80 texashighways.com (^) Photo: Eric W. Pohl
PLATES
COWBOYS AT KING
RANCH cook batches
of traditional Mexican
cowboy bread in cast-
iron Dutch ovens.
F
ood has always been
instrumental in establishing
a sense of place—especially
during Texas’ journey from
settlement to statehood. Between
the 19th and 20th centuries, Texas
cuisine was shaped by the variety of
ethnicities arriving into the territory
as well as those who were already
here. Ingredients, and the meals they
composed, were determined by what
could be locally gathered, raised, or
hunted, then prepared in manners
that had been used for generations or
replicated the flavors of home.
One of those ingredients was may-
haw, a small, cranberry-like fruit that
ripens beneath the hardwood timbers of
the East Texas floodplains. “Who would
deny themselves the pleasure of living in
grand old East Texas, where mayhaws,
that make the best jelly in the world, grow
wild in the woods?” editor W.L. West
proclaimed in a May 1910 edition of the
Polk County Enterprise. These berries
were used to create the region’s favor-
ite jelly, a tart, nectarous preserve. Like
South Texas salsa and Central Texas
kolaches, a jar of mayhaw jelly at the
breakfast table once revealed as much
about where you lived as it did about
what you ate.
At its genesis, Texas cuisine was
tethered to a nomadic lifestyle, more a
means of forestalling starvation than a
tasty pleasure. For native populations
as well as newcomers on the move,
meals often depended on adaptability,
opportunity, and edibility. If it didn’t
kill us or make us ill, we cooked and
ate it. In 1859, Randolph B. Marcy, a U.S.
Army officer and explorer, provided
useful recipes in The Prairie Traveler,
a handbook for the westbound. In
addition to advice like the best routes
across Texas and the safest way to
navigate horses through swift river
currents, Marcy included information
about food. His recipe for pemmican
was derived from indigenous peoples.
Pemmican could be made from
whatever meat was available, which, for
a while, was bison.
“The buffalo meat is cut into thin
flakes, and hung up to dry in the sun
or before a slow fire,” Marcy wrote. “It
is then pounded between two stones
and reduced to a powder; this pow-
der is placed in the bag of the animal’s
hide, with the hair on the outside; melted
grease is then poured into it, and the bag
sewn up.” Jerky is likely the closest kin
to pemmican, adopted by traveling pio-
neers who could hang the meat to dry on
lines strung along the sides of their wag-
ons before flavoring or smoke-curing
in camp. Today, artisanal smokehouses
across Texas offer delicious jerky options
(see sidebar on Page 83), regionalized
in part by the choice of smoking wood.
East Texas black hickory imparts a strong
bacon flavor, Hill Country peach wood
adds sweetness, and South Texas mes-
quite gives an earthy punch.
Food often took on a different kind
of significance as pioneers struggled
to forge a new life for themselves and
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