Chow Down!!
Posted on 02/25/2003 10:55:10 AM PST by aculeus
NOT too long ago, I was seized by a craving.
I was in the mood to return to the kind of food that's bad for you but so good, that tugs at memory but sounds disgusting to the uninitiated.
Because I grew up in Texas, I am speaking, of course, of Frito pie, a dish only a Southwesterner could really love. If I had grown up in Pennsylvania, I might be talking about scrapple; Minnesota, lutefish. And other Texans might crave chicken-fried steak or the spicy Mexican beef tripe soup called menudo. I am struck by yearnings for those things from time to time, but this craving was for Frito pie, the high point of elementary school lunches and high school football games and political rallies.
I asked my mom to send me the fixings, and she sent six cans of Wolf Brand Chili. The Wolf Brand is essential. I make a pretty good bowl of chili myself, but Frito pie doesn't taste right to me without the can of red from Corsicana, Tex., with its 108-year-old recipe and folksy advertisements that were part of my TV upbringing.
I can always tell a Texan — not by the accent, or by the attitude, or even by whether they wear a cowboy hat or boots (oh, grow up). All I have to do is ask the question from the Wolf Brand commercial, with the proper over-excited growl-like drawl: "Neighbor?! How long has it been since you've had a Big! Thick! Steamin' bowl o' Wolf Brand Chili?"
Texans will immediately deliver the tag line: "Well, that's too long!"
Frito pie is not unknown in the North — the Cowgirl Hall of Fame restaurant in Greenwich Village serves a decent version of the dish. But I wanted to make it myself, since it is one of the few recipes that is fully within my set of kitchen skills:
1) Take bag of Fritos. Slice lengthwise. 2) Pour in a cup of hot chili. 3) Add cheese. Velveeta is fine. And onions and jalapeños, if you like. 4) Eat it before it congeals.
I tried to share the love with my children. Two, Elizabeth and Joe, are a little finicky, and Elizabeth has been calling herself a vegetarian lately. But Sam, my enthusiastic gourmand, loved it. We decided that the chili might taste really good on top of one of Elizabeth's Boca Burgers. We were right. It seems to add some kind of missing ingredient.
I realized that other Texpatriates might be feeling the same nostalgia, and packed up a few cans, with bags of Fritos, and sent them off to my wife's Cousin Jim, who is in Kuwait with the troops. "Aw gee! You shouldn't have!" he wrote back in an e-mail message. "Why bless your little white trash hearts, this is a present I will cherish for a long, long time (thank God for Tums)."
But satisfying a long-suppressed desire has a price. You don't want to read the Wolf Brand nutrition label, which told me that after finishing off the can, I had ingested two days' worth of sodium. We just aren't going to talk about the fat and cholesterol. And that doesn't count the sodium, fat and cholesterol in the Fritos. Or the, um, cheese.
A day or so later, I sent my latest blood pressure reading to my doctor via e-mail — part of our attempt to wean me from blood-pressure medications. It's been going well, but that night I reported a definite spike.
"Numbers seem to be creeping back up," he wrote to me the next day. "Have you been doing anything different lately?"
I said in response that I had not been getting as much exercise and sleep as I should have, and added, "I don't know if it makes a difference, but I went on a salty food binge a few days ago." I described the chili orgy. "I've been eating more normally since them," I wrote.
Within a few days, in fact, my numbers were looking good again. I sat down to write about the nostalgic ritual of making just the right food, even if it is, in many ways, wrong.
I sit here writing, and looking up Wolf Brand on the Web. (Hey, Mom — I can order it directly from www.wolfbrandchili.com!) It is getting toward midnight. The craving is back. I push the cat off my lap and go to the kitchen and open one of the cans. There is half a bag of Fritos on top of the fridge, left over from my last spree. I put half of the can's chili in the microwave and then dump it on the Fritos in a bowl, and top it all with cheese. No time to chop onions in this hour of urgent need. The nuked chili blasts the top of my mouth; no matter. I eat lustily, the rich greasiness of the Wolf Brand and the crunch of corn chips blend against all odds, against all sense, into something wonderful.
I return to my easy chair. There are chili spatters on my shirt among the cat hair. I am happy. Sorry, Dr. Pelzman. I'll be good tomorrow.
Let Proust have his dainty little madeleine. This is real eating. You can hardly move after you've had a serving, and how more real does it get than that?
Chow Down!!
Every time I go back to NY, the one place I must eat is Nathans!
Mark
"Tonight", hell, it's lunch time!
Actually, even better than homemade is the chili pie at James Coney Island in Houston.
Them's fighting words!
Mark
I still remember a few years ago getting a call from a friend up in Penang working for Dell computer asking me if I was able to "score" some Monterrey Jack cheese or not. I drove 200 miles one night with 20lbs of cheese in an ice chest and exchanged it for Pace picante sauce.
Not in Wisconsin it's not. Otherwise this sounds delicious.
First concocted at:
>
>
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The Woolworths on the Plaza in Santa Fe, New Mexico!
Sorry, Texans.
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