Family recipes
SYLVIA CASARES: Enchilada Queen shares Tex-Mex flavors passed down from grandmother
SYLVIA Casares thinks of herself as a frontera girl — a typical Mexican-American child of Brownsville who grew up in a home that her paternal grandmother and her mother filled with love and no small measure of homestyle Mexican food. Houston knows her, however, in a more regal context as the city’s Enchilada Queen, whose three restaurants offer daily testament to the power of the most exalted player in the Mexican food canon. Now Casares is cementing her position in the Tex-Mex dining scene with “The Enchilada Queen Cookbook” (St. Martin’s Griffin, $27.98,
Nov. 1), which is poised to trumpet her reign to a larger audience. Written with Dotty Griffith (a former editor and restaurant critic for the Dallas Morning News), Casares’ new book features more than 80 recipes, including those for the sauces that have come to define her enchilada empire, and those passed down by madres and abuelas through the generations along the border towns of the Rio Grande.
When she decided to give up her a corporate career — with a home economics degree from the University of Texas, she worked in food science and recipe testing for Uncle Ben’s and later in sales for Kraft — to open a restaurant, Casares turned to the food she knew. She opened her first Sylvia’s Enchilada Kitchen in 1998. And though her menu has grown, Casares remains focused on the enchilada, which she says is the food most emblematic of rich Tex-Mex traditions.
“Tex-Mex is a beautiful blend of cuisines and cultures. Sometimes people tell me they love my food because it isn’t Tex-Mex. They’re mistaken, because what I cook is Tex-Mex, made the way people make it all along both sides of the border,” she writes. “Some of my dishes may be more Mexican, others more Texan, but they are most always Tex-Mex, at least as I know it.”
That knowledge is fundamental to every enchilada, taco, tamale, salsa and side-dish recipe in “The Enchilada Queen Cookbook.” The book’s recipes, when properly followed — her background in food research makes Casares insistent on measuring everything precisely with strict adherence to the ingredients and methodology — will yield the very food that she writes about with such passion.
“We make enchiladas the way they were made 50 to 70 years ago,” she said. “It’s like stepping back and tasting the flavors of my grandmother.”
Her family is recognized throughout the book as the people who have nurtured, encouraged and emboldened her. The 63-year-old Casares said she wrote the book out of love. “I’m talking about the love that goes into cooking the timeless recipes of my heritage,” she said.
And a love to pass on those recipes. “In my tamale-making classes, there are people who want to continue their traditions but have lost their mother, their grandmother or aunts who were good cooks who had those recipes. The line was broken.”
Even though she was sure her cookbook would restore that line for many, she wasn’t taking any chances when she flew to New York to pitch it to publishers. For her meeting with St. Martin’s Griffin she traveled to Manhattan, with a cooler full of her original chile gravy, salsa verde and mole sauce. She used a break room with a microwave to assemble plates of food for the editors. “They went ga-ga,” she said.
And then she followed up by sending them tamales for Christmas: “Maybe they needed a snack.” She got the green light. “I don’t have any halfway buttons,” Casares said, laughing. “With me, it’s 100 percent or nothing.”