Inside My Table #87 | Excerpt
Texas Trash and Other Delicacies
By Laura Elder
The time my mother tried to kill my father, she used sour cream.
The official diagnosis was hiatal hernia. But there in his hospital bed — pale, wounded and a little smug — my father was convinced the toxic effects of sour cream, administered via tacos, on his purebred South Texas constitution was to blame.
Texans don’t eat sour cream on tacos. Yankee heretics do that, and he had told us so before.
There were other rules about Texas food, according to my father.
I’ll never forget the horror, shame and disappointment on his face when once, very young, I asked for mayonnaise on my hamburger. With as much patience as he could muster, my father informed me I had ordered a “sissy burger.” He might as well have said: “You’re not my daughter.”
Wanting to impress my father, who ate jalapeños as if they were pickles, as a true daughter of Texas, I began eating Pace picante sauce on everything — fried eggs, Cocoa Puffs. I heaped chopped onions and crumbled Saltines onto my Wolf Brand Chili and expected cream gravy at every meal.
Our food, like all things Texas, is spiced up with myth.
Our chili is as hot as a barn fire. Our chicken-fried steaks as big as Cadillac hubcaps. We eat rattlesnake fried, cactus raw, armadillo baked in the shell and beef by the side straight from the spit, or so the scriptwriters say.
Some do, perhaps, but I’ve never met one.
Texans do little to dispel the myth. It appeals to our pride and supports the notion that, for good or ill, Texas is unlike anywhere else. And maybe that’s true.
Consider that once there was an establishment in Aalborg, Denmark, devoted, like a shrine, to the splendor of Texas. I don’t know whether they took Visa or American Express at the John Wayne Bar, but a Texas driver’s license meant you ate free.
Where in the world is there a bar dedicated to that Nebraska vibe?
But even in Texas, where the hype is sometimes true, there’s a step (a two-step, maybe?) between the myth and the meal.
My childhood home, like Texas, was divided into regions. My mother was Hill Country, where German and Slavic influences meant sausage, peppery potatoes and pork chops with sauerkraut, and a hot summer day called for salted buttermilk.
My father, from Corpus Christi, brought to the table bubbling pans of beef enchiladas, huevos rancheros, hard-shell tacos and soft-shell crab.
My parents found harmony in a pot of pinto beans, flavored with ham hock and served with cornbread.
When I think of real Texas food, I think of small-town fairs, Frito pie and sour pickles. I think of bologna sandwiches and greasy sandwich bags of shoestring potato chips my frugal mother smuggled into Astros games. (I still recall the day she finally let me spring for a Dome Dog.)
I think of the speckled trout and redfish my father caught in Matagorda Bay, encased in cornmeal, fried and served with sliced tomatoes on hot summer days. I think of Blue Bell ice cream for birthdays, tamales on Christmas Eve and the Texas Trash we made on New Year’s. Whether that concoction of Chex cereals, nuts, pretzels, Worcestershire sauce, salt, butter and cayenne pepper was born here is debatable. But, like a Rustbelt refugee, it really took to the place.
Over the years, I’ve adopted my own set of Texas food rules. Pickles should be sliced, not spears. Northerners are not allowed to make chili. Sliced brisket needs doughy white bread, the cheaper the better, and both weddings and funerals can be improved with a good banana pudding.
My husband and I also make it a rule to drive to Houston once a week for dinner with my father. We pick up the food, usually at Jason’s Deli. Oddly, my father always wants a New York Yankee — hot corned beef and pastrami — mustard, no mayo.
