Robb
Walsh is a food writer and restaurant critic for the
Houston Press as well as the author of Legends of Texas
Barbecue, The Tex-Mex Cookbook, Are You Really Going
to Eat That?, and most recently The Texas Cowboy Cookbook.
In the process he has become both an expert and a guardian
of the many food traditions and histories that add
to the flavor of the Lone Star state.
The
Kitchen Sisters spent hours and days driving around
Texas with Robb, recording his thought about everything
from Chili Queens and Oystermen to cotton pickers and
vaqueros. Here are some excerpts from our conversation
about Texas Cowboy Cuisine.
"The traditions of the
cowboy were borrowed from both the Mexicans and the
Spanish. In fact, the early word for cowboy was
buckaroo, which was a mangling of the Spanish vaquero. Vaquero,
from vaca (cow), means if a ranchero is a
guy from a ranch then a vaquero is a cow guy, a cowboy. So,
cowboy is a literal translation of vaquero. The
garb—the
big hat evolved from the sombrero and the chaps, the
lariat (lasso), the rodeo, are all Spanish words.This
goes back to the 1690s and early 1700s when the Spanish
Missions were established in Texas and with them came
herds of cattle and herding traditions.
The
distances were so vast here in Texas though, that herding
the way they had in Spain was impractical so they started
herding on horseback. In Mexico, the mestizo children,
kids who were part Indian and part European, had no place
in society in Mexico City. Some of the more ambitious mestizos,
headed off for El Norte. In Mexico El Norte meant to
them what the West meant to us. It was the untamed
region. They were the new caballeros, or horsemen,
of the Americas. So, in
South Texas you had this culture evolving and these horsemen—they
were entrepreneurs, mostly, but they became ranch hands
or foremen. They became cowboys and they were proud,
independent people.
Cowboy dishing up chili at
noonday dinner near Marfa, Texas, 1939
Photo by Russel Lee
Cooking
on the Range
Cowboy
cooking tradition starts off really with Mexican
food. There are
lots of dishes like picadillo where you just
cook a bunch of ground meat with spices and then the
cowboys would wrap it up in tortillas. Beans
were a staple. Cowboy cooking tradition starts off
really with Mexican food. There are lots of dishes
like picadillo where you just cook a bunch
of ground meat with spices and then the cowboys would
wrap it up in tortillas. Beans were a staple. Dried
beans were very efficient to carry.
Cowboy
cooking tradition starts off really with Mexican food.There
are lots of dishes like picadillo where you just
cook a bunch of ground meat with spices and then the
cowboys would wrap it up in tortillas. Beans
were a staple. Dried
beans were very efficient to carry. Cooks hated potatoes
because they spoiled. They were very heavy, but cowboys
loved potatoes, of course, they considered them a vegetable. There
was a real shortage of vegetables. When the canned
tomato was invented, it was a huge hit in the cowboy culture.
In
fact, cowboys carried cans of tomatoes on their saddle
bags. One of the reasons was, the water in west
Texas—like the Pecos River is so alkaline that
you can barely get the beans to cook in it. So,
all the alkaline all the time, the acid of the water
that the tomatoes were packed in was like a rare delicacy. Just
to open a can of tomatoes and drink the tomato water
was a big thrill. In
the early Spanish settlements cattle were raised for money,
sheep were raised for wool and goats were what people actually
ate. As far as cowboy food tradition, they adopted the
tradition of eating goats, because if you’ve got
2 or 3 guys, and you don’t have a refrigerator, what
are you going to do with a whole cow? It weighs 100s
of pounds. You can’t even move it, never mind
eat it. So, killing cows was impractical. When you
got to a city, San Antonio or somewhere, you had lots of
people ready to buy you had lots of people ready to buy
beef then slaughtering cows become practical.
But,
out on the range, they ate goats. The classic preparation
of goat probably came from Spain. The cabrito (roast
goat) is mounted on something like an iron cross. The
carcass is spread out and it is rotated in front of a mesquite
fire so that it roasts slowly. There
is an interesting description of what foods were being
eaten in Mexican Texas and in Anglo Texas. It said the
Americans lived on crackers, salt pork. They had
honey but they didn’t have sugar
and very few staples. Indeed, in the Anglo settlements,
one couldn’t find anyone who would put them up at
night because no one had enough food to share. By contrast
the Mexican communities had more options; they had eggs,
beans and bread and tortillas.
Chuck's
Wagon
As the wild cattle were depleted,
the ranching business arose. People started to breed
cattle and of course, they began to fence off the range
and the cattle drive began to disappear. But, the
ranches were still big; to this day ranches in west Texas
are 400,000 acres. Ranches
are enormous and every spring there’s a roundup where
you bring in all the recently born calves to castrate and
brand them. When you do that, you still have to feed
all these cowboys out on the range. In the1800s,
Charles Goodnight, who was a famous rancher, was credited
with inventing the chuck wagon which was just a wagon outfitted
with everything you needed to cook. The chuck wagon
became the center of the cowboy camp. Today still,
there are people now who have preserved old chuck wagons.
Also, there are people who build re-creations of chuck
wagons to use in cowboy cook-offs. People started building
chuck wagons that fit on the back of pickup trucks. Out
in West Texas you’re liable to see pickup truck chuck
wagons all the time.
Biscuit
Shooters ant Pot Wrestlers
The cook was usually the worst cowboy.
He was the oldest, or he limped or he was incompetent.
It was not a prize job. Nobody wanted to be the cook. Their
nicknames for them were pretty funny: biscuit shooter…pot
wrestler. The food on the chuck wagon, it had to be
stuff that could travel and one of the most endearing traditions
from the chuck wagon was sour dough. There wasn’t
a source for yeast, so you had to keep that sour dough
going. When it got cold, the cook would sleep with the
sour dough to keep it from freezing.
Dutch
Oven
The
Dutch oven, which had come in from the east coast, became
a cowboy cooking appliance. It looked a giant cast iron
pot with legs on the bottom and a lid.The
idea is you burn a fire, you shovel some of the coals onto
the ground, you put your biscuits in the Dutch oven then
you put it on top of the coals, put the lid on it and you
shovel more coals on the lid, so, it bakes from the top
and the bottom at the same time. One of the problems
is the biscuits are a lot closer to coals on the bottom
than they are to the coals on the top, so they tend to
burn on the bottom. I watched a cowboy cook one time
making biscuits and he said, “you can smell when
they are almost ready, you smell when the sugars are starting
to caramelize and then you peek. One
of the problems is the biscuits are a lot closer to coals
on the bottom than they are to the coals on the top, so
they tend to burn on the bottom. I watched a cowboy
cook one time making biscuits and he said, “you can
smell when they are almost ready, you smell when the sugars
are starting to caramelize and then you peek. The problem
is if you lift the lid unevenly, all the coals dump on
the biscuits. So, you really don’t want to open the
dang thing until you really have to.” So this
cook said, “you wait until you smell—till you
think the bottom is starting to brown, then you turn up
the heat”. To turn up the heat he takes his
hat off and he starts fanning the coals on the top to get
them really white to get that heat on the top to brown
the tops of the biscuits.
Of course, other “one pot” meals—things
that could be cooked in a Dutch oven were popular. There
were cowboy cooks from Ireland making Irish stew. You
had Chinese cowboy cooks. All kinds of cultures filtered
into the cowboy tradition. Of course, barbecue grilling,
one pot meals, beans and sour dough baking are sort of
the main stays of cowboy cooking.
Robb
Walsh Talks About
THE
GERMAN MEAT MARKET TRADITION
Part
of the history of Texas includes a bit of a real estate
scheme. The state was essentially empty at one point
in time. After the Spanish abandoned the missions,
the French were starting to make incursions into Texas
because there wasn’t anybody there. To hold
the territory, Spain enlisted impresarios, a kind of salesman
for the territory, and they made them a deal—we’ll
give you this huge track of land and in exchange you bring
in people to settle it. Stephen F. Austin’s
father, Moses Austin, was an original impresario for the
region. Stephen F. Austin continued with the settlement
and brought Anglos from Tennessee and Missouri and other
parts of the United States with the sales pitch “cheap
land, beautiful country.”
Another impresario
for the Texas territory was a German prince who was bringing
people in from Germany. There
were about the same number of settlers coming in from Germany
as the rest of the United States. The late 1890s
was the height of the German influx of settling and at
that time, German was spoken as extensively in Texas as
English. Then of course Spanish was spoken widely
too. In the process of all this settling, Texas had become
a very multicultural place by the 1800s.
The kinds of Germans
who were interested in coming to Texas varied widely. There
were a lot of farmers who just couldn’t get enough
land in Germany and who saw this as a huge opportunity
to farm. There
were also a lot of people who were members of utopian societies
looking for a place to start their communes. So, some of
the German settlers of Texas were among the most idealistic
Europeans. A lot of them went on to become part of
the Texas legislature and the Texas government and gave
us some of our eccentric traditions like Luckenbach, Texas,
and South Austin.
An Army
of Hungry of Cotton Pickers
Picking Cotton in North Texas, Country Life, Bill Dakin,TX
The
big agricultural business of Texas was cotton. Indeed,
Texas was the most productive place in the entire south
to raise cotton. However, that era in Texas’ history
didn’t last very long because
it was interrupted by the Civil War. However, after the Civil
War the cotton culture continued in the German farming towns.Picking
cotton is enormously labor intensive. During the harvest
season an army of cotton pickers, would descend on Texas.
Most of them were from Mexico, a lot of them were black,
and some of them poor whites, or ‘Okies’ as they
called them.
As
many as 400,000 cotton pickers would move in a swarm across
the state starting in the lower Rio Grande Valley where
the season began and moving north as the cotton ripened.
They would spend about six weeks in each community harvesting
the cotton. When they got to German towns, like Lockhart
and Elgin, the number of cotton pickers was equal to the
population of the entire town. The population of cotton
pickers was not necessarily welcome in these towns. They
weren’t provided any sanitary facilities and they weren’t
allowed in restaurants. The only place they could go to get
food was the local store. In the German towns, they went
to the meat market. These were the days before refrigeration
so the meat at the market wasn’t fresh; it was smoked.
There were German smoked sausages and German smoked pork
loins and an array of other German smoked meats.
No
Plates, No Sides — Just Meat
In a meat market, they don’t
put it on a plate and give you a fork and ask you if you
want potato salad, they just put it on a piece of paper.
But to the cotton pickers the selection of smoked meats reminded
them of barbecue, so they bought it up and it became a meal
for them. The cotton pickers wiped out every German meat
market of all the smoked meat they could find and they supplemented
it with crackers, pickles, onions,
and other stuff that you could
pick up in a meat market.
They’d
go sit on the steps or wherever and eat the stuff on the
spot. During cotton-picking season, the German butchers started
to build extra pits and bought more meat. One fellow
I talked to, Mr. Smolek of Smolek's Meat Market, told me
that when he was a kid, in the nineteen teens, his father
was selling 2,000 pounds of smoked meat a day, at fifty
cents a pound. So, that was a thousand dollars a
day from smoked meat in, I think 1917 was the year he gave
me. He said he sat underneath the counter and put
the money in a bushel basket.
We think of this as some
kind of German tradition, but the truth is, it came from
the cotton pickers. That’s
why in the old German meat markets like Kruez Market in
Lockhart, barbecue is still served this way. There are
no side dishes. There are no plates. There are no
forks. It’s a meat market. But, this
is where it came from. It came from the cotton pickers. Without
the cotton pickers, there would never have ever been the
demand for this kind of mass production of smoked meat. Otherwise,
it would just be a couple rings of German sausage.
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