Texans and Fried Catfish

Five of us were dining at a round table at the Dallasretirement home where I now live.   To uphold his reputation as a “gourmet chef”, our cook prepares dishes that are totally unfamiliar to most Texans.  That evening he did a superb job with “salmon en pippillote”.  Four of us agreed that, along with cheesecake for dessert, this was one of the best meals served to us this week.

But the fifth person at the table ordered a hamburger, saying, “I don’t like fish – except catfish.” As soon as she said, “hamburger” I recognized the old lady sitting opposite me as one of those Texans who grew up on a farm (in her case, a ranch in the Panhandle) and only ate foods her mother and grandmother cooked for her when she was a child.

I recalled a river cruise from the Black Sea to Budapest.  As our ship steamed up the Danube, we ate nightly gourmet meals, including fish prepared in an amazing variety of ways.   One night I had dinner with a couple from Houston.  They saw catfish on the menu and ordered it for both of them, but when it was served, a beautiful fillet baked with a special sauce, they called out loudly, “This is NOT catfish“, and sent it back to the kitchen.  For Texans, the only catfish is fried catfish.

“I never heard of fried catfish until we came to Texas,” said the only man at the table.  His wife, sitting next to me on the right, nodded agreement.

“Neither did I,” said the woman on my left. 

The couple are from Chicago.  My dinner companion and my first husband both attended Taft High School on Chicago’s northwest side.  She graduated one year before him but did not remember him.  Still, small World!

I turned to the woman on my left and asked, “Where did you come from?”

“Philadelphia,” she said.

“Oh!”  I said, “I lived there, too.  I loved living in the Philadelphia area.”  We talked about all the things to do in the city (one of the World’s finest art museums), plus the pleasures of living 90 miles from New York City to the north, Washington, D.C., to the south, and the Amish country to the west towards Lancaster.

The Texan sitting across from us was silent, except to say she had not seen any of those places.

It could have happened to me.  I, too, am a Texan.  I grew up in Fort Worth.  I’ve always been independent.  When I was five years old I told my mother, “I’ve eaten enough black-eyed peas to last me the rest of my life.”  I still refuse to eat black-eyed peas, not even on New Year’s, when all other Texans eat a bowl-full to guarantee luck in the coming year.    

Without eating black-eyed peas, I am lucky.  I escaped from Texas by marrying a fellow from Chicago.  I came back to Texas after living in Illinois, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and New Mexico. Everywhere I lived the people believed the place where they have lived all their lives is the best place in the World. 

Texas is totally transformed, Dallas and Fort Worth melded into one giant Metroplex, with suburbs populated with over 200,000 people, larger than Fort Worth when I was a child in the 1930's.  Millions of people have moved into our giant cities.  But Texans are still Texans.

Besides seeing all of the U.S., I traveled abroad.  That Danube cruise was only one stop in a life that took me to many foreign countries, where kind people assured me that theirs was the best place on Earth.  I tried local foods.  Learned to eat fish prepared dozens of ways.  Loved borsch in Russia, but as my companion in China said, “The Chinese should send to Chicago for a chef to teach them how to cook Chinese food.”   

After I went back to my apartment after supper, I thought about Texans and catfish.  They pridefully refuse to learn anything from anyone else.  Their attitude is: “We Texans are independent people who do things our way, and we refuse to change.”  It explains why Texans carry guns into supermarkets, presumably to protect themselves from Peruvian grapes.  Against all scientific evidence, they believe the Earth was created in six days in 6,000 B.C. “because the Bible says so.” 

And that explains why Texans enthusiastically vote for people like Ted Cruz and Ric Perry.  And why Ted and Ric confidently expect all the World to agree with them.  The way to improve the economy is give more money to the rich, and the only fish is fried catfish.