AFJ in Houston Day One Session One

Hello all and sundry. I'm Claudia Perry, a new member of AFJ and I have volunteered to post daily from our convention in Houston. I mostly write about wine. If you're curious, you can check out my blog.

Anyway, there are only 40 of us registered this year,which probably says a lot about the fate of print media and the economy of late. A few attendees mentioned section-front ads and consolidation with the daily features sections as unnerving but increasingly common practices.

Since everyone suffers from eye fatigue from reading on a screen, I'll summarize the three sessions that were held today in separate entries. All were held in Salon B here at the Omni Hotel, and, as is typical in Texas, it was as cold as a meat locker. Wraps and hot beverages may be essential in the coming days.


Session 1 "Texas Food Past and Present" featured Dai Huynh from the Houston Chronicle as moderator, with "Dishes of the Wild Horse Desert" author Melissa Guerra, Chronicle restaurant critic Allison Cook, Houston Press restaurant author and cookbook writer Robb Walsh (coming soon "Sex, Death and Oysters") and cook book historian Elizabeth White from the Texas Medical Center library.

Main talking points: Guerra, an eighth-generation Texan , says state's food history started in 1845 and was shaped by things that were free, flourishing and favored. The South Texas natives were identified by how they looked and what they ate. There were 107 indigenous groups along the Rio Grande. There are at least seven ecosystems in Texas and multiple microclimates. Key to the food is mesquite wood and chile pequine, a small native pepper that was distributed by bird migration and the seeds dropping where they fell from the birds.
The Border cuisine was meaty and cheesy since water and refrigeration were scarce. Interestingly, McAllen and Brownsville are now mad for sushi. One indigenous group, the Mariami, followed the pecan harvest north and brought the nuts back for trade from Fredericksburg. Guerra expects a rise in Texas cooking similar to the Cajun boom in the 80s.

Cook, who in the interests of full disclosure is a Facebook friend, recalled an early Houston restaurant called Sonny Look's Sir-Loin Inn, which featured a knight on a live horse at the door and the owner wearing a coat covered with sequined crustacaeans. Culinary highlight was butter compounded with strawberries, a nod to Helen Corbin of "Texas Caviar" fame. Two major forces in restaurant development in Houston, lifting of immigration quotas in 1965 and liquor by the drink becoming legal in 1972. Houstonians like exuberant flavors, big portions and nothing too subtle about their cooking. In the 80s the arrival of the "New" Southwestern cuisine was somewhat precious and rigid but the cultural culinary mix is now more relaxed and natural. Houstonians look at Tex-Mex cooking as nursery food eaten for comfort and usually on Friday nights, which may be due to the TGIF need for a margarita, but could also be related to the high school football (that last observation is mine not Cook's).

You're seeing a sensory overload such as shrimp stuffed in a jalapeno wrapped in bacon, which Cook says put flavors in conflict but is pretty tasty. She also noted that Texas craft cheese is where California was a few years ago.

White has collected Texas cookbooks pre-sesquecentennial (1986 if you're not from here). The first Texas cookbook was published in 1883 and included a recipe for yacht pie, as if to demonstrate the Houston level of sophistication. Gale Horton put together the first recipe collection in Galveston in 1855. White identifies seven regions of Texas cooking.
The Coastal Prairie influenced by rice, sugar soy beans and cotton. Cottonseed oil was the second largest crop in Texas at the beginning of the 20th century. Rice production improved with the arrival of Japanese growers in 1904 with tolerant varieties and expertise. The Lower Rio Grande Valley produced its first grapefruit crop in 1904. There was also a nonkosher Jewish cookbook published in Houston in 1920s with ads for butchers selling pork and bacon. White thinks this was the community's way of proving they weren't imsular.
The Piney Woods of East Texas were abundant in game, cropland, wood for smoking and
were also influenced by Southern cuisine and Louisiana cuisine.

The Panhandle was hot, dry, sunny and had little water so wheat, cattle and cotton drove the economy. There is very little population and farming didn't really take off until widespread irrigation in the 20s.
The Prairie Lakes (think Dallas-Fort Worth) produced Thomas Munson, who originally hailed from Denison. He was one of three Americans who sent root stock to France during the phylloxera epidemic of the 1860s.

The Hill Country was thickly settled with Germans with three German language cookbooks from 1915 coming from New Braunfels. White has not found any Spanish-language cookbooks, which may be due to cultural factors such as literacy and access to printing (last observation also the blogger's, not White's) Corbin introduced Texas Caviar in Austin in 1931. San Antonio, home of Fritos, also gave us Frito pie and the first Bermuda onions in the state.

The Upper Rio Grande Valley is pretty much the cultural mezcla (mix if you're Spanglish challenged) of Mexico and Texas as found in El Paso and influenced by Juarez.

Robb Walsh sees Texas food as the division between haute and folk culture. He noted that oyster culture in Texas is very blue collar whereas places like New York and San Francisco, that effectively murdered their native crop, it's become a hoity toity experience. Two-thirds of the oysters in the United States come from the Gulf Coast. He thinks Texas does folk cuisine best.

For the various BBQ traditions of Texas (Walsh is leading the travel writers around next week), the best examples in Houston are Thelma's on Live Oak downtown near the convention center (African American style), El Hidalgese on Long Point (Mexican barbacoa), Pizzatola's on Shepherd, Goode Company BBQ on Kirby(German links) and Que Huong in the wilds of Southwest Houston on Bissonnet for Vietnamese style.

More later. I've got to go eat.

Let's get small

I assume everyone is in the same boat I am -- less space than ever. But readers want more recipes than ever. What's a girl to do?

What clever things are you doing to beef up the content of your sections while using less space?

After all, many of us are home cooks. Make less taste like more ought to be right up our alleys.

save these for friday afternoon

First, view them. Then go home and make yourself a well-made drink. Don't scratch your nose. Don't use Rose's lime juice. Don't wink. And as you drink it, give thanks that no matter how bad your week was, you didn't make videos like these:



http://www.jeffreymorgenthaler.com/2008/how-to-make-a-daiquiri-the-american-bartending-school-way/



http://www.jeffreymorgenthaler.com/2007/how-not-to-make-a-mint-julep/



http://www.jeffreymorgenthaler.com/2007/how-to-make-sexy-european-mojito-drink/

bon appetit to you, too, alan

I was reading Alan Richman's commentary in Bon Appetit, on the tribulations of the professional eating. And I was enjoying myself, nodding in agreement as only a fellow food traveler can, appreciating his point that getting paid to eat comes with its own penalties.

And then I came upon this section:

"The life of the restaurant critic isn't the same as that of food writers. You do not have to feel sorry for them.

"When they travel, hotels know they are coming, so they are upgraded to the Elvis Presley Suite. When they eat out, chefs who haven't been seen in their kitchens since the advent of the Food Network fly in, borrow a stained apron from their sous-chef and walk wearily through the dining room, complaining that they were up at dawn picking out organic produce at the farmers market.

"Food writers get to do the easy stories, the ones about prizewinnning pumpkins."

Excuse me? Does anybody have any idea what he's talking about? OK, Sarah Dickerson at Slate doesn't bother to actually do any research outside NYC before declaiming on newspaper food sections. But Richman? I thought the guy was smart. Smart-mouthed, but smart.

Would my kid be a son of a biscuit eater?

An e-mail I got today: "Kathleen, hello! I hope this email finds you well. I am working on a special project and was hoping you could lend your talent and expertise…it’s for Bojangles’ Restaurants – we are filming a commercial using “real people” to give their first hand perspectives on Bojangles’ biscuits – the concept is to basically give a review of the biscuit on camera. We will be shooting on May 1 – it would not require much of your time or travel. We can shoot outside of the Observer building or where ever is convenient for you. Let me know if you’d be interested."
Anybody have a story to top that one?

Kathleen Purvis, The Charlotte Observer.

Did you catch this at The Slate?

http://www.slate.com/id/%202189234/
check it out and tell US what you think

how do I keep up with you people?

AFJ has a blog? Seems to me I heard that somewhere. Most of missed it somewhere between Kessler's video class in Minneapolis and the latest round of belt-tightening here at the Observer, where we're now required to work a couple of GA reporting shifts for Metro every month.

But if I can find a way to keep up with Serious Eats, Egullet (that one's not hard -- once the shiny wore off, the boards slowed down), Chowhound, Bruni's blog, several North Carolina-centric pages, one e-magazine (Slate) and a handful of chef blogs (Bill Smith in Chapel Hill, Frank Stitt in Birmingham, John Malik in Greenville, S.C.) . . .

Well, surely I can make it a regular habit to see what AFJ people talk about when we're not hanging out by the coffee urn in the back of a hotel ballroom.

Keeping up with blogs has become one of those daily chores. It's like speed-reading through the seven or eight food magazines that cross your desk every month and flicking an eye over 700 or 800 cookbooks.

I'm a schedule freak, so I've made my web watch part of the routine. I keep the list posted under "favorites" and I run through them every morning. After the initial investment to get to know the sites and figure out which clicks are likely to yield something I need to know, it's a 10-minute check first thing in the morning, what I do while I'm waiting for the Home editor, my work husband, to make my second cup of coffee.

To remember to check AFJ's chat, I added it to the favorites list between Regina Schrambling's Gastropoda (it makes a good pop-culture quiz -- "let's see if you can identify who I'm thrashing today") and the LA Weekly food page, where I pause once a week to admire whatever Jonathan Gold is writing.

And what's the payoff? Well, partly, it's just the same curiousity that drove me into journalism. We scribes ought to like hearing what people think -- or think they think. We're naturally nosy. And since I read web sites that are heavily trafficked in other cities, it gives me a leg up on trends to watch for here, just the same as I do when I read food stories on the wire.

Here in Charlotte, I can get a bunch of eyes that help me peer around in a sprawling, fast-growing area. No, I don't get too many new column ideas (I've watched Serious Eats, egullet and chowhound all go through multiple rounds of "what's your favorite food movie/song/how many cookbooks do you have" -- a good reminder that trite is trite, no matter what the medium).

But you tell me: Which web sites do you read every day, and what do you get from it?

Kathleen Purvis/The Charlotte Observer