Five Things I Learned at Texas Foodways

A couple of weeks ago I was lucky enough to attend the annual Texas Foodways conference, this time in San Antonio, a city I can’t wait to explore further.  For an excellent summary of what went on, see the run down by Kelly Yandell (The Meaning of Pie) on the Texas Mexican Table. And for what fun it was, try the recap by Robb Walsh, documenter of Texas cuisines.

But I write this because several readers have asked me how I do history, how I find topics to write about? I find that what you learn at a conference is rarely limited to the official program. And that you have to wrestle with what you have heard, and in many cases with where you have heard it.  How does what you hear at a conference jibe with what you know?  How can it be extended, questioned?

So here are five things that struck me: three have to do with food technology, an obsession of mine; and two have to do with geographic parallels and connections, guess what? another obsession.  I can’t wait to pursue them further even if, life being short, I know I’m not going to be able to.  With luck they will spark ideas in some of you.

(1) The Indians of south Texas depended on pit oven cooking

Ah, ha. Yet another group that used pit ovens. Earth ovens, the highest culinary technology of the late Paleolithic, were excellent for cooking roots and large animals, as the anthropologist Luann Wandsnider showed.  Surely some anthropologist or team of anthropologists is embarked on a global survey and timeline of this underground cooking.

Texas Indians had a variety of culinary lifestyles but many, explained Alston Thoms of Texas A & M, depended on roots for their survival.*

Those Texas wildflowers that today delight drivers, hikers, and parents looking for a photo-op, were then a basic staple, or at least their roots were. To make it worthwhile collecting them, there had to be 50 to 100 plants per square yard.

To continue with the mind-boggling statistics, the ovens might be 12 feet across, 6 to 8 feet tall, and be filled with 2000 pounds of roots.

I try to imagine gathering a ton of wildflower roots, however bulbous, to cook.

Winecup blooming in Texas. Credit. Peganum, Henfield, England, Wikimedia

Incidentally, what happened to those Indians? Many simply stayed in place becoming in sequence Mexicans and Americans.  Adán Medrano, chef and author of Truly Texas Mexican, talked about how his family still continued their traditional ways of cooking though I have to confess that I need to follow this up with him.

2.  That ice, booze, and hotels were integral to American expansion in the 19th century

We stayed in the Menger Hotel, built in 1859, now the oldest continuously operating hotel west of the Mississippi.

Horse transport outside the Menger Hotel soon after it was opened. Wikipedia.

It is, literally, just steps away from the Alamo, one of the five Spanish missions constructed in the area in the first half of the eighteenth century. As everyone remarks, the Alamo is small, not the towering edifice suggested by movies about the 200 Texans, including Jim Bowie and Davy Crockett who held out against the Mexican army in the Spring of 1836 until every one of them perished.  No, it was just a little outpost on the far north of the Spanish world, and in 1859 crumbling into ruins.

And when it opened the Menger Hotel proudly announced that it served ice and iced drinks.

Think about that. This was not machine-made ice. It was ice harvested in New England and shipped to Texas. Although mules had replaced the ox carts that lumbered along at ten miles a day, the ice had to be brought 250 miles from Galveston or 145 from Port Lavaca on the Gulf Coast of Texas.

A Texas wagon train in the mid-nineteenth century.

I am struck by parallels to Hawaii, parallels I have already begun exploring in another blog post.  Hawaii tends to be on my mind because my first publication in food history was The Food of Paradise: Exploring Hawaii’s Culinary Heritage, which I wrote when I lived in the Islands from 1987 to 1996.

Hawaii and Texas both entered the American sphere at the same time. In the 1850s, entrepreneurs were experimenting with shipping ice from New England or Alaska to Hawaii to chill champagne cocktails in the hotels being frequented by the Hawaiian royalty and the visitors and foreign residents who were beginning to flood into Honolulu. It’s a story that my friend Hi’ilei Hobart is investigating.

Ice as the yardstick of civilization. Who would have thought?

3. That Germans were much more important in European culinary colonization than their small empire would suggest

Continuing the last point, it was a German immigrant to Texas, William Menger, who built the Menger Hotel. He was a brewer (note to self: What kind of beer could he have been brewing in the south Texas summer before ice and before Carlsberg worked out year-round lager?). He was one of those who turned San Antonio from a Spanish outpost to a largely German city in the nineteenth century.

And, back to Hawaii, the Germans were almost as important there as in Texas. In 1849, Heinrich Hackfield opened a dry goods store in Honolulu that eventually turned into a major department store, its German name stripped in 1918, being replaced by Liberty House. I, like everyone in Hawaii, depended on Liberty House the 1980s before the big box stores arrived. Now, alack and aday, it’s just another Macy’s and last time I was there didn’t even sell the upmarket muumuus that I’d always meant to buy when I lived there.  Hackfield was also a leader in trade, shipping, and real estate, becoming Amfac, one of the Big Five that dominated island politics, in WWI.

Even the Hawaiian national anthem, “Hawai’i Ponoi”, now the state song, was derived from the Prussian anthem “Hefl Dir im Siegerkranz”, rearranged by Heinrich Berger of Potsdam, bandleader of the famous Royal Hawaiian Band. Listen to Hawaii Ponoi, skipping to about 1 min 40 secs when it begins.

And the German link leads us back to Texas and Gebhardt’s chili powder.

4. That chili-based sauces, like white bread, became commoner with industrial grinding

Chili, one of the first of Texas’s famous dishes, is first cousin, or better, sibling to goulash, said Robb Walsh, drawing on his about to appear book on chile.  He pointed out that William Gebhardt, who marketed chili powder, had left Germany just as the Hungarians were perfecting the mills that ground chillis into paprika. Of course this is also when the Hungarians were developing the first roller mills for wheat.

Gebhart’s Chili. Special Collections, University of Texas at San Antonio

Now Hungary isn’t Germany but the connections are suggestive.

Gebhardt imported ancho chilis from San Luis Potosí, 600 miles to the south in Mexico. Wince again, thinking of the transport.

Gebhardt toasted them, then ground them in coffee grinders, making up the powder with oregano and cumin.  In fact, when you browse the University of Texas website linked above, you realize the whole process was a good bit more complex than this simple outline.  And that for commercial production, you had to use industrial mills.

With chili powder, versions of Mexican cooking begin creeping into American cuisine, which does not have the molcajetes to process tough dried chilis, even when rehydrated.

One of the many German contributions to the cuisine of Texas (along with barbecue, sausages, and chicken fried steak).

And guess who founded the Pioneer Flour Mills in San Antonio in 1898.  Yes, a German immigrant, Carl Hilmar Guenther.

The Pioneer Flour Mill, San Antonio. Wikimedia Commons

Grinding.  So essential to food, so forgotten now that most grinding is done for us. When steam engines or electric power drove grinding machines, it became easier to deal with tough materials like wheat and chilis. The price of bread came down. Paprika, chili powder, and pimentón (note to self: follow up pimentón) made new kinds of chili-thickened sauces possible.

Yes, indeed goulash like chili is late nineteenth century.

5. That Tex-Mex is Thoroughly American

And no, no, no, I have zero interest into getting into debates about Diana Kennedy, yellow cheese, or the authenticity of Tex-Mex.  Tex-Mex is a fine and honorable tradition in my opinion.

But political borders matter. Listening to the restaurateurs who ran classic Tex-Mex restaurants, it was clear they did not look to contemporary Mexico.  Indeed, essentially the only mentions of Mexico in a conference on the Texas Mexican Table were my piece on semitas, Cappy Lawton, San Antonio restaurateur talking about how he loved to visit Mexico, Chris Waters Dunn , song writer and culinary writer, on enchiladas, and Iliana de la Vega’s Oaxacan meal.

This is not a criticism.  An observation.

_______________________

Wonderful resources for Texas Food History

*The Texas Beyond History web site run by the University of Texas at Austin.

The Texas State Historical Association 

The historical section of the Texas Transportation Museum

The University of Texas at San Antonio Mexican Cookbook Collection and its associated blog, La Cocina Historica.

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