Category Archives: Food and Drink

WESTERN TRAILS: TEXAS CANYON

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RoadsideParkAZBaja

This is a rest area in Texas Canyon, Arizona — on the road to El Paso.

Below is a Whataburger purchased in El Paso:

WhataburgerandBagBaja

The Whataburger is the best fast-food burger known to mankind but only available in Texas, New Mexico and Arizona, as far as I’ve been able to determine. The one I’m eating in the picture is generously garnished with jalapeños. Whataburger — since 1950, like me.

One of the tales in my book Fourteen Western Stories is set in El Paso, in the days before Whataburgers.

Click on the images to enlarge.

FRONTIER FOOD

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CannedMeatBaja

According to Owen Wister’s novel The Virginian, Underwood Deviled Ham was a cowboy favorite in frontier Wyoming, along with tinned sardines, and a heated-up chunk of canned corned beef was likely to be served to you as the main course at a restaurant or boarding house in a small frontier town.

The deviled ham is palatable, spread on a cracker — the canned corned beef has a quality of dog food about it, faintly savory, faintly repulsive.  Wister said that fresh chickens and eggs were rare on the frontier, along with milk and butter, and that fresh vegetables were all but unknown.

Beef and beans were the staples of a cowboy’s diet, with some bacon or fresh-caught trout now and then if he got lucky.  Home gardens, milk cows and chicken coops were brought to the frontier by women who married ranchers, and were otherwise considered unmanly things to truck with.

BoothsSardines

If you want to eat like a real cowboy, have some fried or stewed or barbecued beef, some beans, and some meat or fish out of a can.

CANNED GOODS ON THE FRONTIER

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UnderwoodDeviledHamBaja

Underwood Deviled Ham, which has been around since 1868, was a popular item on the Western frontier, along with many other canned goods.  In 1902, in his novel The Virginian, Owen Wister wrote:

The cow-boy is now gone to worlds invisible; the wind has blown away the white ashes of his camp-fires; but the empty sardine box lies rusting over the face of the Western earth.

Y’ALL HUNGRY?

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eat-drink-delta-copyjpg-db51b75a7ebab4f2

This is a great book for anyone who loves American regional cuisine — Southern cuisine in particular. It focuses on the Delta region of Mississippi, one of the quirkiest places in America and one of the most interesting, culturally and historically. Its food reflects its nature — a blend of traditional Southern dishes and eccentric local oddities. The book is part travel guide, part restaurant guide — laced with recipes for many of the dishes it describes and profusely illustrated with gorgeous and evocative color photographs by Langdon Clay, depicting both the food and the places it’s served.

TeaShop

After spending some time with it, I guarantee you’ll want to throw this book in the back of your car, head off to the Delta and start looking for some Delta-style tamales or fried okra or crawfish cakes. The mouth waters just thinking about it.

You can buy the book here — Eat Drink Delta.

ALL YOU CAN EAT

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For the last meal of Jae’s annual dream vacation in Las Vegas we went to my local sushi joint, where Jae ordered the all-you-can-eat sushi dinner. He ate so much sushi that the waitresses and the sushi chef were undoubtedly reconsidering the wisdom of their all-you-can-eat offer.

We then went to the Crown & Anchor pub where Jae had a generous portion of the toffee pudding featured there. It was an impressive display of food consumption.  I have known Jae for about twelve years and he has always eaten food in this quantity and has always stayed rail thin.  It doesn’t see right somehow.