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What do you call it when everyone cooks something and brings it a gathering to share? When I was a child that was called a “covered dish” dinner—or lunch or supper. We used to have those at church a lot, as I recall.

Covered Dish Meals

They were called covered-dish meals because naturally whatever you cooked had to be covered so that you could transport it. Women collected cooking and serving dishes and utensils just so they could contribute nicely to covered dish meals. They also collected and refined special recipes.

People loved those dinners, where all the cooks brought their specialty dishes. Certain dishes were so popular that you had to get in line early, or there would not be any left for you. Running out, of course, was a great compliment to the cook.

Potluck Meals

On the other hand, if you were at somebody’s house and stayed till kind of near lunch or supper time, you were likely to be invited to “take pot luck.” That meant to share in just whatever the family was having anyway, no matter how scrappy.

In the South, including East Texas, a potluck invitation was tendered sort of apologetically. Because Texas hospitality requires cooking and serving the guest’s favorite dishes and/or the hostess’s most renowned specialties—and with a potluck dinner there was not time to do that.

So sometimes you got a splendid meal, maybe a pot of stew or some wonderful cold fried chicken or roast beef sandwiches. Other times, you got hastily scrambled eggs, toast, and dabs of reheated vegetables. Good luck or bad luck, it was just whatever was in the pot (so to speak).

Collaborative Meals Today

So how is it that people started referring to covered dish meals as potlucks? All I can figure is that they did not realize that the best covered-dish meals were organized. One or two people volunteered to coordinate, and everyone else signed up in advance to bring veggies, entrees, desserts, bread, or chips and dips. There was no worry that there would be mostly salads and no entrees, because someone coordinated that.

So I guess if people just showed up with whatever they felt like, with no coordination, it could feel sort of like pot luck…maybe. But that’s no excuse.

We need to bring back the good old Texas term “covered dish dinner” (or lunch). And while we’re at it, folks, use a sign-up sheet to make sure we aren’t all trying to make a meal on just bread and chips. Don’t you think?

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The other day my friend Mani was eating chicken-fried steak at lunch and talking about how she was eating chicken so often. It became clear that after living in Texas for 12 years, she still did not know what chicken-fried steak really is (besides the Texas equivalent of the food of the gods).

Those who are not Native Texans often have a hard time grasping the concept that there is no chicken in chicken-fried steak. It is simply thin, tenderized (pounded) steak that has been fried Southern style as if it were chicken. It is best eaten with real (never instant!) mashed potatoes, cream gravy, and black-eyed peas.

True Texas chicken-fried steak has black pepper and various secret spices (depending on the cook) in the batter to make it a heavenly eating experience. Just as the best Texas cooks have secret recipes for fried chicken, they are not going to tell you exactly how they work their magic to create chicken-fried steak.

The best chicken-fried steak restaurants become legends. For example, there was one in Tomball that people would make the pilgrimage to from Houston (or the Compaq campus) for years and years. I don’t know if it’s still there or not, and I can’t think of the name.

As far as I know, the current reigning chicken-fried steak (CFS) champion in the Houston area is Wuensche Bros. in Old Town Spring. A young Aggie ex (Texas A&M graduate) and CFS addict that I referred to Wuensche Bros pronounced their CFS to be the best he had ever had. Apparently he had made it his hobby to try out all the most highly recommended CFS joints between Houston, Austin, and surroundings. He was in heaven at Wuensche Bros.

For those who are not in the know about the current best CFS joint in their area, or who can’t make it to Wuensche Bros. for some reason, there is (just for you) a chain of restaurants that specializes in that fine old Texas delicacy. It’s called The Black-eyed Pea. (Remember my telling you that the classic CFS meal includes black-eyed peas?) Their other food is good, too.

In Texas, at least, you can generally find one of the Black-eyed Pea restaurants in your area. Outside of Texas, you may be out of luck, but ask around anyway. Maybe there is a good CFS joint in your area.

If not, I hope you do get to taste some real, honest-to-Texas chicken-fried steak with all the trimmings sometime. Just be sure that when you ask around, you ask a true, dyed-in-the-wool Texan (or a diligent student of Texas culture) to make sure you are getting the real thing.

Well, time for lunch. I’ll talk atcha later.

Pecans (puh-CONNS) are wonderful Texas trees that bear delicious nuts. They are native to Texas, and they are prolific. You still find pecans in the oddest places, where parks and such have been built where homesteads used to be.

You have to have at least two trees in the same small area for them to bear nuts. But that’s a good thing. Pecans are great trees for shade, especially if planted on the north and west sides of the house to keep it cool. Then the leaves fall off in the winter when you need the sun to keep it warm.

Also, pecan trees put down deep taproots instead of spreading all over the top of the ground, breaking up the sidewalks and messing with the foundation of the house the way oak trees do. And also unlike oaks, pecans don’t topple over during windstorms the way oak trees sometimes do if the ground is really saturated with rain for a few days.

Pecans even tend to keep the grass from growing so deep underneath them, which makes less work for whoever has to mow. And, of course, they are hardwoods, so when a pecan tree dies—or has to be cut down for some other reason—you have really fine wood to burn or build with.

Pecan wood soaked in water is great for smoking meat. It’s much more subtle than mesquite.

It used to be just about everyone who had a yard would plant pecans if they could. We Texans do love our pecans, especially in pecan pies. They are great in cookies, and brownies, and used to decorate the tops of cakes. But we also like them candied or baked with cinnamon sugar, or just toasted with salt.

Buttered-pecan ice cream was a big Texas favorite for generations. In recent years, though, our hearts were won over by the Blue Bell ice cream flavor, Pralines and Cream, made with crumbled up pecan pralines. Naturally we pronounce “pralines” the Texas way (PRAY-leens).

It takes about 7 to 9 years after you plant a pecan seedling for it to bear nuts. And that’s if you go to a nursery and buy a really big one in a giant tub about 3 feet deep (because of the taproot, you know).

Naturally there’s a family story about a pecan tree. My grandparents lived on a corner in a tiny little town. There were deep drainage ditches along the roads on two sides of the property. All kinds of seeds and flower bulbs used to float up and take root at the edge of their yard, which was made up of four city lots.

One year my grandfather dug up a seedling that he said was a pecan, and he planted it in the front yard near my grandmother’s fig orchard (on the north, of course, so the figs would still get plenty of sun). He was a great gardener, who had grown up on the remnants of the family plantation, and he figured he knew his trees.

Well, Nana was annoyed. She was a knowledgeable country Texan, too, and she knew a black walnut when she saw one.

Pampa had dug up the seedling from the ditch right near the big old black walnut tree in the back, which had nuts that were almost impossible to shell and pretty much inedible. So planting a tree like that was just a waste of good orchard space to a fig lover. They argued about it for years!

Pampa planted that tree when I was one year old, and there are family photos of me beside that tree as we both grew up. But it just took forever to bear nuts. And the argument about what it really was became kind of a long-running joke in the family.

I had just turned 17 when Pampa died, and the tree had still not done anything but get taller and taller. Nana thought it was downright useless, but of course she would never cut it down, because it was Pampa’s tree.

That fall, though, the tree finally bore nuts for all to see. It was a pecan.

We all just knew that somewhere up there in Heaven, Pampa was smiling.

Quite a few towns in Central Texas were settled in the 1800s by people from Czechoslovakia. They brought their language, which some of their descendants still speak, and their music. That’s how the accordion and the polka-like rhythms became an important part of Tejano (tay-HAH-no) music.

Best of all, those Czech settlers brought the recipe for the delectable breakfast pastries known as kolaches. A kolache (kuh-LAH-chee) is sort of sweet and bready, usually about 2 to 3 inches across, and squarish (because they are baked close together in a pan). They are about 3/4 of an inch tall, and there is a well in the center that is filled with fruit jam—or sometimes cream cheese.

Kolache shops also sell sausage “kolaches” that are really just kolache dough wrapped around a small link sausage and baked, looking like a large pig in a blanket.

And they make bacon kolaches that are made like a jelly roll (a thin layer of dough rolled up into a round cylinder) but with bits of crisp bacon instead of jam. I suspect that the meat kolaches are a 20th century invention, but they are good, especially the bacon ones.

There are kolache shops all over the place these days. You can’t have a business breakfast meeting in Houston without kolaches (unless you are having really great breakfast tacos and lots of fresh fruit), and they are delicious!

Caldwell has a Kolache Festival every year, and I keep meaning to go up there and try the home-baked kolaches. Somehow when I was a child, my family not being Czech, we missed out on the kolaches. They didn’t have their own festival in those days.

I want to go straight to the source and try out the real kolaches in Caldwell. I hope you get a chance to do that someday, too.

Meanwhile, if you ever see a kolache shop, stop in and try some. Yum!