be a T-bone rather than a city-slicker K.C. strip or a ditsy little filet. Better be a big T-bone—order one under sixteen ounces and John Zentner figures you might as well stay home. And it better be pan- or griddle-grilled the old cowboy way, with the drippings to add flavor.
One more thing: real Texas steaks do not come in boxes. The self-respecting steakhouse owner insists on a cold locker full of swingin’ beef, aging as it dangles, from which he cuts his own steaks. There are no exceptions to this rule.
150 Years of Bad Coffee
Texas has a proud tradition of bad coffee. Frederick Law Olmsted first noticed it, bewailing “the black decoction of the South called coffee, than which it is often difficult to imagine any beverage more revolting.” It’s tempting to romanticize the Arbuckle’s brand camp coffee served forth by range cooks, but the odds are that after being boiled tempestuously with the grounds and given a toss of eggshells to settle out of the debris, it was wicked-tasting stuff. Over the decades it became gospel that Texas coffee was black and mean and macho; even today, a traveler who requests cream in West Texas is regarded with the contemptuous sidelong glances served for sissies.
There might have been hope for good Texas coffee once, but it never panned out. That Mexican cafe con leche never caught on in these precincts in a tragedy. That the German kaffeeklatsch succumbed to the Mr. Coffee age is an incalculable sadness. Even the doughty drip coffee of Cajun imports has taken a strange regional turn; the Beaumont coffee roaster, Texas Coffee Company, turns out a dark-roasted drip grind called Seaport that is so eccentric it could take years of getting used to. “Drinking the coffee most of the United Stated drinks is like eating a half-baked cake,” expostulated Texas Coffee president Joseph “Pep” Fertitta to a reporter. Agreed. But drinking Pep’s coffee is not unlike drinking some particularly ornery bayou water. Kinda grows on you, though.
The best Texas coffee, if the truth be known, is made by Houston’s Vietnamese community, who swear by New Orleans Café du Monde coffee with chicory for their tiny drip pots. Speculating about why Texans have blown their other coffee options seems as fruitless as trying to figure out why so many of us require our coffee before a meal instead of after.
Hopes
If there is hope for the fitting and proper evolution of Texas food—as opposed to its simple preservation—it lies not with the pseudo home-cooking entrepreneurs or with trendy restaurants playing to the whims of the food press. It resides instead with a handful of Texas restaurants that have spent years experimenting and reinterpreting without self-congratulatory fanfare.
One such is Jeffrey’s, the Austin restaurant that consistently serves some of the most interesting food in the state. There’s a definite French influence at work here, but Jeffrey’s sauces have a vigor and snap that seems distinctly Texan, and its continually changing menus have a genuine regional bias. It shows in the lively flounder ceviche, the haunting smoked quail appetizer, a sturdy, fragrant, pork-and-cabbage soup of the sort that ought to come out of Hilly Country restaurants and never does. It is manifest in a new yet old-fashioned peach roll made with fresh local peaches and in a red-peppery crawfish etouffee that could hold its own with any in Lafayette. Even Texans’ subterranean, ranch-inspired penchant for variety meats gets its due; Jeffrey’s version of sautéed sweetbreads, simplicity itself, is like Mario’s in San Antonio to the third power, and liver in a sparkling, lime-flavored demiglace evokes the tropical Valley.
Alana’s in Austin was in decline until recently, when it instituted two daily prix fixe dinners that have a real Texas bent. (Variable menus that respond to the market are perhaps the best measure of a serious regional restaurant, since they display a concern for food sources rather than the easy buck.) Alana’s strong suit has always been fresh Gulf fish, particularly redfish in various guises—a refreshing specialty, considering the banality of much Texas seafood cookery. This is no mesquite-grill-anything-with-fins-on-it operation, either. Alana’s snapper a la Reyes arrives wearing a tactful sauté of poblano chiles and onions; another night’s grilled redfish may be graced with peppery deviled oysters. And a couple of Alana’s nonfish dishes serve the status of new Texas classics: the poblano soup, wonderfully pully with white cheese, is to Texas what onion soup is to France, and her pecan tart is just about the only version of pecan pie worth eating, frenchification be damned. There are worrisome signs at Alana’s—I view the appearance of sautéed quail with cilantro butter with some alarm—but perhaps the restaurant has the stuff to triumph over trendiness.
At Ouisie’s, a historically erratic Houston neighborhood restaurant currently enjoying one of its ups, an innate Texanness outweighs various irritations. Sometimes the goods are homely classics redone: pimento cheese, a bowlful of lavishly garnished black beans, hamburgers with green chile and jack cheese. Sometimes they’re Texas basics that few restaurants bother to get right, like buttermilk pie, broiled whole flounder, or a pull-out-the-stops chicken-fried steak dinner replete with corn, pudding, greens, black-eyed peas, and mashed potatoes. And occasionally the kitchen gives an entirely new twist to Texas verities. Got some tamales? Stuff a game hen with them. Fresh redfish? Give it a startling dusting of cayenne and serve it with a garlicky sauce. Oranges? Macerate them in bourbon and mint. This is thoughtful, unhackneyed regional cooking that doesn’t need to grandstand or play more-up-to-the-minute-than-thou.
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