Enchiladas, y’all? Because Arkansas is perched on the eastern side of the impossible-to-ignore nation of Texas and shares its south border with the state of Louisiana, it’s not uncommon to encounter interesting Anglo-South fusion versions of both Tex-Mex and Cajun or Creole dishes in my little state. The one I want to share with readers today comes from a period of my mother’s life I think of as the bridge-party phase.My mother was not by any means what used to be called a club woman. She was too independent-minded and, frankly, too cantankerous to put up with the nonsense people have to put up with when they expect to move unhindered in the circles of society. And my family didn’t have the social cachet, in our little town, to move in those circles.
Even so, she played bridge (a club woman’s sport, in our town) with alacrity, and was, I’m told, a wickedly good bridge player. She had the kind of calculating, mathematical mind to count cards and anticipate other players’ moves with unerring accuracy. And she was a superb bluffer. She routinely won tournaments with that skill set.
The bridge gatherings were about more than card-playing, though. They were about juicy gossip and plenty of it, heavily lacquered bouffant hairdos (the bridge-party phase was in the 1960s), wood-paneled dens wreathed in cigarette smoke. And food. Noshes galore, ranging from those godawful congealed salads of the sixties to casseroles full of unmentionable bits laced with cream of mushroom and cream of tomato soup.
And the bridge parties were about recipes—what to cook tonight recipes, how to please your man recipes. What Mrs. Steinberg does to pastrami, how Mrs. Matoesian stuffs grape leaves, why Mrs. Breaux makes chicken étouffée that has potatoes in it, and then serves it over rice. With bread.
I’m pretty sure that the following recipe for “enchiladas” comes from the bridge-party phase of my mother’s life. Wherever it came from, it has now become a fixture in my family, and is a winter comfort dish, one fairly easy to put together, with hearty flavors and carbs sufficient to tide one through the cold days—not “tied one over” the winter, as I was surprised to see the distinguished New York Times printing in a travel article recently.
Before I launch into the ingredients, a warning: if you’re expecting real Mexican, or even real Tex-Mex, food here, you’ll be sadly disappointed. Possibly even appalled, if you know anything about Mexican or Tex-Mex food. We pronounced this dish “ahnchiladas,” just as we said “prayleens” for pralines. That ought to tell you something.
Here’s how my mother made enchiladas: she started with a pot of chili, full of beef and beans (we don’t share the nation of Texas’s high-falutin’ aversion to beans in chili). When it was simmering, she put together a batch of hot-water cornbread.
Hot-water cornbread, you say? Please don’t tell me you haven’t heard of that indispensable ingredient of almost any Mexican or Tex-Mex dish one can imagine. To make it, you mix a bit of salt with some cornmeal (white—always—for us), pour in boiling water to form a sticky mass of dough, and then pat the cornbread into what we call pones—flat, round circles of dough. Which are then dropped into hot fat and fried until crisp and brown on the outside.
Hot-water cornbread is, of course, distinctly not Mexican, though it’s not unlike the masa dough used to make sopes or gorditas—and the ahnchilada dish I’m describing here is actually not far from sopes, though it’s miles away from enchiladas. The big difference between the masa of sopes and hot-water cornbread is that the masa incorporates lard. Hot-water cornbread is just cornmeal, salt, and boiling water. And never sugar: nevernevernever, if you want authentic Southern cornbread of any sort.
We Anglo Southerners and African-American Southerners eat hot-water cornbread with almost anything—with the abundant dishes of fresh vegetables that grace the summer table, with beans and greens, etc. It’s an easily made cornbread that doesn’t require heating up the oven, and for that reason, is particularly favored for summer dinners.
I say “is favored,” though I suspect that hot-water cornbread is rapidly becoming a thing of the past. In Little Rock today, I find it almost exclusively in some of the venerable local cafeterias that are practically the only restaurants serving local dishes made in local ways anymore—at least in my region.
I also suspect that hot-water cornbread is a trans-Mississippi adaptation of the johnnycakes and hoecakes of colonial Anglo America. I find it much more frequently in Southern cookbooks and on Southern tables west of the Mississippi than to the east. And I suspect there’s an historical reason for this: it has to do with the difference in cornmeal produced by stone-grinding of corn (at one time much more common in the old Southeast) as opposed to grinding corn with metal rollers, the primary method available when the old Southwest was settled. But that’s a subject for another posting.
So. You have your chili. You have your hot-water cornbread fried. What next? Take a head of lettuce and shred a good bit of it into a bowl. Take another bowl and fill it with finely chopped sweet white onion. In another bowl, put a good bit of grated cheese. Any cheese would do, in my mother’s mind. The most common one on our table was what she called rat cheese—a mild cheddar that, she told me, her father had sold in his small-town store in wedges cut from a huge wheel always to be found on a counter of the store. Fill another bowl with salsa.
You now have ahnchiladas. It’s the responsibility of each diner to build his or her enchilada according to his or her taste. If you want the full enchilada, spoon chili onto the hot-water cornbread, top that with some of the grated cheese, pour on some salsa, and top the whole thing with chopped onion and shredded lettuce. And then enjoy.
And so what makes this a recipe to help save the planet? Well, first of all, I have long since adapted it. I almost never use chili as a topping, and when I do, it’s chili made with beans alone and no meat.
Usually—and this is how Steve and I ate these enchiladas last night—I simply cook a pot of pinto beans as the first topping ingredient. I may, if I wish, sometimes season them as they cook with some chopped onion and jalapeño pepper, perhaps some garlic and chili powder and chopped cilantro. I often have a bowl of sliced limes for the seasonings and garnishes, and I also like to have on hand a bowl of cilantro.
In place of the shredded lettuce, I usually make a simple, quick cole slaw of shredded cabbage and carrots, seasoned with salt, pepper, a bit of vinegar, sugar, and olive oil. I like to use a Mexican cheese—especially queso fresco—when I have it, for the topping. And then when everything’s ready, I line the bowls up on the sideboard in the order in which most folks will eat, and invite people to make their enchiladas.
I am under no illusion that I’m serving people real enchiladas when I serve this dish. I know full well that this is an Anglo-South fusion version of a Tex-Mex dish. These are enchiladas, y’all, and nothing like an enchilada either a Texan or a Mexican might recognize.
Still, there’s something to be said for the way in which different parts of the United States have so freely adopted (and adapted) the foodways of other parts of the nation—and of other countries altogether. If nothing else, it illustrates the amazing adaptability of people intent on eating well, on cooking interesting new dishes, on using local foods to their best advantage, on learning about new flavors and ingredients to enhance their own traditional foods. At its best, that innovative, adaptive streak running through many American subcultures has helped us withstand the strong corporate pressures to flatten our diets so that we become ever more malleable to the spurious ingredients and fast-food abominations corporations want to foist off on us as real food.
And because I’d rather have real food than fake any day, I intend to keep on eating my fusion-cuisine enchiladas in lieu of ‘burgers and fries. Even when I do call them ahnchiladas.
