Texas Gold Star Cuisine by Ruth Paget
I have visited Houston, Texas once for the wedding of a college friend from the University of Chicago.
The sultry Gulf Coast air in Houston made the big Texan hair I had worked so hard to curl like Farah Fawcett’s for the wedding fall limply on my face despite hair spray. (Or, could it have been from dancing and singing to songs from the 1980s after the wedding?)
If I count the times I have made plane connections in the Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport, I can say that I have been to Texas about 30 times on my way to various points in the Eastern United States from California.
All these short stays in Texas piqued my interest in the state’s history and cuisine.
I wanted to see how the large population of descendants of German immigrants to Texas mixed their love of meat with Southwestern ingredients when I bought The New Texas Cuisine by Stephen Pyles.
Three meat dishes from this book that I thought looked especially good include:
-veal medallions on wilted greens with pinto-wild mushroom sauce and spicy whipped sweet potatoes
-pork tenderloin with dried cherry sauce and caramel pine nuts
-roast beef tenderloin with roast tomato ancho chile sauce and wild mushroom enchilada
Pyles also provides a nice collection of poultry dishes that are a little easier on the pocketbook to make such as the following:
-roast chicken in adobo sauce with black-bean prosciutto refrito
-roast wild turkey with blue cornmeal-chorizo stuffing
-pheasant braised in tequila with peaches
The New Texas Cuisine cookbook by Stephen Pyles will surely expand what cooks think of as Texan cuisine as they cook and provide background information for trips to the state.
By Ruth Paget, author Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France
