Texas Home Cooking

by Cheryl Jamison

  In working with any chiles, but especially with the hotter varieties, wear rubber gloves if your skin irritates easily. Always refrain from touching your eyes, contact lenses, lips, or other sensitive body parts.

  THE TRINITY GANG

  Some Chinese chefs refer to a quartet of their favorite seasonings—garlic, ginger, green onion, and chile—as the Gang of Four. Texans have a Trinity Gang of their own—cumin, oregano, and garlic—that's a remarkably close cousin when you add chile to the trio, as you do in chili con carne and many other dishes.

  Indigenous to the Southwest, cumin or comino (the Spanish name often used in Texas) comes in seed and powdered form. Serious Lone Star cooks buy the seeds, toast them in a heavy skillet for a couple of minutes, and crush them with a mortar and pestle or a spice mill, a process that most fully releases the earthy flavor.

  The preferred oregano is the Mexican variety, which is more herbaceous in taste than the European alternative, an acceptable substitute. Most of our recipes containing garlic call for it fresh, except in dry mixes. Sometimes we suggest roasting the fresh garlic, to sweeten and mellow its taste. To do this, place individual cloves, with skins on, in a heavy skillet over low heat, and turn them until the skins darken on all sides and the cloves soften.

  SASSY SAUCES

  Texas cooks may use Louisiana-style hot pepper sauce even more than their neighbors on the other side of the Sabine. The king of the sauces, Tabasco, is so deeply entrenched in the state that the brand name appears frequently in Lone Star recipes. The Mcllhenny Company makes this vintage liquid lightning by mashing Tabasco chiles with salt, aging the mixture in oak like a fine wine or whiskey, and combining it with vinegar before bottling. A number of competitors offer similar products based on other chiles, and most are adequate substitutes for Tabasco.

  Texans also go for condiments that combine sweet and heat, incorporating them in everything from appetizers to meat marinades. Sugar and spice mix smartly in jalapeño jellies, horseradish-tinged Jezebel sauce, ketchup-with-a-kick chili sauce, and specialty items like D. L. Jardine's Texapeppa, a cousin of Jamaican Pickapeppa sauce. We give recipes for some of these and similar foods, and in "Mail-Order Sources" ([>]) we list outlets for more.

  Salsas are even bigger than other sauces in the state and more widely available in groceries and by mail. Much more than a dip, they flavor fried eggs, baked potatoes, our Polio Kiev, and probably someone's yogurt. Our trio of recipes cover salsa basics, but in Texas experimentation is the essence of the dish and its uses.

  MUSTARDS AND HORSERADISH

  Many Texas recipes gain pungency from mustard and horseradish, flavors popularized in the state by German and other central European settlers. A range of mustards are used. The purest taste comes from finely ground seeds in the form of powdered mustard, made usually with white or yellow seeds rather than the brown or black seeds found in Asian cooking. We have a preference for Colman's, in either the mild blend or the hotter "double superfine."

  All-American yellow mustard, the hotdog condiment, appears in some dishes. A blend of the mildest seeds with turmeric for color, it provides a little mustard taste mixed with the tang of vinegar. A variation, jalapeño mustard, is becoming common in Texas recipes. It's available in many stores and by mail, but you can easily make your own by chopping a tablespoon (more or less, to taste) of pickled jalapeños and stirring them into a six-ounce jar of your favorite yellow mustard. Jalapeño mustard will keep indefinitely.

  Zestier and deeper in flavor, prepared brown mustard is truer to central European roots. Creole mustard, developed by German Creoles in Louisiana, is the brown variety with horseradish and sometimes a touch of chile added. We especially like Zatarain's and Mcllhenny's.

  Native to central Europe, the horseradish root is more closely related to mustard than to horses or radishes. Most Texas recipes call for it prepared, which means grated and bottled with vinegar. Don't buy more than you plan to use in six months, because it can turn bitter. If you're fortunate enough to find the fresh root, it can be grated as needed and mixed with just enough white vinegar to bind it.

  The Staff of Life

  Few people today appreciate the tremendous importance of cornbread and biscuits on the American frontier. Without cornbread the state of Texas probably would have starved before it was born, and without biscuits the cowboy certainly would have had many more discouraging words about his home on the range.

  Cornmeal and wheat flour, the basic ingredients of these pioneer staples, remain central components of Texas cooking. Get good and appropriate versions of each. Stone-ground cornmeal is preferable to steel-ground, the most common method of commercial processing. A medium-grind meal works best in cornbread, an extrafine grind in spoonbread, and each makes an ideal coating for different fried dishes. We think the Adams Milling Company in Dothan, Alabama, produces some of the country's top cornmeal, though Arrowhead Mills of Hereford, Texas, comes very close and distributes more widely nationwide. Keep cornmeal in the freezer if you don't use it up quickly.

  Grits and masa harina are also important ground-corn products. They come from dried hominy or pozole, made by treating corn with the mineral lime, or lye, which removes the hulls from the kernels and turns the kernels glutinous. In eastern Texas people grind the dried kernels coarsely into grits, and in the west they grind it more finely into masa harina, the basis of corn tortillas and tamales. With either, as with cornmeal, stone-ground varieties without preservatives are best. Again, keep them in the freezer or use them pronto.

  Most Texas wheat is the hard red winter variety, which makes a superlative flour for yeast-bread baking, first popularized in the state by German and other central European settlers. The wheat's high gluten content helps form a strong but elastic dough. Arrowhead Mills makes an excellent minimally processed version of this flour distributed throughout the United States.

  Biscuits and pie crusts require a low-gluten flour for tender, flaky results. Since biscuits were an import to Texas from Upper South settlers, it's not surprising that the finest flour for them still comes from Tennessee. White Lily Flour, available at grocery stores throughout the South and by mail, is ground from soft red winter wheat, which makes a less absorbent flour than hard varieties. It's so powder-like that it can be substituted for cake flour. While many people like the self-rising version of White Lily, with leavening and salt already added, we prefer the all-purpose alternative.

  Standard all-purpose flours were developed to combine the best qualities of low-gluten soft wheat and high-gluten hard wheat, making a product suitable for a range of cooking needs. We prefer other flours for the specialized purposes mentioned above, but all-purpose flours work fine in most other situations.

  Long Sweetin'

  Americans used to distinguish between two types of sweetening, long and short. Today we rely heavily on the short style—such as sugar and honey—and tend to ignore the heavier flavoring potential of long sweeteners like molasses and cane syrup, both sugar-cane products.

  Molasses is a brownish-black liquid produced by boiling the cane juice and extracting the sugar crystals. Successive boilings make light, dark, or blackstrap molasses. Choose dark, unsulphured varieties for a deep flavor in beans, marinades, gingerbread, and other baked goods. Blackstrap has become a fad in some circles, but we prefer leaving it to the cattle. Sorghum, another dark syrup, gets confused with molasses. Made from sorghum cane, a cereal grain, it's sweeter than molasses and something of an acquired taste.

  Cane syrup comes from sugar cane ground to collect the juice, which is then cooked down until it's thick and golden brown. Harder to locate these days than molasses, cane syrup tastes milder and sweeter, though it's more full-bodied and less cloying than corn syrup, the usual modern substitute. Mcllhenny cane syrup gets decent national distribution.

  Cast in Iron

  You can't cook chili in an aluminum pot or fried chicken in a stainless-steel skillet. It's technically possible, to be sure, but downright disrespectfu
l of the food. Many traditional dishes simply taste best when cooked in cast iron, where they were usually born. If you didn't inherit a set of cast-iron pans, invest in at least one large all-purpose cast-iron skillet and set your mind on other pieces for the future, including a Dutch oven with a tight-fitting lid.

  A cast-iron skillet allows you to fry anything short of a whale, but it can also do much more. Use it to toast spices like cumin seeds and to roast garlic cloves. For baking, cast-iron pans work better than others in developing crisp crusts on cornbread and caramelizing sugar on pineapple upside-down cakes.

  If you're working with new cast iron, season it first. Rub the pan inside and out with lard, Crisco, or vegetable oil, and heat the pan in a 350° F oven for about an hour. Over the next few days, as time allows, repeat the process. After you start using a pan, clean it mainly with water and a sponge. Try to avoid using soap, which can undermine the effect of the seasoning. To guard against rust, always dry the pan with heat, either on the burner of the stove or in a warm oven.

  Into the Frying Pan

  Except for two vegetarians in Oregon, all the cooks in the country think they know how to fry food. The vast majority are wrong. Whether they are pan frying (with just enough fat to come up the sides of the food) or deep frying (where the food is completely submerged in oil), most Americans don't take full advantage of the taste and texture potentials in this method of cooking. When done right, frying is one of the most flavorful ways of preparing food, but all too often we settle for dishes that are greasy, soggy, or gummy instead of pert and crispy, for something that could have been baked to the same crunchiness, and for bites that collapse rather than burst beneath their crust.

  In the recipes we give specific advice about frying various foods, but here we want to emphasize two important considerations for all fry cooking. First, never reduce the amount of oil called for in a recipe on the assumption you'll cut your intake of fat this way. Just the opposite would happen, because every dish requires a proper quantity of oil for the coating immediately to form a seal around the filling, trapping moisture inside the food and keeping grease outside, in the pan.

  Second, make sure the oil is at the proper temperature when you start and throughout the frying. If the oil isn't hot enough, the food will absorb it, leaving a hard and greasy crust. If the oil is too hot, the coating will remain gummy inside and won't adhere well to the food. Don't overcrowd a frying pan, which would result in uneven cooking temperatures. It's better to cook in two or more batches rather than to rush to get everything done at once. In deep frying, and some other situations where the amount of oil is adequate, use a thermometer. Let the oil get ten degrees hotter than needed before adding the food, which will drop the oil temperature. Recheck the temperature if you cook successive batches of food.

  The Oil Business

  West Texas wildcatters aren't the only people whose fortunes rise and fall with oil. A home cook seeking real flavor and quality must know the basic properties of a wide range of oils and fats, even some currently in low esteem.

  Most traditional recipes from the past used large amounts of saturated fat, well beyond what was useful for flavor. We have reduced the quantities significantly, and we have eliminated meat fat and hydrogenated oils entirely when they contribute little or nothing to the taste and texture of a dish. In many cases, however, saturated fat still works better in one way or another than monosaturated or polyunsaturated oils. Rather than dilute a dish, we leave it to you to moderate your intake of rich foods according to your needs. You can't do that, though, without understanding the options and their attributes.

  GOING WHOLE HOG

  "Hog's lard is the very oil that moves the machinery of life," according to Dr. John S. Wilson in Godey's Lady's Book in 1860. Few would maintain that view today, but we shouldn't completely dismiss lard, the rendered and clarified fat from pork. If you want the ultimate flakiness in biscuits, pie crusts, and pastries, you need the richness of lard, and its flavor adds considerably to some dishes like refried beans.

  Most of the lard on the market now is processed to remove its naturally strong taste, leaving a mild nuttiness. Its consistency is similar to that of vegetable shortening. Although flavorful for frying, lard can't handle prolonged high temperatures or any reuse. Depending on the processing, it may be found in the supermarket at room temperature beside the vegetable shortening or in the refrigerated section near the butter. Keep it tightly wrapped in the refrigerator since it absorbs other flavors readily.

  Salt pork and fatback provide a little lubrication to some traditional dishes and are, in small amounts, good for flavoring. Salt pork is cut from the sides or belly of the pig. It is salt-cured, like bacon, but not smoked. Fatback comes from the hog's backside and is not salted. Salt pork is usually simmered in water before use to eliminate some of its harsh salinity. Once that is done, it can be used interchangeably with fatback in most dishes. At the store look for either beside the bacon, or ask the butcher for a chunk. Fatback keeps about a week and salt pork two or three times longer. In Texas cooking, they commonly enhance greens, dried and fresh beans, and black-eyed peas.

  Bacon drippings find broader application, flavoring a range of traditional dishes. Look for slab bacon that has been well smoked and is sliced thick. Texas slab bacon often comes with a black-pepper coating, a significant plus worth seeking out. Although your grandmother may have kept bacon drippings in ajar on the stove, it's better to keep any grease that you strain off meat in a closed jar in the refrigerator.

  CATTLE CALL

  The most flavorful beef fat is suet, a solid fat from the kidneys and loins. It was immensely popular in Texas cooking—particularly on the range—until recent decades, and it still has strong supporters in some parts of the state. We seldom use it, but if you want to give it a try, you can get it from your butcher. Suet keeps about a week.

  Many nineteenth-century Texas visitors complained about the lack of butter in the state, despite the abundance of cattle, which were raised for beef instead of dairy products. Butter didn't catch on for cooking or anything else until it became widely available early in this century. If a recipe calls for any significant amount of butter, use the unsalted kind for a more delicate taste but be aware that it will spoil as quickly as a gallon of milk.

  VEGETABLE SHORTENINGS AND OILS

  Crisco brought out vegetable shortening about the same time that Texas stores started stocking much butter. Few places greeted the new product with such enthusiasm as the Lone Star State. A partially hydrogenated blend of vegetable oils, shortening turns semisolid at room temperature, making it a long-lasting, odorless alternative to lard. We think the original brand is still the best. A mixture of soybean and cottonseed oils, it stands up to prolonged cooking times and some careful reuse, and also fries some foods, like chicken, better than any other product.

  Shortening also has beneficial properties in baking, though some people use it in too large a quantity, leaving a discernibly dull taste in baked goods. Avoid this by combining shortening with lard or butter.

  Another hydrogenated vegetable oil product, margarine, has a dull flavor, too. We stick with butter or substitute a savory oil.

  We recommend many oils in different recipes, some for their taste and others for their cooking properties. When you want a neutral oil, canola and corn are usually the top choices, though safflower and sunflower are also good options. All have high smokepoints, making them workhorses in frying. Peanut oil has a high smoke-point, too, and adds a hint of nuttiness to food as well. An oil of roasted peanuts, such as Loriva's, exudes intense aroma and flavor. When a dish calls for olive oil, it's often worth the expense of using the extra-virgin variety, normally heady in flavor.

  The less refined an oil, the more it resembles the original food in character. Our recipes sometimes specify unrefined corn oil, which tastes of summer corn. Try Spectrum Naturals brand or Texas' Arrowhead Mills. Avoid using unrefined oil for tasks such as deep frying, because they have
low smokepoints.

  Specialty oils such as Texafrance's Roasted Garlic Essence can work wonders in salad dressings, marinades, and other preparations. A pioneer in the specialty oils field, Loriva has a full line of fascinating flavors. The growing availability of these and other oils may turn out to be as important to a new generation of home cooks as Crisco was to our grandparents.

  Keep all oils in a cool, dark pantry, or refrigerate them if you don't think you'll finish them within a month or two.

  Taking Stock

  Frequently, stock is the most important difference between average and great home cooking. Until about fifty years ago, most Texans and other Americans used to keep a stockpot simmering almost constantly on the back of the stove. The liquid, which provides the essence of flavor in many traditional dishes, has no substitute. Store-bought cans and cubes of mystery substances are weak substitutes, usually long on salt, short on taste, and stiff on price.

  Making your own stock is easy; it can be done in advance in large quantities; and, in this age of recycling, it's the perfect way to use your vegetable and meat trimmings as well as your pickle and peanut butter jars. Ideally, you should maintain a supply of beef, chicken, and seafood stocks, though chicken alone is a significant asset. Anyone who eats much game may want to keep game stock on hand, too. You don't need a precise recipe to make stocks, because depth of flavor doesn't depend on exact measurements. Start by saving your own ingredients and maybe begging scraps from your meatcutter. Keep trimmings and bones from raw or cooked poultry, beef, game, and seafood in separate plastic bags, and collect carrot peels, celery tops, and onion skins together to use in all of the stocks. Stash the ingredients in the freezer until you've got several pounds for a particular stock.