Texas Cooking

Chapter 1Food and stories go together. They have been paired since the first tribes of man gathered around campfires in caves, or tents, or crude brush shelters. They are like an ancient couple married longer than anyone can remember, bringing warmth and comfort, wisdom and laughter to those who sit with them. Many of the oldest stories are about food and where it came from-like the Native American legends about how the People got the first seed corn, or how the buffalo came to be, or the biblical one about the Garden of Eden and how Adam and Eve brought about their fall from grace by eating the forbidden fruit. In my family, some of the best stories are about food, like the one about the time my grandmother tried to create sauerkraut in a five-gallon crock and filled the basement with a gas so noxious no one could go down there for months. Or the time my great-aunt decided to try the new Mexican cooking fad on Easter Sunday, and created something so horrible even the dogs were afraid of it. Cooking talent, in my family, is like eye color. You never know who's going to get what. I got blue eyes, no cooking talent. I'm not bitter about it. I have no cooking interest, either. My mother spotted this deficiency in me early, and gave up trying to mold me into a culinary genius. She decided that, along with my grandmother's curly red hair, I inherited Gran's nondomestic personality. Just like my grandmother, I didn't fit the traditional mold that society sets out for girls. I was scab-kneed and redheaded, tall and not the least bit refined, and determined to do everything my brother could do. I rejected all things girlish, including cooking. I spent my formative years reading about adventure, or running the fringes of the neighborhood looking for adventure, but never in the kitchen, unless my grandmother and my great-aunts were gathered there, and the room was filled with wild Irish stories. My mother, a prim schoolteacher, was often scandalized by what was said at those gatherings of the Collins clan, but she let me sit and listen anyway. Perhaps she knew it was important for me to fit in somewhere, or perhaps she was just happy to see me finally in the kitchen, peeling potatoes or snapping green beans, finally learning how to cook, or so she thought. The fact was that I learned a lot about my family, and listened to some wonderful Irish stories, but I didn't absorb a teaspoonful of cooking knowledge. Which is why it's so strange that cooking took me on an adventure as wild as any of my great-aunts' tales, and changed everything I thought I knew about myself. It all began with cooking. A story about cooking. Texas cooking. I was so aghast when I got the offer, I sat silently staring out the window with the phone buzzing in my ear. "Collie?" Laura Draper's voice brought me back to reality. "Collie, are you still there?" "Laura, are you sure you dialed the right number?" I asked. "I don't know anything about cooking. I don't know anything about Texas. I cover D.C. stories, remember? Washington, D.C. Real stuff." Fortunately, Laura ignored my burst of attitude. "You can't do any kind of stories sitting in bed with the covers pulled over your head, Collie." Only a really good friend can put you in your place like that and get away with it. "Now get off your butt and check your fax machine. I sent the proposal over two days ago, in case you hadn't noticed." "I hadn't," I muttered. "I'm not surprised," she fired back. "It's an eight-story run, and the pay isn't bad. Eight thousand plus expenses." A huge sigh trembled through me, and the sound of it made my eyes burn. It was filled with the sense of hopelessness that had become the biggest part of me. "It just isn't my kind of story...." "Stop it, Collie!" The volume made me hold the phone away from my ear. After so many weeks of quiet, her voice seemed like thunder rolling through my brain. "Wingate, Lisa is the author of 'Texas Cooking', published 2003 under ISBN 9780451411020 and ISBN 0451411021.