Don’t Call It Tex-Mex

A writer and chef is on a quest to tell the world about Texas Mexican food, the cooking of South Texas and northern Mexico that predates and spans the border.

A customer eats at El Puesto No. 2, on San Antonio’s West Side. The 17-year-old restaurant serves what the chef and writer Adán Medrano calls Texas Mexican cooking, the indigenous food of South Texas.

Credit...
John Taggart for The New York Times

By Rachel Wharton

April 22, 2019

HOUSTON — This city’s Second Ward is full of temptations for Adán Medrano, a writer and chef who lives just a few miles southeast.

The Mexican-American neighborhood is home to the perfect flaky tortillas at Doña María Mexican Café, scratch-made in flour or corn, and ready to be folded around eggs with the fine threads of dried beef called machacado. It has the off-menu roasted tamales at the Original Alamo Tamales, with blackened husks and caramelized edges of masa and meat. And there’s Taqueria Chabelita, where the owner, Isabel Henriquez Hernandez, makes pinto beans whose smoky intensity comes not from pork fat, but from a slow char in a hot pan.

For Mr. Medrano, who grew up in San Antonio with generations of relatives on both sides of the Rio Grande, this is all his comfort food, his culinary heritage, his comida casera, or Mexican home cooking.

Just don’t call it Tex-Mex, he said. He prefers to describe it as Texas Mexican, which is also how he describes himself.

Adán Medrano, right, eats breakfast at Doña María Mexican Cafe in Houston. The restaurant has perfectly prepared flour and corn tortillas, said Mr. Medrano, who considers both traditional in Texas Mexican cooking.

Credit...
John Taggart for The New York Times

Texas Mexican is the indigenous cooking of South Texas, according to Mr. Medrano, 71, whose second cookbook, “Don’t Count the Tortillas: The Art of Texas Mexican Cooking,” will be published in June by Texas Tech University Press. It’s the food that’s been made by families like his on this land since before the Rio Grande marked a border, when Texas was a part of Mexico, and long before then.

Don’t get him wrong: Tex-Mex is a cuisine that should be respected and celebrated, he said. It’s just that Tex-Mex standards like queso and combo fajitas piled high with chicken and shrimp don’t speak of home to those whose Texas roots go back some 12,000 years.

“That’s not our food,” said Mr. Medrano, who has spent the better part of a decade defining his cuisine, inspiring a growing number of Texas Mexicans in the process. “We don’t eat like that.”

Chips with salsa ranchera and pork in chile colorado, or red chile sauce, are Texas Mexican standards. Both are served at Old Danny’s Cocina in San Antonio, which Antonio Franco has run for 20 years.

Credit...
John Taggart for The New York Times

You can find Texas Mexican here at Mr. Medrano’s Houston go-tos, and at decades-old San Antonio West Side lunch spots like Old Danny’s Cocina, or even newer favorites like El Puesto No. 2 down the street. It’s at Maria’s Restaurant in downtown McAllen and at Cafe Amiga in Brownsville, both run by granddaughters of their founders.

It is dishes like chicken poached with striped green squash and corn, the tomato-noodle soup called fideo, and gulf shrimp and cactus stewed in a mix of dried red chiles. It’s the simple ground beef picadillo or the beef-and-potato stew called carne guisada, both subtly seasoned with a pounded paste of black peppercorn, garlic and cumin, which Mr. Medrano describes as the Texas Mexican version of the Cajun holy trinity.

Sopa de fideo, a tomato-noodle soup, is a Texas Mexican dish eaten all over San Antonio. At Old Danny’s Cocina, a cup comes free with the daily lunch specials.

Credit...
John Taggart for The New York Times

It is what Juan Hernandez, of Doña María Mexican Cafe, has always described as “mama-style cooking”— the mama in this case being his wife, Anna Hernandez, who grew up a block away from the restaurant and is a co-owner. Mr. Hernandez would never call the food she makes Tex-Mex; in fact, it inspired Tex-Mex.

That began in the early 1900s, when local Mexican-American home cooking was first adapted in restaurants run “by Anglos for Anglos,” Mr. Medrano said. In the 1970s, writers started referring to that hybridized cuisine as Tex-Mex: refried beans as smooth as pancake batter; chili made with powdered spices and stock, instead of the carne con chiles based on whole dried red chiles; fajitas with anything other than the skirt steak that gave the dish its name; and extra cheese on everything.

Juan Hernandez, of Doña María Mexican Cafe in Houston, has never used the term Tex-Mex to describe the restaurant’s food; he calls it “mama-style cooking.”

Credit...
John Taggart for The New York Times

The idea of distinguishing Texas Mexican from Tex-Mex came to him after he enrolled in the Culinary Institute of America program in San Antonio in 2010, after careers in producing and writing for television, and awarding foundation grants to nonprofit arts and education projects. Mr. Medrano, who also founded San Antonio’s annual Latino film festival in 1977, originally took the classes for fun, he said, but they led him to an epiphany: After decades in the shadows, his food needed not just a champion, but a name.

Mr. Medrano didn’t want to use the word Tejano, because it is sometimes used to highlight Spanish colonial ancestry rather than native heritage, and because spelling Texas with a J instead of an X is a European practice.

He came up with a better term after learning about the distinct regional cuisines of Mexico, realizing that he had essentially grown up with one of his own. “You have Oaxacan Mexican, you have Jaliscan Mexican,” Mr. Medrano said. “Why not Texas Mexican?”

His initial research on the history of this food became his first cookbook, “Truly Texas Mexican: A Native Culinary Heritage in Recipes,” published in 2014.

For his cookbooks and documentary, Mr. Medrano spent hours discussing Texas Mexican food with chefs like Isabel Henriquez Hernandez of Taqueria Chabelita in Houston.

Credit...
John Taggart for The New York Times

Since then, Mr. Medrano has traveled the region, cooking, lecturing at schools and museums, and gathering knowledge from chefs, anthropologists and home cooks, many of whom are quoted in “Don’t Count the Tortillas.” (This summer he will even make carne guisada tacos at a Fourth of July celebration in Moscow, at the residence of the United States ambassador to Russia.)

Click for Full Text!

Poster Comment:

My mouth is watering after reading this.

One time when in the big truck in Chicago, I stopped at a taqueria on Ashland just south of Division to pick up a couple of Carne Asada burritos. This place made them with all beef flank steak and some onion and cilantro sauce spooned on. You could get salsa on the side.

I had to double park the big truck. While I was in there, a couple of people came out of the restaurant next door and wanted to get their car, but I was blocking them in. I opened the door and told them I was picking up lunch.

Afterward I went over on Division and parked and ate. It was great but here in Missouri they do not have those kind of places to eat. A few good places in Joplin but that is another story.