Barbecue items worthy of historic markers
On a recent drive to Austin, I took note of the many signs along the way pointing to various historical markers. If you grew up in Texas, family vacations often included a stop along the highway and a dutiful recitation of the engraved text describing a battlefield or old homestead.
Nowadays, it seems, there is less time for meandering around the state and randomly stopping at a historical marker. Google Maps has made the destination, not the journey, the main goal of travel.
Fortunately, for all the armchair travelers out there, the Texas Historical Commission has created the Texas Historic Sites Atlas that exhaustively documents every marker in the state, along with the text of its story. It’s a great virtual travel resource (atlas.thc.texas.gov/ map) if you’ve got an hour or four to spend in front of a computer.
Back on the road, in Giddings, I stopped at City Meat Market, which deserves its own historical marker. This is one of the last remaining Central Texas-style meat markets that transitioned to serving barbecue in the 1950s. It famously launched the career of pitmaster Tootsie Tomanetz of Snow’s BBQ in nearby Lexington, who got her start here in 1966.
Though well-known for its smoked chicken and coarseground, crumbly sausage, I always get the one dish for which City Meat Market is famous: pork steak.
This is one of my favorite dishes in all of Texas barbecue, and it’s available every day the restaurant is open. Driving through Giddings and past City Meat Market on the town’s main intersection, I always thought it would be appropriate to put up a historical barbecue marker that states: “City Meat Market: home of the smoked pork steak.”
Which got me thinking about other historic dishes in Texas barbecue. Sure, there are many historic barbecue joints worth recognizing, many that have closed and some that are still around.
But what about those dishes that you can still order today that allow you to actually taste the history of Texas barbecue? In addition to the pork steak at City Meat Market, here are three more you can try from one end of the state to the other.
Starting in Beaumont, Patillo’s Bar-B-Q is a must-visit for the Creole-inspired, all-beef sausages known locally as “juicy links.” Redolent of garlic, cumin, chili powder and paprika, these links ooze a bright-red juice betraying a substantial percent-Brownsville, age of beef fat in the filling. Patillo’s has been making these links for over 100 years, and any visit is like stepping into a Texas barbecue time machine.
Next, I’d head over to Taylor, where I’d put up a marker for the beef rib at Louie Mueller Barbecue. Though there is some debate about which Central Texas barbecue joint first served the big “dinosaur-style” beef plate ribs, Louie Mueller has undoubtedly perfected the dish.
My final stop would be at Vera’s Backyard Bar-B-Que in which still serves what many consider to be the true foundation of all Texas barbecue: barbacoa de cabeza (smoked cow’s head). Indeed, Vera’s has been open for so long (60-plus years) that its method of cooking the cow heads in underground coal pits has been grandfathered-in by contemporary health regulations.
Undoubtedly there are potentially many more Texas barbecue dishes that may qualify for historical status. Though we may not have time to stop and read traditional historical markers, I’d certainly be willing to take a tour around the state tasting the best and most historic dishes that Texas pitmasters have to offer.