Texas Home Cooking

by Cheryl Jamison

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  What We've Got Cooking

  Old Truths for New Times

  THE TEXAS CLASSICS

  Real Pit-Smoked Bar-B-Q

  Tex-Mex Treasures

  Championship Chili

  Chicken-Fried Steak and Other Chuck

  THE MAIN COURSE

  Holy Cow

  Chicken, Pork and Other Barnyard Fare

  Tamed Game

  Fish and Seafood

  SUPER AND SIDE DISHES

  Hearty Salads and Breads

  Beans, 'Taters and Other Keepers

  Farm-Fresh Vegetables

  Country Canning

  LONE STAR SPECIALTIES

  Eye-Popping, Heart-Thumping Breakfasts

  Football Food

  Beverages to Boast About

  Y'All-Come-Back Desserts

  Mail-Order Sources

  Acknowledgments

  Texas Cookbooks

  Other Books of Interest

  People and Places Index

  Recipe Index

  Footnotes

  THE HARVARD COMMON PRESS

  535 Albany Street

  Boston, Massachusetts 02118

  www.harvardcommonpress.com

  Copyright © 1993 by Cheryl Alters Jamison and Bill Jamison

  Illustrations copyright © 1993 by Paul Hoffman

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Printed in the United States of America

  Printed on acid-free paper

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Jamison, Cheryl Alters.

  Texas home cooking : 400 terrific and comforting recipes full of big, bright flavors and loads of down-home goodness / Cheryl Alters Jamison, Bill Jamison.

  p. cm. -- (America cooks)

  ISBN 978-1-55832-059-8 (pbk.)

  1. Cooking, American--Southern style. 2. Cooking--Texas. 3. Cookbooks. I. Jamison, Bill. II. Title.

  TX715.2.S68J358 2011

  641.59764--dc23

  2011016086

  Special bulk-order discounts are available on this and other Harvard Common Press books. Companies and organizations may purchase books for premiums or resale, or may arrange a custom edition, by contacting the Marketing Director at the address above.

  Cover design by Night & Day Design

  Cover photography by Joyce Oudkerk Pool, assisted by Morgan

  Bellinger; food styling by Jason Wheeler

  Text design by Kathleen Herlihy-Paoli

  Illustrations by Paul Hoffman

  20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13

  for Heather, David, Colby, Tatia, and Britton,

  a new generation of Texas cooks and eaters,

  and Austin, Krista, B. J., Erik, and Kyle,

  the next generation.

  What We've Got Cooking

  "The very fact that I was in Texas for the sole purpose of eating contradicted my blind but resolute conviction that most food down there was, at best, some form of fodder consumed by asbestos-palated goat-ropers for no other reason than to sustain human life.... Well, to suggest that I now champion the cause of Texas cookery is a triumph of understatement—not to mention an admission of acute guilt and embarrassment.... I need no more convincing that the regional dishes of Texas are not only some of the most inspired in the nation but also some of the most delicious."

  James Villas, American Taste

  Villas is an unusual fellow, an eater with an open palate. Most of us would rather wrestle a rattlesnake than give up our food biases. This is particularly true when we're talking about Texas, a place where, as everyone knows, it's better to be bowlegged than subtle or fussy.

  If you hear the words Texas and cuisine used in the same sentence in culinary circles, it's probably the punch line of ajoke about Paris, Texas. Even many Texans aren't aware of their state's amazing food heritage and the real potentials of its home cooking. In a land of bull-riding cowboys, high-kicking cheerleaders, and bank-bamboozling millionaires, it's easy to conclude that what you trot out to the table is less pertinent than J. R. Ewing's virtues.

  We're here to show you different. Texas has more to boast about in the kitchen, contrary to common belief, than in the boardroom, bedroom, or back room. When the traditional dishes of the state are fixed right, they're as full of flavor as foie gras and as hearty as a honky-tonk angel. We're going to treat you to some meals that'll make you—like James Villas, Town and Country editor—pull up a table in the amen corner of Lone Star cooking.

  Down-Home Food for Contemporary Cooks

  A century ago, in 1893, Alice O'Grady brought European refinement to Texas cooking. That was the year she opened the Argyle Hotel in San Antonio, the only place in the bumptious frontier state where ladies and gentlemen could count on proper manners and silverware. In her elegant restaurant, the Irish-born Miss O'Grady served a range of Continental delicacies plus mashed potatoes dyed pink, cakes with elaborate spun-sugar icing, and congealed salads with pastel-tinted cabbage garnishes.

  Texas never quite ceases to be Texas, however gussied up it gets. This is particularly true of the food heritage, which has shown the same kind of staying power as a straight flush. Texans, along with everyone else, have grown more cosmopolitan over the past one hundred years but they have never spurned their roots. Like Alice O'Grady, they have simply incorporated new influences into old food traditions, blending with the contemporary world instead of bowing to it. The result at its best, as we feature it here, is down-home fare with flair, more complex and robust than in the past though true to its original inspiration. We don't dye our mashed potatoes, but they'll tickle you pink if you remember mashed potatoes as bland.

  Even with our stress on depth and breadth of flavors, our focus remains real home cooking, not just hearty and familiar but also easy to prepare. We respect professional restaurant chefs and their cookbooks—and we're happy to apply their ideas and techniques when appropriate—but our recipes don't require a Star Wars kitchen, a staff of twenty, or a week of advance planning. Although we pursue and attain a good measure of the rich, multidimensional qualities we admire in fine restaurants, we don't do demi-glaces.

  We also don't do hospital vittles. We take health considerations seriously, and usually manage to cut heavy or rich ingredients without sacrificing flavor, but if that doesn't work we don't compromise goodness. Our own approach is to eat less rather than decimate a beloved dish. Besides, plenty of our country favorites in the cookbook are already as light and wholesome as any health food—just more wonderfully savory. We frequently make a low-calorie, low-fat, and mighty tasty meal out of several of our "Supper and Side Dishes" served together.

  Texas Home Cooking celebrates down-home American eats. The lineage is purely Lone Star in some cases, and much broader in others. Both sorts of dishes make up a delightful culinary legacy that's still as lively as a fiddle tune and as lingering as a slow dance at the prom.

  Six Flags and a Dozen Flavors

  Texas schools really hammer at the hard facts in history. There's no way you'll graduate from a Texas high school without knowing that the state was a part of six countries at different times. Except for the Republic of Texas, you don't have to name the nations, just count the flags.

  Much more important, it seems to us, is the number of cultures that have contributed to the Texas heritage, a figure far higher than six. To begin appreciating the depth and diversity of the state's
traditional cooking you need to tally the sources—national, ethnic, and social. Even if we ignore important groups of nineteenth-centuiy settlers that had little lasting influence on the food—French, Italian, and Japanese, among others—the list of peoples who made a difference is impressive. You have to look seriously at Mexicans, Upper South frontiersmen, plantation Southerners, Africans, New Orleans Creoles, Cajuns, Czechs, Germans, and cowboys of all hues.

  By the nineteenth century, each group established a culinary legacy that not only has survived to the present, but also at some point passed into general acceptance. Today it's easy to imagine a Texan of any background having a Czech kolache for breakfast, a Mexican enchilada for lunch, and for dinner, a Cajun étouffée washed down with a Bavarian beer and finished off with a Southern pie. With the possible exception of New Orleans, no place in the country has benefited so much from such an extraordinary mingling of food cultures. This culinary diversity is a side of Texas many people don't know, and one that we'll explore in the recipe chapters through hundreds of anecdotes, tall tales, blatant lies, and plain truths.

  Fun Food

  We'll also tell stories about a more playful side of Texas eats, about delightfully outlandish people, unbelievable places, loony dishes, and crazy cook-offs. You won't hear Texans talk about the state's "cuisine," because that would make the food sound stuffy and boring. Texans want to have fun cooking and they want to have fun eating, ambitions they realize with rare zeal and zaniness.

  We hope to convey that enthusiasm in the pages ahead. Texas Home Cooking is downright serious about enjoying food, about relishing it as an adventure, a sensuous thrill. That we can turn eating into a frolic is, after all, one of the main ways humans differ from other animals. Let's make the most of it, Texas style, and set our lips to rejoicing.

  Old Truths for New Times

  "Never eat anything bigger than your head."

  Texas folk wisdom

  Knowledge can be a troublesome thing—hard to obtain and slippery to hold, but quick to kick you in the head when you turn your back. That's what has happened with traditional home cooking in Texas and the rest of the United States. Our grandparents, and their grandparents before them, figured out a lot of ways to achieve peak food flavor with the ingredients and implements at hand. Acquired over generations, that knowledge disappeared as quickly as a pecan pie at Thanksgiving after Americans learned new truths in recent decades about convenience foods, fast cooking methods, international cuisines, and healthy eating.

  Then comes the kick. Our interest in freshness results in a rediscovery of regional cooking. Increased global awareness reawakens a sense of self and revives appreciation for local seasonings. The monotony of fast and frozen food makes us yearn for the taste of a down-home meal and the creativity of the kitchen. Grandmother's ghost moves into the microwave.

  Now, to get that old flavor we want, we have to relearn or at least remember the old truths of down-home cooking, the how-tos and why-fors of cast iron, the stockpot, and buttermilk. Throughout the recipe chapters, we give scores of "Technique Tips" about specific dishes, but before you put anything on the stove you need to review some general principles that apply broadly to the style of cooking. These are hoary homilies rather than fresh facts, though a teaspoon of this home-kitchen savvy may contain more real flavor than a cup of culinary-academy skill.

  Buoyed by Buttermilk

  Some Americans look at buttermilk as an heirloom oddity, but in Texas it's still an important ingredient in traditional cooking, a vital agent for flavoring, baking, and marinating. Adding vinegar or lemon juice to regular milk, as many books suggest, makes a poor substitute.

  Originally buttermilk was a by-product of butter. The churning motion made the butterfat separate from the whole milk and solidify. The remaining liquid, slightly tart, was called the buttermilk. Today's commercial buttermilk is made by adding a special bacterial culture to low-fat or non-fat milk so that it thickens and develops a tangy taste.

  Years ago resourceful cooks found that buttermilk added moistness and a rich aroma to baked goods, and also promoted even, golden browning. Before the days of baking powder, when baking soda was the predominant leavening, an acid was required to release the carbon dioxide that forced the dough or batter to rise. Buttermilk provided the catalyst for the reaction, and still does in many Texas favorites, including buttermilk biscuits and German chocolate cake.

  Buttermilk is also a miracle marinade. It enhances a range of fried dishes, including chicken-fried steak, contributing both flavor and moisture to the succulence sought beneath the crust. Used with game, buttermilk breaks down tough tissues, neutralizes gaminess, and again adds moistness to what is often lean, dry meat.

  The Spice of Life

  Traditional Texas cooking relies on a broad range of seasonings, many of them associated in the past exclusively with one ethnic tradition. Over time most of these spices, sauces, and other flavoring agents drifted loose from their roots and began livening up other local culinary styles. As our recipes demonstrate, you find a distinctive blend of seasonings in Texas food today, producing dishes that are more assertive and multidimensional than the same dish was a generation ago or similar dishes are now in other parts of the country.

  CHILES AND CHILI POWDER

  Chile and chili are such hot topics in Texas that even the spelling is a hell-raising issue. Following the generally accepted custom, we use the e on the end in referring to the capsicum plant and its pods and the i in talking about the official state dish of Texas, chili con carne, and related products. In recent years some Lone Star aficionados have staged a mock war with New Mexico, claiming that even their neighbors' famous capsicums should be spelled with an i, but the clamor is more of a marketing gambit than a language lecture.

  Spanish and Mexican settlers taught other Texans the love of chiles as far back as the last century. The fruit remains a primary element of Tex-Mex cooking, and is certainly the core of chili, but chile also finds its way into almost every kind of cooking in the state. Today Texas farmers grow about 120 varieties of chile, which range from mild to fiery and come fresh, dried, frozen, pickled, smoked, and canned.

  Much of the dried chile used in Texas cooking comes as a part of chili powder, a mixture of one or more types of chile with cumin and other spices. For the best and freshest chili powder, make your own from the recipe on [>]. If you're buying it packaged, look for blends with little or no salt and a full, slightly sweet taste. A prime powder should warm your tongue but not scorch it. Our recipes usually state a preference for the Gebhardt's brand, which is sold nationally, though a number of other Texas companies make fine products that have more limited distribution. Chili "seasonings" or "mixes" go a step further than powders, combining spices with onions, flour thickeners, and other ingredients.

  Ground dried red chile, called for in many recipes, comes mostly from two similar chiles, the specially bred New Mexican pod, sometimes called a long red, and the more fruity and chocolate-like ancho. Usually a bit hotter than chili powder, and deeper red in color, the ground pods provide a rich, pure chile flavor. You can find them ready to use in packaged form, but when chile is the main flavor in a dish, you may want to grind your own dried whole pods rather than relying on a pre-ground product. Grinding your own takes only a few minutes and usually enhances the dish to some degree. Remove the stems and seeds from dried whole pods, toast the pods briefly in the oven at 300° F until they are lightly crisped, break them into several pieces, and then grind them in a blender. Two other less commonly used red chiles, mulatos and pasillas, offer similar amounts of heat and can be prepared in the same fashion.

  A number of hotter chiles also come most commonly in a dried red form. The pea-sized chiltepins, which grow wild throughout southern Texas and other areas of the Southwest, and the closely related and equally diminutive pequins both pack an amazing amount of firepower into a small shell. Two other cousins, chile de árbol and cayenne, add similar amounts of heat. Traditionally
, chile de árbol is more common in dishes with Mexican roots and cayenne in those from Cajun country. At the mild end of the capsicum heat scale, paprika brings a sweet, earthy flavor to food rather than warmth, though some brands of the ground spice are virtually tasteless. Normally you find cayenne and paprika already powdered, and chiltepins, chiles pequíns, and chiles de árbols as dried pods that can be easily crushed with a mortar and pestle. With any of these or other dried chiles, look for a source that replenishes its supply frequently and buy just what you can use in a few months, keeping it in a cool, dry place.

  Fresh chiles are typically used in their less mature green form, though one West Texas favorite, the güero or banana pepper, is used yellow-ripe. It's on the same heat level as the more familiar jalapeño, which is close to the center of the chile scale overall. Serranos are hotter than jalapeños, but can be used interchangeably in lesser amounts.

  Definitely sharp but not incendiary, jalapeños became a popular accent flavor in Texas cooking several decades ago. They now appear in a variety of guises in addition to fresh. A number of companies pickle them in a liquid that makes a great marinade, and some outfits smoke them to make chipotles, which are sold dried or canned in a heady adobo sauce.

  Fresh New Mexican green chiles, sometimes known as long greens or Anaheims, vary in heat, but all are milder than jalapeños and more robust and earthy in flavor. Along with poblanos, an acceptable substitute, they need to be roasted to remove the tough skin. Put the whole chiles in a single layer on a grill or on a cookie sheet beneath a broiler, and heat them until they are blistered and uniformly darkened. Transfer them to a sturdy plastic bag to steam, which loosens the skin and makes it easier to peel after the chiles are cool enough to handle. Remove the stems and seeds, and cut the pods into bite-size chunks. In many areas of the country, you can buy chopped frozen green chile without sacrificing too much of the fresh flavor, but avoid the bland canned variety unless nothing else is available.