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This article originally appeared in American Way Magazine and was nominated for the 1996 James Beard Journalism Award for Magazine Feature Writing without Recipes.
The flag of Gruyère flutters over the stone ramparts of an ancient walled castle on an Alpine cliff. The flag is white with a fierce-looking bird in the middle of it. Legend has it that the first Count of Gruyère went out hunting one day with the intention of naming his County after the first thing he killed. He killed a crane, (a grue in French) and thus became the Count of Gruyère.
I thought I’d run across some cheesemakers here in the walled village of Gruyères (the name of the village is spelled with an “s” on the end to keep it separate from the name of the region), but there aren’t any. As it turns out, this fortified village wasn’t built to produce the stuff, it was built to defend it. Defending cheese may sound like a pretty strange idea, but by now I’m used to it. In fact, I’ve just travelled all the way from my home in Texas to the Swiss Alps because I’m feeling so defensive about cheese.
read more Article Archives: "War of the Cheeses," 1995 »
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Writing about food as a freelancer was a tough way to make a living and I was about ready to give up after several years of poverty. My fortunes changed when this article about bumming around the Caribbean looking for new hot sauces was published in American Way magazine and won the 1996 James Beard Journalism Award in the Magazine Feature Writing with Recipes category.
The little house looks like it’s about to slip off the cliffside into the thicket of banana plants and herb gardens below. Knocking on the door, I am greeted by reggae on the radio and several loud, simultaneous conversations. “Come in, it’s open!” somebody finally hollers over the din.
Inside, seven women are sitting around a kitchen table cleaning herbs and laughing. Out the window behind them, I can see the green squares of hundreds of garden plots covering the steep slopes of Trinidad’s Paramin Hills. Stacked along the wall is the treasure I’ve travelled thousands of miles to find, cases upon cases of “Genuine Paramin Pepper Sauce.”
Hillary Boisson is the Parmin Women’s Group’s unofficial leader. She is scrutinizing my T-shirt trying to find some clue as to what this large sunburnt American wants in her clubhouse kitchen. The T-shirt reads: “Austin Hot Sauce Contest, Fourth Annual.” read more Article Archives: "Hot Sauce Safari," 1995 »
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This article appeared in Cooking Light Magazine in June 2004, at about the same time that the cookbook Nuevo Tex-Mex was published.
Tex-Mex first blazed across American tastebuds in the Wild West of the 1880s. In those days, young Hispanic women with roses pinned to the bosoms of their dresses sashayed around San Antonio’s Military Square peddling tacos, tamales and chili con carne to lonesome cowboys. The Chili Queens, as they were known, were famous both for their flirtatious sales pitches and for the spiciness of the Tex-Mex specialities they sold.
The Chili Queens gave Tex-Mex tacos, tamales and chili con carne a pretty exciting reputation. Of course, nobody called it Tex-Mex in those days. It was simply known as Mexican food. In fact, we were still calling it Mexican food some eighty years later when Americans fell in love with crispy tacos and tortillas chips in the late 1960s.
The term “Tex-Mex” didn’t come along until the 1970s when Mexican cooking authorities convinced us that this sort of Texan-Mexican fusion cooking wasn’t really Mexican food at all. The name was something of an insult, it divided Mexican food into two categories. Guacamole and tamales were authentic Mexican food. The gloppy, cheese-covered platters, the fast food tacos–and all the other stuff that didn’t get any respect–that was Tex-Mex. Suddenly, one of America’s oldest and most popular regional cooking styles had been demoted to junk food status. read more Article Archives: "Nuevo Tex Mex" 2004 »
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