Summer heat doesn’t stop Texas barbecue
The experience of four distinct seasons is somewhat lost on those of us who grew up in Texas. There’s summer, which is really hot, and then the rest of the year.
For most Texans, there are really only three seasons — football, baseball and basketball. We begin our awakening from the lazy days of summer around the first of August, when our favorite college and professional football teams start training camps. As I think back to my days playing high school football, the idea of suiting up in full pads and practicing in 100-plusdegree heat seems crazy. But for a teenager in Texas, it’s a rite of passage.
The lack of seasonality here also applies to food. Again, three seasons apply: oysters, crabs and crawfish. For me, summers are associated with trips to Galveston or Bolivar Peninsula and eating piles of blue crabs — boiled, steamed, fried or “barbecued.”
Barbecue crabs (actually just seasoned and fried) were a seasonal staple growing up in Southeast Texas, made famous at Sartin’s seafood in Sabine Pass. For about $20, you could order “platter service,” which included all-you-can-eat barbecue crabs that came to the table piled high on round metal trays. If you were renting a beach house on Bolivar and you had time to kill in between assembling puzzles or playing Monopoly, spending hours picking apart blue crabs to get to the sweet meat was a delicious diversion.
Traditional Texas barbecue, of course, is stubbornly unaffected by seasonality. There are no seasons for beef, chicken or pork. Texans will happily sit down to a big pile of rich, fatty brisket during the hottest days of August just as they would during a crisp, cool day in November.
This fact is baffling for much of the rest of the country, if not the world. I was introduced to the seasonality of food on backpacking trips to Europe during my college years. The idea of the “summer menu” is in full force there. Lighter dishes such as salads, cold soups and charcuterie are preferred over heavier meat ones.
Indeed, when my European friends visit Texas in the summer, they are baffled and intrigued when I take them to a barbecue joint and we sit down to an obligatory tray of smoked beef and pork.
Some of my most memorable barbecue experiences have occurred during Texas’ sizzling summer. Several years ago a new barbecue trailer called Micklethwait Craft Meats opened in Austin. It was getting a lot of buzz, so a group of my regular barbecue buddies made a weekend run to check it out. The season did not factor into our travel decision.
Micklethwait, then as now, is a trailer parked in a dusty clearing with a few picnic tables and a few trees offering some shade. My only memory from that day was eating some of the best barbecue I’ve ever had while sitting in the hot Central Texas sun. It was very much a Texas experience. The drive back to Houston was the hardest part. A belly full of smoked meats combined with the heat and humidity of a summer afternoon required multiple stops for coffee to stave off the inevitable drowsiness.
I recently returned to Micklethwait for the first time since that initial visit. We arrived at lunchtime. The temperature was pushing 90 degrees. And yet every picnic table was filled, and there was a line to get barbecue. In between bites of brisket, conversation turned to Longhorn football and the team’s chances this year with their new head coach. We must be getting close to August.