Southern Belly
Page 28
When Arnold passes—and it’s likely he’ll go at the grill—he’ll inevitably be compared with the late and great C-Boy Parks who, while working at the Night Hawk on the Strip, across from the University of Texas campus, served as the clubhouse cook to what seemed like the entire Austin music scene.
Among the legacies of C-Boy’s time in the kitchen are an off-the-menu speciality that endures at the Frisco Shop to this day: eggs blindfolded, which in the hands of C-Boy was a hybrid of poaching and frying achieved by cracking two eggs on the griddle, tossing on a couple of ice cubes, and covering the whole affair with a metal lid so that, as the ice melted, the tops of the eggs steamed while the bottoms sizzled. Such dreams as this are reason enough to drag your bones from bed on a Saturday morning.
5819 BURNET ROAD / 512-459-6279
Crystal Beach
STINGAREE RESTAURANT
Barbecue crabs, adored by Gulf Coast Texans, are comparable to barbecue shrimp of New Orleans. They are misnomers. And they are bliss. To get my favorites, I drive an hour south of Houston to Galveston and take a three-mile ferry ride out to the fish-camp town of Crystal Beach on the Bolivar Peninsula.
Stingaree Restaurant, perched atop a marina within sight of the massive oil tankers that ply the shipping channel, serves both barbecue shrimp and all manner of crabs. They also dish broiled redfish. But crabs, specifically blue crabs caught in brackish waters, are the reason to make the trek.
You have a choice: barbecue crabs, fried crabs, and boiled crabs. The latter are hum-drum. Ideally, you’ll get barbecue crabs and convince a tablemate to get fried crabs.
Stingaree’s barbecue crabs conform to the recipe developed in the 1940s by Granger’s, a long-gone and much-beloved roadhouse at Sabine Pass. During the 1970s and 80s, Sartin’s Seafood, which began in Beaumont but has metastasized throughout the region, perfected the technique. That means ripping the top shells off and removing the innards before rolling the crabs in cayenne-spiked barbecue spice mix (specifically any number of variations on the original Alamo Zestful Seasoning) and deep-frying them by the score.
Sartin’s, which now claims three locations under ownership of various family factions, still does crabs that way. The appeal of naked crabs thrown in roiling oil and spiced with a rude seasoning mix is undeniable. And yet I dote on the comparatively more refined approach, as practiced by Stingaree’s.
They call their specialty Vieno’s fried crabs. The prep work is the same. But they add a couple steps. For starters, they marinate their shelled and cleaned crabs in Worcestershire sauce and other aromatics. And along with the spice mix they add a bit of breading so their fried crabs emerge from the basket with heightened texture, true substance. What’s more, the spice mix has a better chance at clinging to the carapace of the crab.
Come to think of it, such refinements in preparation and such honesty in naming mean that Vieno’s fried crabs are not, after all, comparable to barbecue shrimp of New Orleans. But the bliss in eating remains.
1295 STINGAREE COVE / 409-684-2731
Dallas
BURGER BINGE
Sixty-odd miles south of Dallas, in Athens, a historical marker stands where, in the 1880s, locals say Fletcher “Old Dave” Davis first fried a beef patty and stuffed it between two slices of bread. The Athens claim is but one of many made by chamber-of-commerce types, and, like nearly all the epiphanic invention stories associated with the hamburger, it’s dubious. But the marker, with its silver letters and slate background, lends a bit of gravitas to a folk food that does not get its fair share of respect.
The grand exception to the Rodney Dangerfield complex plays out daily in the diners and cafés and drive-ins of Texas or, more specifically, Dallas, where flattop burgers are relished. I’m not talking about those fern-bar behemoths that have become, for many misguided souls, the standard by which hamburgers are judged. Instead, I’m thinking of the nickel-thin to wallet-thick burgers that are cooked with care and served without pretense throughout the city.
Emblematic of the overstuffed-wallet camp is circa 1985 Wingfield’s, in the south Dallas neighborhood of Oak Cliff. Set alongside a tire shop and down the street from Sugar’s Unisex Beauty Supply and Salon, this white rectangle with green trim is a place of pilgrimage for cul-de-sac swells in search of an urban burger.
Walking in the door, I trip over fellow acolytes, awaiting their tissue-wrapped prizes. Slow soul grinds from a boom box. The hiss of burgers on the flattop adds a treble note. Working a galley kitchen is owner Richard Wingfield, defying the laws of juicy burger physics, cooking freshly ground and well-salted beef way past medium, stuffing crumbly hillocks of beef into double-toasted buns, smeared with mayonnaise, stacked with red onion and tomato.
Meanwhile, across town, female carhops dash about the blacktop that encircles Keller’s Drive-In, champion of the nickel-thin set. By the time I arrive, the lunch rush has died down and the parking lot is mostly empty, save two old goats leaning against the tailgate of a pickup, drinking longnecks.
My beer arrives soon after I pull beneath one of the metal awnings that flank the central cookhouse. I yank the parking break on my rental and order. My burger—a number 5—arrives soon after, but not before I have the chance to drop a few quarters in the indoor-outdoor jukebox and hear David Ball sing “Thinking Problem.”
Served on a metal tray hooked to my window, it’s a double-decker cemented by slices of American cheese and shellacked with a sauce that owes its inspiration to Thousand Island dressing. And as much as I like that burger, the savor pales in comparison to the pleasure of sitting in a car, in broad daylight, drinking a beer from a bottle with cocksure impunity.
KELLER’S DRIVE-IN / 6537 EAST NORTHWEST HIGHWAY / 214-368-1209
WINGFIELD’S BREAKFAST AND BURGERS
2615 SOUTH BECKLEY AVENUE / 214-943-5214
BURGER HOUSE SEASONING SALT
I once was a fool for spices and condiments. Bought hickory-smoked black pepper by the quart jar. Couldn’t resist a quart of homemade chowchow. Smuggled pepper vinegar home in my luggage. Never met a barbecue rub I didn’t like. My kitchen cupboard looked like a Stuckey’s storeroom, what with all the brightly colored labels and the kitschy packaging. Genuine Texas Beef Rib Super Swab in a glass boot bottle anyone?
Of late, though, my ardor for collecting spices and condiments has cooled. With one exception: Burger House Seasoning, a raspy mix of cumin and salt and garlic and black pepper, which holds me in such thrall that I maintain a four-bottle-a-year habit.
Jack Prometheus Koustoubardis, whose family hailed from Cephalonia, Greece, knew the stuff was good. When he mixed a batch for his Burger House in the Snider Plaza area of Dallas, he locked the door behind himself.
The present-day proprietors of the Burger House shake a goodly measure of the stuff on their burgers. And they use it on their straight-from-a-bag shoestrings, too. But I believe Burger House Seasoning Salt, now sold by the jar, deserves scratch cooking. Hand-cut fries. Hand-formed burgers. That’s how I use it in my kitchen.
BURGER HOUSE / 6913 HILLCREST AVENUE / 214-361-0370
Where there’s smoke,
there’s sausage.
Elgin
SOUTHSIDE MARKET
Texas barbecue, as we know it, was, to a certain extent, born in the state’s meat markets. As my friend Robb Walsh has argued, when segregation was law, cotton pickers of African and Mexican descent patronized markets at midday, buying beef and pork and links of sausage for a takeaway lunch that conformed to whites-only dining-room dictates. Among the vestiges of that tradition is the use of pink butcher paper sheets as de facto plates—and the taste for eminently portable sausages.
The most fabled barbecue sausage in Texas is ground, stuffed, and smoked by Southside Market, a fixture in Elgin since 1882. Known as “hot guts” for their cayenne and black pepper spice and also their natural sheath, these juicy links are most commonly wrapped in a tortilla or a slice of white bread and eaten in the manner of a hot dog—or you
can slice the sausage into rounds, slap a few on a saltine, cap the affair with a round of raw onion, and hit it with a glug of Southside’s own hot sauce.
Bryan Bracewell and family have worked the pits here since 1968, when Bryan’s grandfather, Ernest Bracewell, bought into the business. That’s the year William Moon began slaughtering cows and pigs and selling meat from the back of a horse-drawn wagon.
And the Bracewells still run Southside like a market, which means that you can stop off and buy a haunch of beef or a belly of pork. More likely, though, like the cotton pickers of decades past, you will come in search of sausage, and, after taking a seat in a gymnasium of a dining room decorated with taxidermied woodland creatures, bite into a combustive all-beef link that will snap beneath your teeth and throw rivulets of greasy goodness onto the shirts of your tablemates. About that time, you’ll begin casting about for a second sheet of pink butcher paper, figuring you might use it as a bib.
1212 HIGHWAY 290 / 512-285-3407
Houston
FRENCHY’S CHICKEN
Percy Creuzot opened this takeaway stand in 1969. He planned to sell spicy chaurice poor boys, like the ones he had come to know in New Orleans. Oyster loaves, too. But a used-car dealer with a lot alongside intervened.
“His name was Jesse Hearn,” Creuzot, a dapper man with copper-colored glasses, born in the 1920s, says. “Told me I was a fool for selling poor boys. Told me if I wanted to pay my rent, I’d fry chicken. He was so determined; he showed me his way, mixing eggs and milk, shaking the dipped chicken in a bag of flour. It took a friend of my sister’s to teach us how to spice it right, though.”
At one point in the 1980s, the Creuzot family owned more than twenty branches. But a downturn in Houston’s ever-volatile economy curtailed expansion plans. Today the original location and few grocery store outlets remain. As does the hot-sausage poor boy, still on the menu, still fiery. And then there’s dirty rice, collard greens, seafood gumbo, and a creamy take on red beans and rice that looks so brown it might as well be purple.
All are Creole, as in Creole of Color, that mixed-race subset of Louisiana culture oftentimes identified with New Orleans. But it’s the fried chicken, fried to a relatively greaseless crisp and spiked with cayenne, on which the Creuzots stake their reputation.
Braggadocio is, in this case, defensible, for the birds that emerge from Frenchy’s fryers are wondrous fusions of crust and flesh. Upon first bite, crust will fly and cayenne will burn. “But we don’t go too hot,” says Creuzot. “That’s what we got jalapeños for; if you want heat, they’ll light you up,” he says, gesturing toward the pickled dirigibles that come in his three-piece box.
3919 SCOTT STREET/713-748-2233
RATIONALIZING TEX-MEX
Seated at Loma Linda, a pink block building fitted with wrought-iron burglar bars, Robb Walsh and I lean in to examine our enchilada plates. “This is what it’s all about,” he says as I cut into tortilla flutes oozing with Velveeta or some Velveeta analogue. “In addition to being stuffed with processed cheese,” he says, swabbing a flour tortilla through an auburn-hued puddle of sauce, “these enchiladas are topped by the most Anglicized chili gravy in the city.”
I take a bite. I tell him that the viscous sauce swamping my plate resembles the goop that enveloped the Hungry-Man TV dinners of my youth. Walsh smiles and nods. I compare the gravy to the stuff WASPs ladle over mashed potatoes. Walsh keeps smiling. I sense that my mind and palate have somehow grasped a profundity, but I’m not quite sure what it is.
Back in the car, he explains his theory of Tex-Mex. If some people divine insights by reading tea leaves, I believe that Walsh can read taco-shell shrapnel. As author of The Tex-Mex Cookbook: A History in Recipes and Photos, he has earned the right to posture and pontificate. But at the moment, he’s busy railing against writers who dismiss Tex-Mex as a bastard cuisine, a slur perpetrated against the canon of true Mexican cookery.
As we speed along the interstate that engirds Houston, Walsh says that Tex-Mex may have its roots in the interchange between Native American peoples and the colonists who first brought livestock to Texas in the late 1500s. He says that Tex-Mex is a uniquely American expression of cultural conflict and complement. And he says that chili gravy reflects an early melding of Mexican and Texan cultures. Sure, it’s bland, because that’s the way Anglos wanted it. Or maybe it’s bland because that’s the way Mexicans thought Anglos wanted it.
“Tex-Mex is America’s oldest regional cuisine,” he says, cutting his eyes my way to gauge whether I understand the import of his statement and, more important, how it is reflected in the interplay of Velveeta and chili gravy and refried beans. Don’t apologize for America’s regional cuisines, he argues. And while you’re at it, embrace the reality of convenience foods, for we all know that true green bean casseroles require a can or two of fried onions. As a native of the Deep South, weaned on pork rinds and sandwiches of pimento cheese on Wonder bread, I know of which he speaks.
While Walsh explains his theories, we stop at three more restaurants, and I order cheese enchiladas at each. Upon counsel from my Tex-Mex swami, I request a fried egg on top and sop my tortilla into the egg-cheese-chili gravy goo that cascades over the enchiladas.
At Felix’s, I even turn down the side of Spanish rice in favor of a kind of Italian-cum-Mexican chili mac, comprising limp spaghetti swaddled in chili gravy. According to Walsh, the availability of such a variant signals that we are likely at table in a time capsule, a restaurant where the offerings afford a glimpse into the primeval maw of what we now know as Tex-Mex.
At each stop, Walsh’s theory of Tex-Mex as a righteously unrefined cuisine comes into sharper focus. Forkful by forkful, I come to understand that, in the combination plate of enchiladas, refried beans, and chili mac, I might glean what Walsh already knows—that after years of describing the South as a kind of gumbo, and in the face of a spiraling Hispanic population, the metaphor of the combination plate may well ring truer than any.
In an effort to be thorough, I even succumb to Walsh’s offer of a meal at Mama Ninfa’s, the Houston restaurant that popularized fajitas. Though I happily scarf down a platter of well-charred meat, in the end, I crave an egg-topped enchilada bursting with liquefied Velveeta, cordoned by a moat of chili gravy.
FELIX MEXICAN RESTAURANT / 904 WESTHEIMER ROAD / 713-529-3949
FIESTA LOMA LINDA / 2111 TELEPHONE ROAD / 713-924-6074
MAMA NINFA’S / 2704 NAVIGATION / 713-228-1175
Best place in Texas for a roadside conversion.
Huntsville
NEW ZION MISSIONARY BAPTIST CHURCH
I could compare their flame belching pits to the fiery furnaces of hell. Or I could enjoin eaters to praise the Lord and pass the brisket. I could dub a plate of their pork ribs the Holy Grail of barbecue. I could rechristen the Fellowship Hall as the Church of the Immaculate Barbecue. I could talk of holy smoke and heavenly flavor. I could belt out a few stanzas of “Amazing grace, how sweet the sauce.”
But fellow culture chroniclers have been doing me one better since the early 1980s, when D. C. Ward volunteered to paint his mother’s church, and his wife, Annie Mae, came along to keep him company and cook lunch. On the first day, she cooked for her husband alone and turned away the hungry and curious. But by day three she was cooking extra for anyone who stopped by. Come Sunday she was petitioning the pastor, A. C. Harris, to cook on behalf of the church, to raise funds by way of barbecue.
To begin, Annie Mae worked a grill beneath a clutch of pecan trees. In time, the city told her she needed a facility with walls, a roof, running water. That facility, a clapboard shack fronted by two oversized barrel smokers, remains home base for the New Zion’s ministry by way of meat. (Sorry, couldn’t help myself.)
Here’s the drill: Tread the purple Astro Turf that surrounds the pits. Present yourself at the counter. Ask for pork ribs, a side of mashed potato salad, maybe some beans. Definitely snag a slice of citrus-kissed buttermilk pie.
Tak
e a seat at one of the tables that span the low-ceilinged room. Try your best to drown out the thirteen-incher in the corner, blaring forth with soap operas. And bite into a well-charred rib, savoring the knowledge that while most church feeds are occasional events, the parishioners of New Zion stoke their pits Wednesday through Saturday, rain or shine.
2601 MONTGOMERY ROAD / 936-295-3445
Lockhart
BARBECUE DYNASTY
Bragging rights in Texas barbecue are oftentimes based on two things, cutlery and condiments. That’s a crass distillation, but a defensible one.
It’s generally accepted that barbecue joints born of the meat market tradition should at least have a history of forswearing forks, even if they now deign to offer them. Bonus points are awarded to those spots where knives were once chained to the tables to discourage stabbings—not to mention the kind of petty thievery food industry folks now dub silverware shrinkage.
As for sauce, it’s a crutch; that’s what the old-timers say. Meat should taste great without a swab of tomato and vinegar, which, to the purist, does nothing but mask the primal flavors instilled by the liberal use of salt and the prolonged application of smoke.
Smitty’s in Lockhart was once a fork- and sauce-free zone. And it still exudes an age-old patina. Long ricks of wood flank the gravel parking lot. When you enter from the rear, flames from a post oak–fired pit lick at your ankles. And the dining room boasts faded green walls and communal tables.