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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Even hoary old Brennan’s can show the upstarts a thing or two. Having failed at the important task of bringing great New Orleans creole cooking to Houston, the management wisely switched gears and hired ambitious young chef Mark Cox, who got busy ferreting out Texas cottage suppliers in the boondocks. They keep him furnished with Hill Country venison in tenderloin, smoke, or sausage form from Mike Hughes’ Broken Arrow Ranch in Ingram, fresh herbs and lettuces from Hearne, New Braunfels pheasant, chickens that scratched at Mount Pleasant less than 24 hours ago. Cox seems to be still feeling his way: his grilled redfish may not make your heart beat faster, but he does a marinated Gulf crabmeat salad that takes a backseat to none. Okay, Brennan’s New American Cuisine advertising takes a preening attitude that can make your skin crawl, but Cox’s food speaks louder than words. His is the kind of enterprise cooking that other restaurants would do well to emulate.
Cox’s concern for local food sources is a rare but not extinct impulse. In the meantime, concerned Texans must scout roadside vegetable stand, pick-your-own places, or the few markets like Jamail’s in Houston, the Whole Foods Market in Austin, and Queen’s in Fort Worth that actually seek out small local suppliers. Our activist new agriculture commissioner, Jim Hightower, plans to publish a guide to Texas cottage suppliers next year—”everything from cabrito to sweet corn,” he promises.
Should our public institutions fail us, it may behoove Texans to take matters into their own hands. Maybe it’s time to polish up those old hunting and gathering techniques before everyone forgets how to go oystering and berrying and nut-picking. There are frogs and flounders to be gigged, mustang grapevines and agarita bushes to be plucked. Even if the forces of culinary darkness triumph, there will still be plenty of good Texas food out there. We’ll just have to go get it.
The Truth About Chicken-Fried Steak
Ahem. This is going to win me as many friends as David Stockman made by telling the truth about trickle-down, but here goes: the truth about chicken-fried steak is that it’s almost never any damn good. During my many years on the lookout, I have encountered only four that seemed acceptable. One was the legendary version at Massey’s in Fort Worth. Another was a shamelessly funky rendition at Gennie’s Bishop Grill in Dallas. Two were uptown Houston numbers, one at Ouisie’s and the other a Confederate House Chicken-fried ribeye that would be rejected out of hand by purists, who contend that anything made with a cut of meat better than round steak is not a CFS. Maybe there are more good chicken-frieds out there somewhere, but after suffering so many inferior specimens, I don’t feel inclined to search for them.
The problems are these: chicken-frying is a miserable thing to do to a piece of beef in the first place, and too many things can go wrong. The meat can be too tough or too hideously tenderized. The frying job can be heavy-handed or grease-besotted. The gravy can turn into a stiff, tasteless sludge, with nary a redeeming speck of pan cracklings, or it can be overdoctored with black pepper in an attempt to hide its shortcomings. Too many restaurants have resorted to frozen, commercially breaded patties, a distressing development aggravated by the use of frozen, corrugated french fries on the side. Even rabid CFS nuts, who take a broader view of this sacred cow than I do, admit that the unofficial state dish (chili is official) has fallen upon evil days.
CFS probably seemed like a good idea at the time, when some poor ranch cook or other was pondering how to render some no-account range cow fit for human consumption. But in these days of comparative milk and honey, our collective clinging to this dish of expediency seems hugely sentimental. Chicken-fried steak currently has far more importance as a symbol than as a meal; to order a CFS is to make a statement, a declaration of Texanness.
In a way, I’m grateful to chicken-fried steak. It keeps a certain segment of the populace off the streets: they’re either eating chicken-fried steaks, talking about eating chicken-fried steaks, reminiscing about chicken-fried steaks they have known and loved, or discussing the finer points of the dish. Like whether a brown gravy turns it into a veal cutlet, or whether it’s better to have a country-fried steak that has been single-dipped in flour and fried in just a little grease or a true chicken-fried that has been soaked in buttermilk, double-dipped, and fried in a vat of grease. Fascinating stuff like that. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to go apply for an unlisted phone number.
Great Moments In Texas Culinary History
1868: Herr Harnisch, proprietor of the Harnisch & Baer Ice Cream Parlor, introduces the miracle of charged soda water to San Antonio and uses it to produce America’s first ice cream soda.
Circa 1875: The state’s first artificial ice is made at Jefferson.
1963: Van Cliburn eats seventeen biscuits with his meal at Green Pastures in Austin.
Circa 1964: LBJ establishes his credentials as a serious eater by telling a cook, “I’m the president of the United States, and if I want more ice cream, I’ll have more ice
cream.”
1970: When protesters at a University of Houston rally take up a “Free Lee Otis”
chant, it never dawns on Governor Preston Smith that they’re referring to imprisoned
black activist Lee Otis Johnson. Ever the country boy, the guv responds: “Frijoles?”
1974: Spot Baird, an East Texan, serves possum and yams to visiting Soviet
cosmonaut Aleksei Leonov.
1976: President Gerald Ford, who once told novelist John Hersey that eating is a
waste of time, proved it by trying to eat a tamale, shuck and all, during a visit to the
Alamo.
1977: Tommy Hamby, owner of the original Hoffbrau steakhouse in Austin, declines to go franchise in the face of tempting offers from various entrepreneurs. He gives them his recipes and his blessing and tells them, “You can do whatever you want, but I’m not interested.”
1979: Upon arriving in Houston, celebrated Hunan chef “Uncle” Wen-Dah Tai makes the only fitting culinary gesture: he decides to use jalapeños in a chicken dish.
1981: Alana Mora, of Alana’s in Austin, refuses to serve redfish to State Senator
Grant Jones, a leader in the fight to ban commercial redfish fishing and sales.
1982: On a space shuttle flight, astronaut Bill Lenoir becomes the first man to eat
jalapeño peppers in outer space.
Not-So-Great Moments In Texas Culinary History
1894: William Gebhardt produces the first commercial chili powder in New
Braunfels.
Circa 1930: Will Rogers refuses to go on the road without a supply of canned chili.
Circa 1940: Alice O’Grady, famed proprietor of San Antonio’s old Argyle Club,
anticipates nouvelle cuisine by serving gelatin molds ensconced on a bed of pink
shredded lettuce, garnished with blue morning glories.
1958: An ad campaign is launched urging people to heat Dr Pepper to make a festive cool-weather drink.
1978: Ignoring the issue of mutual exclusivity, Texas A&M research scientists
develop the so-called mild jalapeño.
1982: Jalapeño-eater Bill Lenoir becomes the first on his space shuttle mission to come down with space sickness.
1982: Casting common decency to the winds, researchers at Texas A&M developguacamole made from English peas.
1983: Dallas heiress Caroline Hunt Schoellkopf—she of the Mansion on TurtleCreek, the Remington, et alia—publishes a cookbook consisting entirely of pumpkin recipes.
1983: The Salgo Corporation in Richardson publishes its Real Texas Chili Rodeo Recipe Collection; it uses chili powder in carrot cake, cookies, and a tequila-grapefruitcocktail appropriately called a Prairie Dog.
Hall of Fame
Mrs. Brenner
Not only does Houston’s Lorene Brenner run the best steakhouse in Texas, she is also that rarest of heroes in the restaurant world, the unstinting perfectionist. After 47 years on the job, she still insists on broiling all her steaks personally (that’s 175 to 200 a night) while keeping a gimlet eye on everything down to the busboys. And she’s a food hero for an even more refreshing reason: she and her son, Herman, have rejected numerous offers to sell out, franchise, or otherwise proliferate Brenner’s steakhouses over the face of the earth.
Zephyr Wright
LBJ’s cook brought corned beef hash spiked with jalapeños to the White House. The Washington elite may have ridiculed Lyndon and Lady Bird as “Colonel Corn Pone and his Pork Chop,” but the Johnsons and Zephyr knew what they liked and ate accordingly. Probably the same Washingtonians who scorned those Texas vittles as hick stuff are now clambering aboard the New American Cuisine bandwagon and would love a crack at Zephyr’s hash. Fred Fountaine Barbecue adept, Louie Mueller’s, Taylor. One of the last of the old-time barbecue greats. Fred still rises at four in the morning to fire up his ancient, blackened pit, whose vicissitudes he knows better than a mother knows her own child. Fred is against air conditioning because it would ruin his communion with his pit’s drafts and eddies. He even swears, he can tell by his pit when it’s going to rain. An expatriate Rhode Island boy, Fred says it took him thirty years to get his barbecue right. It was worth it. Captain Benny Hienemann Emperor of oysters. The only appropriate response to the man who brought cultivated Matagorda Bay oysters to the attention of Houstonians is “Thank you.” The only appropriate response to the man who sees to it that his cooks fry those oysters the way angels would is “Thank you very much.” Frederick Law Olmsted Texas’ first food critic. Strong culinary convictions manifest themselves in the young Yankee journalist’s account of his 1854 horseback ride across Texas. Fred could really work out on such subjects as lardlike butter and stale, “micaceous” cornbread. But he rejoiced at the wheat bread, salads, vegetables, and peach compotes served up by Hill Country Germans and Alsatians. And his recipe for mesquite-grilled rabbit à la Texas Ranger is enough to put the fear of God into even the most addlepated mesquite abusers. Sadie Thornhill And Martha The two best-known chili queens in late-nineteenth-century San Antonio. One a gringa, the other Hispanic, they exemplified the democratic spirit that has—until recent distressing developments—been central to the Mexican food experience in Texas. All manner of people crowded together at their open-air stalls for Tex-Mex goodies. Later chili queens were shut down in the forties, but their spiritual successors are staging a comeback—just check out the fajita and gordita stands in San Antonio’s mercado on weekends. Helen Corbitt Texas’ food doyenne. Through her years in charge of Neiman-Marcus’ famous Zodiac Room and her immensely popular cookbooks, the sensible Corbitt made Texas food safefor the upper middle class. Her significance is as a popularizer of modified indigenous dishes; her poppyseed dressing, avocado soup, tamale pie, Prairie Fire bean dip, and Texas caviar (marinated black-eyed peas) obviated the need for fancy-schmancy Continental dishes at affluent Texas dos. Corbitt’s was a tearoom cuisine with a Texas soul.
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