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The Tex-Mex Cookbook: A History in Recipes and Photos Paperback – June 15, 2004
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From the Mexican pioneers of the sixteenth century, who first brought horses and cattle to Texas, to the Spanish mission era when cumin and garlic were introduced, to the 1890s when the Chile Queens of San Antonio sold their peppery stews to gringos like O. Henry and Ambrose Bierce, and through the chili gravy, combination plates, crispy tacos, and frozen margaritas of the twentieth century, all the way to the nuevo fried oyster nachos and vegetarian chorizo of today, here is the history of Tex-Mex in more than 100 recipes and 150 photos.
Rolled, folded, and stacked enchiladas, old-fashioned puffy tacos, sizzling fajitas, truck-stop chili, frozen margaritas, Frito™ Pie, and much, much more, are all here in easy-to-follow recipes for home cooks.
The Tex-Mex Cookbook will delight chile heads, food history buffs, Mexican food fans, and anybody who has ever woken up in the middle of the night craving cheese enchiladas.
- Print length288 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherTen Speed Press
- Publication dateJune 15, 2004
- Dimensions7.45 x 0.75 x 9.15 inches
- ISBN-100767914880
- ISBN-13978-0767914888
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From the Inside Flap
Join Texas food writer Robb Walsh on a grand tour complete with larger-than-life characters, colorful yarns, rare archival photographs, and a savory assortment of crispy, crunchy Tex-Mex foods.
From the Mexican pioneers of the sixteenth century, who first brought horses and cattle to Texas, to the Spanish mission era when cumin and garlic were introduced, to the 1890s when the Chile Queens of San Antonio sold their peppery stews to gringos like O. Henry and Ambrose Bierce, and through the chili gravy, combination plates, crispy tacos, and frozen margaritas of the twentieth century, all the way to the nuevo fried oyster nachos and vegetarian chorizo of today, here is the history of Tex-Mex in more than 100 recipes and 150 photos.
Rolled, folded, and stacked enchiladas, old-fashioned puffy tacos, sizzling fajitas, truck-stop chili, frozen margaritas, Frito Pie, and much, much more, are all here in easy-to-follow recipes for home cooks.
The Tex-Mex Cookbook will delight chile heads, food history buffs, Mexican food fans, and anybody who has ever woken up in the middle of the night craving cheese enchiladas.
From the Back Cover
From the Mexican pioneers of the sixteenth century, who first brought horses and cattle to Texas, to the Spanish mission era when cumin and garlic were introduced, to the 1890s when the Chile Queens of San Antonio sold their peppery stews to gringos like O. Henry and Ambrose Bierce, and through the chili gravy, combination plates, crispy tacos, and frozen margaritas of the twentieth century, all the way to the nuevo fried oyster nachos and vegetarian chorizo of today, here is the history of Tex-Mex in more than 100 recipes and 150 photos.
Rolled, folded, and stacked enchiladas, old-fashioned puffy tacos, sizzling fajitas, truck-stop chili, frozen margaritas, Frito(TM) Pie, and much, much more, are all here in easy-to-follow recipes for home cooks.
The Tex-Mex Cookbook will delight chile heads, food history buffs, Mexican food fans, and anybody who has ever woken up in the middle of the night craving cheese enchiladas.
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
TEX MEX: THAT LOVABLE UGLY DUCKLING
Tex-mex is the ugly duckling of american regional cuisines. Since it was called Mexican food for most of its history, nobody even thought of it as American until about thirty years ago. That was when the first authoritative Mexican cookbook in the United States, Diana Kennedy's The Cuisines of Mexico, was published.
Kennedy trashed the "mixed plates" in "so-called Mexican restaurants" north of the border and encouraged readers to raise their standards. The English-born Kennedy was the wife of the late Paul Kennedy, a New York Times correspondent posted in Mexico City. She had never lived in the United States at the time of the book's publication in 1972 and evidently wasn't familiar with the Tejano culture.
Hugely popular in the United States, The Cuisines of Mexico was a breakthrough cookbook, one that could have been written only by a non-Mexican. It unified Mexican cooking by transcending Mexico's nasty class divisions and treating the food of the poor with the same respect as that of the upper classes. But while admirably egalitarian in her attitude toward the food of Mexicans, Kennedy lambasted the food of Texas-Mexicans.
In a later book, The Art of Mexican Cooking, Kennedy wrote, "Far too many people outside Mexico still think of them [Mexican foods] as an overly large platter of mixed messes, smothered with shrill tomato sauce, sour cream, and grated cheese preceded by a dish of mouth-searing sauce and greasy deep-fried chips. Although these do represent some of the basic foods of Mexico-in name only-they have been brought down to their lowest common denominator north of the border, on a par with the chop suey and chow mein of Chinese restaurants 20 years ago."
Tex-Mex entered the lexicon of the food world within a year of The Cuisines of Mexico's publication. The first time it was used in print in relation to food, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, was in this 1973 quote from the Mexico City News, an English-language newspaper: "It is a mistake to come to Mexico and not try the local cuisine. It is not the Tex-Mex cooking one is used to getting in the United States."
If you go to the library to look up Tex-Mex, you will find lots of definitions. But unfortunately they are all different. The dictionaries don't agree on whether Tex-Mex means Americanized Mexican food in general or specifically the kind from Texas.
Some food writers put San Francisco's steak burritos, San Diego's fish tacos, and Tucson's chimichangas in the Tex-Mex category. That's because they use the term Tex-Mex to mean Americanized Mexican food, regardless of its place of origin.
There is no consensus on what Tex-Mex means in Texas either. Middle-aged Anglos tend to describe it as a specific subset of the larger genre of Mexican food-one that involves yellow cheese enchiladas with chopped raw onions and chili gravy as served in San Antonio around 1955.
Why the confusion? Because for many years, the people who owned the restaurants where Tex-Mex was served refused to use the term at all. Tex-Mex was a slur. It was a euphemism for bastardized, and it was an insult that cost Mexican-Texan families who had been in the restaurant business for generations a lot of business.
Tex-Mex was still called Mexican food when its popularity began to spread beyond Texas to other parts of the country. But the biggest fans of Tex-Mex have always been west of the Mississippi. Texas-Mexican food first became popular in the Midwest in 1893, when a San Antonio chili stand was set up at the Chicago World's Fair. Chili con carne was being canned in Oklahoma and St. Louis by 1910. Cincinnati's first chili joint opened in 1922. And more chili joints sprung up across the country, becoming Depression-era havens for cheap food. Meanwhile, tamale vendors popularized another kind of Mexican food across the country. In The World on a Plate, food historian Joel Denker tells us tamales were among the most common foods on the streets of Chicago in the early 1900s and were far more popular than hamburgers.
Because of their greater familiarity with its traditions, food writers and cooking authorities from the western half of the country think of Tex-Mex more sympathetically than do their New York counterparts.
"I love Tex-Mex. I grew up on it," says Rick Bayless, author of Authentic Mexican and Mexico One Plate at a Time.
In his cookbooks, Bayless, who comes from Oklahoma, pays tribute to Tex-Mex as a distinctive regional cuisine. "When people cook from the heart, there isn't a right, or wrong, way to do it," he told me. Bayless said that when writing Authentic Mexican, his first cookbook, which was published in 1987, he wanted to include Tex-Mex as well as New Mexican and California Mexican. But his New York editor didn't share his point of view.
In Eating in America: A History (1976), the late Chicago food writer Waverly Root defines Tex-Mex as a unique regional cuisine: "Tex-Mex food might be described as native foreign food, contradictory through that term may seem. It is native, for it does not exist elsewhere; it was born on this soil. But it is foreign in that its inspiration came from an alien cuisine; that it has never merged into the mainstream of American cooking and remains alive almost solely in the region where it originated . . ."
Today, most people agree that Tex-Mex isn't really Mexican food. And for reasons I hope this book will explain, Tex-Mex has started to shed its negative connotations. In the last five years, some of the same Texas-Mexican restaurants that once shunned the term have begun to claim they invented Tex-Mex!
Meanwhile, historians are beginning to study "Tex-Mex" more seriously. As it has become more widely understood to describe an American regional cooking style, it has also begun to be used retroactively. Culinary folklorists now trace Tex-Mex cooking all the way back to the state's Native American peoples and to Juan de Onate's colonists who first brought European livestock to El Paso in 1581.
"Tex-Mex foods are a combination of Indian and Spanish cuisines, which came together to make a distinct new cuisine," writes Joe S. Graham in the Texas State Historical Society's Handbook of Texas Online.
For all these reasons, I thought this might be a good time for a Tex-Mex cookbook. For the past ten years, I have been gathering scraps that I thought might shed some light on the story of Tex-Mex cooking. From restaurants and museums, garage sales and presidential libraries, I've collected recipes, snapshots, menus, postcards, and advertisements for canned chili. And I've interviewed a bunch of colorful veterans of the Tex-Mex restaurant business. In this book, I have put those scraps together. The result is not a complete picture but a fragmented collage made up of one man's gleanings.
It's been more than thirty years since The Cuisines of Mexico was published, and many of its baroque Mexican dishes seem like museum pieces now, while at the same time, Tex-Mex has achieved worldwide popularity.
We can all thank Diana Kennedy for inadvertently granting Tex-Mex its rightful place in food history. By convincing us that Tex-Mex wasn't really Mexican food, she forced us to realize that it was something far more interesting: America's oldest regional cuisine.
***
DEFINING "TEX-MEX"
-Oxford English Dictionary: "Designating the Texan variety of something Mexican. First use in print, Time magazine, 1941 '. . . Tex-Mex Spanish, that half-English half-Spanish patois of the border . . .' "
-Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, Tenth Edition Dictionary: "Of, relating to, or being the Mexican-American culture or cuisine existing or originating in esp. southern Texas."
-Food Lover's Companion: "A term given to food (as well as music, etc.) based on the combined cultures of Texas and Mexico."
***
TEJANO
"In Spanish, a Texan of Mexican descent is called a tejano or tejana (with a lowercase t). Hispanics in Texas identified themselves as Tejanos as early as January 1833, when leaders at Goliad used the term. Contemporary historians use the term to distinguish Mexican Texans from residents of other regions and to distinguish them from the Texians as Anglo-American Texans were called, during the period between the end of the Spanish era in 1821 to Texas Independence in 1836.
"The term 'Tejano' gained greater currency following the Chicano movement of the mid-1960s with corresponding changes in nuance and usage. It now encompasses language, literature, art, music, and cuisine. Tex-Mex is a related term that is not synonymous."
-Adán Benavides
from the Handbook of Texas Online.
***
Product details
- Publisher : Ten Speed Press; 1st edition (June 15, 2004)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 288 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0767914880
- ISBN-13 : 978-0767914888
- Item Weight : 1.48 pounds
- Dimensions : 7.45 x 0.75 x 9.15 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #75,351 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #24 in Southwestern U.S. Cooking, Food & Wine
- #50 in Mexican Cooking, Food & Wine
- #628 in U.S. State & Local History
- Customer Reviews:
About the author

Robb Walsh is an international food writer who divides his time between Galway Bay, Ireland and Galveston Bay, Texas. He is a three-time James Beard Journalism Award winner and the author of a dozen books about food.
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One critical `defining moment' in `Tex-Mex' cuisine occurred just thirty years ago, according to the author, when Diana Kennedy, the renowned interpreter of Mexican cuisines identified the style of cooking north of the Mexican border in `The Cuisines of Mexico' as something distinctly not part of Mexican culinary heritage. Having been cut loose from Mexican cuisine by such a distinguished authority left this style of food to establish its own identity.
While other writers may not take the `Tex' part of the term literally, Robb Walsh wishes to define the extent of `Tex-Mex' cuisine as truly that which is done or which originated within the boundaries of Texas, or some location very close by. This rules out several popular gringo dishes such as fish tacos so prominent in San Diego. Ground Zero for Tex-Mex cuisine appears to be San Antonio, in the shadow of the Alamo. Only fitting that the defining venue for Tex-Mex eating is the most memorable location in the battle for Texas independence from Mexico. The word `Tex-Mex' was not invented for the cuisine and may not have been applied to the cuisine until Diana Kennedy banished it from Mexican food styles. It began, however, as early as 1581, when the first European livestock arrived in El Paso, enabling the connection between Old World beef and New World corn and tomatoes. This means that `Tex-Mex' cooking style has some direct connection to Spanish influences. It did not emerge purely from Mexican styles of cooking; however, it is obvious that Tex-Mex owes most of its character to staples and basic preparations that were born in Mexico. The fact which makes the book so vibrant and alive is that many of the most interesting events in Tex-Mex cuisine history happened between 1894 and World War II, which means that so many oral and photographic sources are available for the telling.
The heart of Tex-Mex cooking is probably the chile, and the soul is probably the dish, chili con carne, or, literally translated `chile with meat'. The story of the differences in spelling for these closely related things is an important part of the groundwork Walsh lays for recounting the history of Tex-Mex. He presents a simple but very useful survey of chiles which includes a careful distinction of fresh from smoked forms and red from green forms, with a clarification that the famous Hatch chile is actually a cultivar of the Anaheim variety and not a truly distinct species. He is also careful to note that the Habanero is just another name for the Scotch Bonnet, an identity ignored by some other writers who should know better.
Needless to say, the book also contains many, many chili con carne recipes, most of which follow true Texas tradition and leave out the beans. There are at least two interesting discoveries regarding chili basics. The first is the fact that early chili con carne recipes included pork and the meats were stewed, as one may do in a French daube and not browned. The second tidbit is the fact that there is a special chili die for grinding meat in a hand meat grinder. Never saw that one on Martha Stewart!
The book is filled with a mix of recipes, stories, and pictures, all of which lead to an extremely pleasant culinary / literary experience. It makes one with that John Thorne, Jim Villas, and Calvin Trillin would be a little more creative with using pictures to liven up their essays. Kudos to the book designers at Broadway Books, too, for their effective assembly of all the material. It is rare to find a culinary work that gives so much for its modest $18 list price.
The single most important value to the book, of course, is in the recipes that never find their way into important Mexican cookbooks by Kennedy and the equally well decorated Rick Bayless. This is not to say Bayless does not endorse this work. The back cover can barely hold his praise for it. I loved the recipes for their obvious authenticity and I was truly happy to have a good source for a Tex-Mex party menu. However, the author's obvious attention to every sort of detail in telling the story of Tex-Mex food is what sells me on this book.
As long as you do not grind your own flour and make your own tortillas, almost all of the recipes in this book are relatively simple. You even get the simple recipes for such basics as chile powder and the original Pace salsa. But, even if you want to jump into this cuisine with both feet, the good news is that almost all the special equipment is both simple and cheap, as long as you know the proper techniques. And, this book has them all.
Highly recommended for the reader, dabbler, and the zealot. Few books make a culture and cuisine come alive quite so well.
The recipes that I’ve tried so far have been better than expected. You have a flavor in mind when you see the ingredients, the volumes and proportions just give the finishing touches. The recipes are fabulous as written!
Thanks for the well written book.
Much appreciated!
The book begins, appropriately enough, with a short primer on Tex-Mex in a chapter called "That Loveable Ugly Duckling." Walsh explores the exact meaning of Tex-Mex: is it Americanized Mexican food, or that hybrid blend of Mexican and Indian cooking found only in Texas? The following chapter is a wonderful collection of Tex-Mex dishes (burritos, enchiladas, chimichangas, fajitas, refried beans), ingredients (including a photo guide to fresh and dried chiles) and kitchen tools (which are easy enough to find if you live near a large Mexican (or Hispanic) community: the tortilla press, comal, and molcajete).
The recipes begin in chapter two, starting with old-fashioned cowboy breakfasts: cooked pinto beans with a touch of bacon grease, fried onion and garlic, and chiles, Ox Eyes (skillet eggs in hot sauce), migas, nopalitos and eggs, and cowboy coffee (with a touch of cinnamon and orange peel).
The remaining chapters explore the development and marketing of chili (including ample vintage photographs of San Antonio's legendary Chile Queens at work), the rise of the Tex-Mex restaurant in San Antonio and Houston, San Antonio puffy tacos, "junk food" Tex-Mex Frito pie, bean dip, nachos, and chile con queso. There are a few sweet desserts to round out your meal, including several praline recipes, cookies, and a decadent chocolate caramel flan cake.
The recipes are clearly written and easy to follow, but it's the historical sidenotes and many rare photos that I found so intriguing about this book. There are interviews with pioneering Tex-Mex restaurant owners, tidbits of Mexican and Tejano history and lore, and snippets of WPA reports documenting food in Texas in the 1920s and 1930s, and stories about the Anglo marketing of chili powder, canned tamales, Pace salsa, and chain restaurants like Chili's (complete with vintage advertising and recipe books). The book closes with a look at Tex-Mex's global spread to France (helped along by the 1986 film BETTY BLUE (37°2 le matin) (DIRECTOR'S CUT) (IMPORT, ALL-REGION) ), South America, Thailand, Japan and the Middle East. And for those who love a good tipple, yes, there's a chapter devoted to the invention of the frozen margarita, fruit margaritas, and sangria.
There's something here for everyone, but the health-conscious beware; authentic Tex-Mex is all about the flavor, which includes large amounts of rendered lard (fresh, not store-packaged, hydrogenated, and flavorless) and occasionally Velveeta (chosen for its ability to stay soft after the food cools). There's also some cuts of meat that many Anglos will find unappealing: cow head (used for barbacoa) and beef tongue (menudo, or tripe soup, is curiously absent here). And tender palates beware: Tex-Mex and Mexican food make ample use of the hottest chiles (serranos and habaneros), although you can substitute less-spicy ones (but you'll lose some of the flavor). If you live in a small town, you may have difficulty in tracking down Mexican ingredients such as masa harina, piloncillo, and dried chiles, but Walsh thoughtfully includes several mail-order (and Internet) sources.
A fantastic gift for fans of Tex-Mex (what most Americans call "Mexican") food, expat San Antonians, or anyone who's interested in culinary (and regional) history will enjoy the Tex-Mex Cookbook.
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Perfekt für unsere Zeit. Mal wieder genießen und stöbern.
Das Buch ist nichts für die, die anhand glamouröser Bilder ein 10-Minuten-Rezept suchen.
The recipes in this book are also very diverse, covering everything from breakfasts to beverages. Some recipes are more time-consuming (making handmade tortillas or grinding ingredients with a mortar and pestle) but there is actually a chapter on junk food. Since the recipes are arranged around the historical chapters, recipes for the same type of dish may be scattered throughout the book. Fortunately there is an Index at the back. I have only tried a few recipes so far but they turned out well. One of these days I will get around to making Barbacoa (which calls for an entire cow's head!) because it is my husband's favourite!















