There are a number of places this post could start, but we’ll begin with a brisket recipe from Rare Collection: Superb Recipes by The Junior League of Galveston County (1985).
This cookbook originally belonged to Lorna’s maternal great-grandmother, and then to Lorna’s mom, Judy, and then to Lorna after she took it with her when she moved out of her parents’ house. She’s cooked a variety of things from it over the years, but particularly the moussaka (which is tasty even if you don’t really like eggplant)—most recently last December, which is when I first noticed the moderately bonkers brisket recipe on the opposite page.
Season brisket with soy sauce and Worcestershire sauce.1 Okay, sure. Sprinkle Lipton onion soup mix, rosemary, caraway seed & celery seed onto brisket. Initially, the soup mix threw me off, but it’s basically a spice mix, so whatever. It’s still fussier than “traditional” Texas brisket, which is seasoned with just salt and pepper, but nothing beyond the pale. Marinate two days; wrap in foil; bake. Still fine, still a brisket I would cook and eat. It’s the last step—where you put the drippings from the brisket into the bottom of a pan, layer the (cold) sliced brisket on top of it, and dump a can of cherry pie filling on top before baking the whole mess another half hour or so—that caught my attention in a wtf kind of way.
I mean, maybe it’s good! I’m probably not ever going to cook it, but I can see how it would work.
At any rate, that weird brisket recipe, and browsing through other recipes in the book as Lorna cooked, somehow sparked a new obsession for me (relief at the semester being over and a few glasses of wine also played a part). I ordered a few other used Junior League cookbooks that evening (Dallas, Palo Alto, and Colorado), and several others in the following weeks. And more since: I have a cookbook called The Melting Pot: Ethnic Cuisine in Texas, which was compiled by UTSA’s Institute of Texan Cultures. My mom picked up a stack of cookbooks at a garage sale several weeks ago, including two that were evidently fundraisers for the Sherman School Food Service Association. I found a bunch at an antique mall in Denison last weekend, but only came home with four, ranging from a long-defunct Dallas restaurant to an RV park in Harlingen, Texas.
I’m still trying to figure out what’s behind my interest in these cookbooks, which is part of why I’m finally doing something with this substack that I registered nearly two years ago (here’s the intro post, if you want a glimpse at my original lack of vision). But I think a big thing is a curiosity about how recipes travel and change over time, and from context to context and kitchen to kitchen. I’ll write about braised celery soon, and calabacitas, and probably meatloaf down the line—all of which are good case studies of what I’m trying to get at here. And I’ll definitely be asking people to share family recipes and excerpts from well-worn cookbooks from their own libraries.
Are there wrong ways to make brisket? Yes, probably. But there are also a lot of right ways to make it, and some might even involve cherries.
I always want to just spell this “wooster sauce,” which is only slightly different than how it’s properly pronounced.