San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Tastes of Texas
Marfa to Crawford, flavors do state proud
Like the size of the state itself, Texas’ culinary riches are epic in scope, influenced by history, geography, and native and immigrant cultures.
The best cookbooks that mine the food of such a giant place tend to focus on a region, a distinct place and time or specific foodways that illuminate how we live and eat.
Such is the case with two new cookbooks that speak to different dining traditions. “Cooking in Marfa: Welcome, We’ve Been Expecting You” and “Recipes From the President’s Ranch: Food People Like to Eat” could not be more different in subject matter.
The former is a sophisticated treatise on highbrow dining in the artobsessed desert Shangri-La that is Marfa; the latter a folksy immersion into down-home meals shared by the George W. Bush family at their Prairie Chapel Ranch in Crawford, known as the Western White House.
But the two publications share an undeniable spirit — a passion for the people and flavors that do Texas proud.
Marfa eats
Published by Phaidon in May, “Cooking in Marfa” is an immersion into the lifestyle, history and food culture of a storied town as seen through the eyes of the owners of a destination restaurant, the Capri. Authors Virginia Lebermann, co-founder of the arts nonprofit Ballroom Marfa, and her husband, chef Rocky Barnette, ushered in a new level of dining in Marfa with a restaurant known for celebrating indigenous ingredients.
Though Lebermann hails from a family of ranchers who have been in Texas for more than 100 years, Barnette was raised in North Carolina and moved to Marfa after an eight-year stint in the kitchen of the Michelin-starred Inn at Little Washington in Washington, Va. They share, though, a love of the “la frontera” culture of a place Lebermann calls “not exactly Texas or Mexico.”
“It is a regional collision of vastly different yet intertwined histories, cultures, and economic political structures,” she writes in the cookbook.
She purchased the Capri and its sister property, the Thunderbird Motel, in 2004, and together they created a restaurant that from the beginning was meant to embody the history of this border region.
There are about 80 recipes in the cookbook that show the Capri’s obsession for color, texture and composition built on a deep knowledge and appreciation for the regional landscape’s native origins. The Capri’s menu is filled with dishes such as masa pasta with bottarga, tostadas al carbon with razor clams, duck confit with huitlacoche salsa, watermelon gazpacho with sal de gusano and desserts that include mesquite bean ice cream and helados fashioned from tamarind, nopales and Mexican elderflower. It is thrilling stuff.
Bush people
Matthew Wendel, author of “Recipes From the President’s Ranch,” is a born and bred Texan from Danbury, south of Houston. His memoir/cookbook — available from The White House Historical Association, its publisher — reads as a story of a person plucked from obscurity to work with a dynastic family that happened to include the most powerful men on Earth.
The way Wendel tells it, he was working as a catering waiter in Austin in 1995 when he was sent to the Governor’s Mansion, where George W. Bush’s family lived. Fast-forward a few years when Bush asked Wendel if he’d continue serving the family, who was headed to the White
House. Wendel cooked for and served the Bushes at Camp David and, mostly, at their home at Prairie Chapel Ranch in Crawford.
He had no formal culinary training, but Wendel, the sixth of nine children, possessed food sensibilities the Bushes appreciated. He learned his way in the kitchen from his mother, Velva, an accomplished home cook and baker known for her from-scratch cinnamon rolls and Sunday suppers of chicken fried in a cast-iron skillet.
Just the kind of food the Bushes loved. And it’s that filling, honest, flavorful food that populates the cookbook: guacamole and roasted ancho chile salsa, chicken and black bean Mexican lasagna, chickenfried steak with skillet gravy, green chile macaroni and cheese, and jalapeño cheese biscuits.
There are touches of elegance — lemon asparagus soup, blood orange and date salad, pecan-smoked beef tenderloin — but mostly the Bush dining roster was stick-to-your-ribs Texas favorites such as fried chicken, chicken and dumplings, cheese enchiladas and ranch chili.
“People always asked me, ‘What is the president’s favorite dish?’ I would always answer, ‘Dessert,’ ” Wendel writes. “The president is a fast eater, and I said that he ate his meal fast to get to dessert.”
One of those desserts was undoubtedly Laura Bush’s peach cream pie, a recipe included in the cookbook.
Wendel’s service with the Bushes ended after their eight years in the White House. But he remains friends with the family; Laura Bush wrote the book’s foreward.
Today, Wendel is the general manager of the Blair House, the presidential guest house.
“They continue to be a part of my life,” he writes of the Bushes. “I had watched Jenna and Barbara grow up from teenagers into smart and beautiful women. I was there for the many birthdays and special moments the family celebrated, never feeling like a servant but as an important part of the care and feeding of the first family and serving my country in the best way I knew how.”