PJ Stoops - Texas Seafood: A Cookbook and Comprehensive Guide

TEXAS SEAFOOD

A COOKBOOK AND COMPREHENSIVE GUIDE

PJ STOOPS AND BENCHALAK SRIMART STOOPS

UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS PRESS

AUSTIN

Support for this book comes from an endowment for environmental studies made possible by generous contributions from Richard C. Bartlett, Susan Aspinall Block, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Copyright 2019 by the University of Texas Press

All rights reserved

First edition, 2019

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Stoops, PJ, author. | Stoops, Benchalak Srimart, author.

Title: Texas seafood : a cookbook and comprehensive guide / PJ Stoops, Benchalak Srimart Stoops.

Description: First edition. | Austin : University of Texas Press, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018054754

ISBN 978-1-4773-1803-4 (cloth : alk. paper)

ISBN 978-1-4773-1921-5 (library ebook)

ISBN 9781477319215 (non-library ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Cooking (Seafood) | SeafoodTexas.

Classification: LCC TX747 .S683 2019 | DDC 641.6/9209764dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018054754

doi:10.7560/318034

TO JJ AND BB

Everything good in our lives emanates from you.

TO MOM AND DAD (GAIL AND STEVE)

Without you both, without your love, support, and encouragement, none of the good stuff would ever have happened. We love you both. We only hope that we can do for our children what you have done for us.

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

Of all the peoples who have lived on the Texas Gulf coast, none appreciated and relied on our natural bounty more than those who were here before the arrival of Europeans. We do not even know what this people called themselves; we know them only as the Karankawa, which is the corrupted form of the possibly pejorative exonym bestowed on them by other indigenous peoples. They were not a monolithic people, but rather several related tribes, all of whom shared common cultural and linguistic ties going back millennia and rooted in coastal subsistence. They were among the first peoples with whom lvar Nez Cabeza de Vaca came into contact when he and his crew were shipwrecked near what is now Galveston Island. (Although we recommend reading Cabeza de Vacas firsthand account of his travels, we caution that the book contains little in the way of good evidence for anything aside from the fact that Cabeza de Vaca was indeed lost and wandering for a few years. He treats most of the Native peoples he meets with scorn and generally gives only cursory and derogatory descriptions of their customs and habits.)

The Karankawa fared no better against European brutality and disease than any other indigenous people. By the late eighteenth century, they had mostly retreated to less hospitable areas in what is today southern Texas and northern Mexico. In 1858, the last of the Karankawa were apparently slaughtered by Texas Rangers on Padre Island, thus passing from the pages of history, another people lost in the slow, centuries-long American genocide. We have traces of their language, though these represent at best fragments of corrupted vocabulary from one dialect. These traces were obtained only in 1891 (more than thirty years after the last of the Karankawa had died), by a linguist working with an old woman named Alice William Oliver, who had apparently grown up near one of the last surviving bands. Of course, there is absolutely no way to test the accuracy of any of this information.

The Karankawa stayed on barrier islands and near bays during the fall and winter months, harvesting and consuming incredible amounts of oysters, rangias, and other shellfish. They also fished extensively, though how far out and what fish they targeted remain subjects of debate. In the large midden mounds that pepper the Texas coast, archaeologists have found bones from all the usual inshore species, as well as sharks and even tuna and other species found farther offshore today.

The Karankawa used and understood the northwestern Gulf Coast region like no one before or since. During the spring and summer (which are, not coincidentally, the seasons of coastal mosquitoes and hurricanes), they would retire inland, sometimes to what is now known as the Piney Woods, sometimes to the edge of the Texas Hill Country. Here they would harvest and subsist on all manner of wild plants and game. When the weather cooled to a sufficient degree, the Karankawa would return to the coastal grounds.

The world of the Karankawa is one we cannot accurately imagine. However, we need hardly reach so far back in time to see a glimpse of a much different coast. The taming and reshaping of the Texas coast happened almost within living memorythe Texas and Louisiana section of the Intracoastal Waterway was started in 1925; it was the last leg of a canal that would connect Boston to Brownsville. Today, factories and tourist infrastructure dominate the landscape from Beaumont to Brownsville; drilling platforms dot the horizon; the Intracoastal Waterway, which forever altered and disrupted the very flow of water, meanders parallel to the coast.

The eminent (and controversial) fisheries scientist Daniel Pauly first popularized the concept of shifting baselines of perception, which boils down to the observation that the waters in which we all fish (meaning basically all coastal and inland parts of the world) are fragments of what they were even a generation ago, and the waters of our parents generations are shadows of what they were a generation before that, and so on. Consequently, each generation views the waters they inherit as normal and natural, thus disguising the extent of loss and degradation.

Fifty years ago, Red Snapper were bigger on average than they are today, and they could be caught off the Texas City dike, along with groupers. While this seems impossible to todays fishers, we have talked to old-timers who insist it is true. The bays fifty years ago teemed with life to a degree rarely seen today. Going back fifty years before that, the situation is more extreme. The Texas coast we have all grown up with is not the Texas coast of our parents; which in turn is not the same as the Texas coast of their parents. Today, most Texans see the Texas coast and Gulf waters as a fun place to visit and a place to maybe catch a few fish. Most seem to have lost an appreciation for what we have right here.

THE GULF AND US

For our part, we are both new to the Gulf. Twelve years ago, the Gulf of Mexico was just a place PJ had been to a few times; for Benchalak (who goes by the nickname Apple, which well use throughout the book), it was just a place on a map, a place halfway around the planet. In the intervening years, we learned a lot, read too much about fish, talked about Texas seafood to anyone who would listen, spent lots of time waiting on boats, sold a lot of fish, ate every bit we couldnt sell, worried when the boats didnt go out, worried when they didnt catch what we needed, pleaded with chefs to buy strange things we knew were good, made a tiny bit of money but lost a hell of a lot more.