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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Shrimp gumbo (Rusk St. Manor, Marshall)
Crabmeat with black butter (Maxim’s, Houston)
Cayenne redfish (Ouisie’s, Houston)
STEAKS
Sixteen-ounce strip (Brenner’s, Houston)
Eleven-ounce T-bone (Hofbrau, Houston)
Large sirloin (Hoffbrau, Austin)
Pan-fried T-bone, any size (Ranchman’s, Ponder)
Zentner’s Daughter special cut (Zentner’s Daughter, San Angelo)
Rose O’Texas tenderloin (Cattlemen’s, Fort Worth)
Part Three
SALADS
Wilted lettuce with olive-and-garlic dressing (Hofbrau, Houston)
Heart of iceberg with vinaigrette (Warwick Hotel Sunday brunch, Houston)
Charlie Bell salad (Maxim’s, Houston)
Bombay salad (King’s Inn, Loyola Beach)
Marinated crabmeat (Brennan’s, Houston)
Fruit salad with poppyseed dressing (Confederate House, Houston)
Spinach salad (Yacht Club, Port Isabel)
SIDE ORDERS
German fried potatoes (Brenner’s, Houston)
French fries (Lucky Lindy’s, Amarillo)
Ranch fries (Hofbrau, Houston)
Onion rings (Curley’s, Uncertain)
Baked potato (Brenner’s, Houston)
Green beans (Ranchmann’s, Ponder)
Mashed potatoes (Chef Latin’s, Nacogdoches)
Baked squash casserole (Highland Park Cafeteria, Dallas)
Bowl of cream gravy (Highland Park Cafeteria, Dallas)
Greens (This Is It Bar & Grill, Houston)
Yams (Frenchy’s, Houston)
Hushpuppies (Cap’n Dave’s, Houston)
Mabel Bruce’s green tomato pickles (Lakeview Lodge, Jefferson)
Louise Smrkovsky’s dill pickles (City Market, Schulenburg)
BREAD
Cornbread (Rusk St. Manor, Marshall)
Yeast rolls (Mrs. Bromley’s, Clarendon)
Pumpernickel and rye (Dietz Bakery, Fredericksburg)
French bread (Paris Bakery, Houston)
DESSERTS
Pecan fudge ball (Confederate House, Houston)
Coconut pie (Rusk St. Manor, Marshall)
Sweet-potato pie (Swann’s, Hempstead)
Tequila-and-lime sorbet (Tony’s, Houston)
Chocolate pie (Petersen’s, Palacios)
Apple strudel (Brenner’s, Houston)
Peanut butter pie (Gennie’s Bishop Grill, Dallas)
Peach pie (Matt Garner’s, Houston)
Lime tart (Alana’s, Austin)
Blackberry cobbler (Ranchman’s, Ponder)
BEVERAGES
Fresh-brewed iced tea (Rusk St. Manor, Marshall)
Agua de sandia (Rosario’s, San Antonio)
Fresh limeade (City Drug, Jefferson)
Margarita (Spanish Village, Houston)
Ramos Gin Fizz (Cadillac Bar, Nuevo Laredo)
Buttermilk (Pickett House, Woodville)
Shiner beer (Spoetzl Brewery, Shiner)
Lemonade (Taco Hut, Houston)
Licuado de plátano (Armando’s, Houston)
ENDANGERED SPECIES
It is purely depressing to think how many worthy dishes are vanishing from the state repertoire, public and private. Does anyone still make cantaloupe pie the way they used to on the Texas & Pacific Railroad? What about vinegar pie made with vinegar from Panhandle apples? Wendish fig pie seems lost to the ages as well, along with venison shortcake, corncob jelly, venison tamales, and Hill Country farm cheeses, not to mentioncrummin, that soothing crumble of cornbread and sweet milk that was Sam Rayburn’s favorite dish (nowadays, John Connally seems to be the only Texan who’ll swearallegiance to crummin in public). In the midst of massive culinary erosion, you’d think our most promising young chefs would have the decency to whip up some fresh Hill Country peach ice cream instead of noodling over trendy recipes for prickly pear sorbet, if you see what I’m getting at and I think you do.
Fortunately there are a few food establishments where ancient splendors are being preserved for posterity, or at least for the next few customers.
The Nutt House in Granbury still makes the most elemental hot-water cornbread—just meal, water, and salt, patted out into little cakes and deep-fried. Verynineteenth-century.
You bag the goose, and your hosts at the Farris 1912 Hotel in Eagle Lake will cook up a rich, mysterious goose gumbo so dark it’s almost black. They will fix it only if you give them enough geese to serve all your fellow guests, though, so get cracking.
Beans and bacon, the hallowed cowboy breakfast, can still be had at the estimable Van Dyke’s in Amarillo.
A strong German baking legacy once made the Hill Country a bastion of homemade bread. Sadly enough, the puffy modern loaves on sale at every third place of business are usually the over-sugared, bleached-out kind. But at Dietz Bakery in Fredericksburg, the pumpernickel is dense, sour, and dark as night, the moist unseeded rye a gentle incarnation of German brown bread. Both are baked in a brick hearth that has been in use for two generations. Speak up quick if you want them unsliced, and get there before 1 or 2 p.m. or the townsfolk will have cleaned the place out.
They’re not as thrilling as they were back when wild turkeys swarmed over the Hill Country, but you can still get turkey tamales at the Hill Country Store in Goldthwaite. It’s the thought that counts.
Buttermilk pie seemed headed for extinction, but currently it’s enjoying a revival, the standardized reality of factory buttermilk notwithstanding. The best recent version is the tart, simple one at Ouisie’s in Houston; the most disappointing, the harsh, overlemony one at Cappy Lawton’s various Mama’s outlets. In this case, the thought does not count.
Whole mustang-grape preserves that are sublimely tart and runny can be ordered from Fredericksburg’s Das Peach Haus, along with that disappearing Texas delicacy, agarita jelly (it’s a notorious pain to make, but the results taste subtly and elusively of Christmas). Owner Mark Wieser, the Gillespie County judge, buys his mustang grapes and agarita berries and wild plums from local farmers and foragers. He also turns out old-fashioned peach preserves, unthickened and possessed of a startlingly fresh flavor. Modernity has sneaked in by way of a few artificial colors, but in other respects Das Peach qualifies for a culinary preservationist’s award.
Dewberry cobblers were once as common as the canned, sluggish peach kind are now. Those who hit Marshall’s Rusk St. Manor on the right spring day, though, when a customer has brought in a bucket of newly picked berries, can vie for the dewberry cobbler with the regulars—some of whom have been known to squabble over the lastfew portions.
Pioneer records show that Hill Country families once spent entire days simmering watermelons to make a thick brown jam that lasted all winter. Jefferson’s RuthmaryJordan, proprietor of the bed-and-breakfast Pride House, still puts assorted melons to this forgotten use. At first blush, her ginger-colored melon preserves may strike thepalate as oddly unidentifiable, but a couple of mornings later, you’re hooked.
The Truth About Pecan Pie
Pecan pie simply doesn’t wear well. Not that the pecan is not a noble nut, the gem of the Texas river bottomlands and all that. Historically, Texas pecans have had lots of splendid applications: as embellishments to chicken salad and corn pudding, as adornments to fudge ice cream balls and waffles, or simply spiced and candied to be served at Christmastime. Pecans are exceedingly pleasant on top of yam pie or fudge pie. But somehow in the context of pecan pie, the magic flees after the second or third bite. It’s not so much the pecans themselves (although cooks who don’t bother to taste before they bake often inflict stale nuts on hapless diners); it’s all that Karo syrup in the custardy base. Even when the filling isn’t cloying—the pecan pie at the Barn Door in San Antonio comes to mind—the whole effect is so rich and nasty that finishing a piece becomes an act of heroism. Or foolhardiness, at the least. Maybe it’s time to admit that pecan pie wasa bad concept and move on to new territory.
ORIGINS
Texas was a Southern state first of all, so the first Texas cooking was Southern cooking. We owe a lot to it; our manifold corn dishes, from grits to hushpuppies; thebuttermilk school of baking; pork and chicken dishes The tradition is kept alive today at East Texas spots like Chef Latin’s eponymous cafe in Nacogdoches, where one can get a mean plate of overcooked vegetables, and other delicacies.
ORIGINS
As Southern food crossed the Sabine into Texas, so did Mexican food cross the Rio Grande to become our most durable and universal cusine—is there a town in Texas where you can’t get a plate of enchiladas? The cradle of Texas Mexican food is San Antonio, and the classic modern-day practitioner is the dapper Mario Cantú, whose Mario’s Restaurant is a little more Mex-Mex than Tex-Mex.
ORIGINS
In the mid-nineteenth century, immigrants from Eastern Europe added the third major food style, which flourishes in Central and Southeast Texas. Master meat smokers, the Europeans brought us barbecue and sausage. A little down-home cross-pollination produced such no-place-but-Texas results as Roy Smrkovsky and Willy Jurak’s jalapeño sausages at the City Market in Schulenburg.
ICE
It’s time to give ice some long overdue consideration as a principal Texas foodstuff. I grew up in Vermont, where ice was something that clinked around in your glass, cooling your drink during infrequent spells of warmish weather. Our winters were full of it, so ice had no special status as a precious substance. One of several culture shocks that smote me in Houston was the far more appreciative attitude Texans took toward their ice. At the home of a well-to-do Memorial family, I watched in amazement as all of them began chewing their ice cubes with obvious relish. They were…eating it! Far from constituting grounds for being sent to bed without dessert, this behavior was acceptable—nay, desirable.
Eighteen years later, I have developed the critical standards necessary to ice connoisseurship—an insufficiently recognized field of Texas endeavor. One wants one’s cubes to be on the small side, so as to fit more easily into one’s mouth. And one wants them a tad cloudy: crystal-clear ice, pretty as it looks, is the rock-hard, tooth-breaking kind. A satisfying crack is paramount to the ice aficionado’s enjoyment of his cube; that opaque Dairy Queen type of ice, honeycombed with air, is simply too easy to chew—and not nearly noisy enough. It almost goes without saying that shaved ice is a pernicious modern mutant. I propose that it be outlawed everywhere but movie theaters, where good eating-quality ice would drown out the dialogue.
Where to find respectable ice? The party ice machines at the San Antonio-based HEB chain of grocery stores is one infallible source. My fondest personal ice-cuisine recollections center on a paper cup full of cubes acquired at Inman’s smokehouse in Llano. They lasted clear to Austin and proved a great comfort during a hot, horrid traffic jam on 290. Slowly and methodically chewed, in fact, an average serving of ice cubes can induce a blissful, almost trance-like state. Just think of those ice cubes as our own little frozen mantras.
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