9 Foods Texans Swear By That the Rest of America Won’t Touch

A newcomer from California sits down at a South Texas table on a Sunday morning and gets handed a bowl she can’t identify.

Everyone else is already eating.

She takes one polite spoonful, works out what’s in it, and decides she’d rather stick to the toast.

These are the foods Texans swear by that the rest of America won’t touch.

1. Barbacoa de Cabeza

Down along the Rio Grande, Texans dig a pit, drop in a whole cow’s head, and cook it overnight until Sunday breakfast.

The cheek meat, called cachete, pulls apart soft enough to spoon straight into a warm tortilla.

So do the tongue, the lips, and yes, the eyes, which border cooks treat as a delicacy.

An out-of-stater hears “cow head” and sets their fork right back down.

Their loss.

Barbacoa de cabeza cooked the old way is getting scarce even in Texas, since cleaning and pit-roasting a head is slow, heavy work.

Vera’s Backyard Bar-B-Que in Brownsville is one of the last spots still cooking whole heads in the ground over mesquite coals, and most weekends it sells out by mid-morning.

2. Son of a Bitch Stew

Old trail cooks fed Texas cowboys a stew built from nearly every part of a freshly killed calf, and the name stuck for a reason.

Heart, liver, tongue, sweetbreads, and brains all went in the pot.

So did the marrow gut, the tube between a young calf’s stomachs, which chuckwagon cooks swore gave the stew its flavor.

A hand who had lived a month on beans and biscuits craved every bite.

Read that ingredient list to a visitor from out of state, and the spoon stays on the table.

Ranch cook-offs and chuckwagon competitions across Texas still simmer it the old way, marrow gut and all.

The polite menus just print it as Son of a Gun.

3. Menudo

Menudo is the Sunday-morning bowl Texans reach for after a long Saturday night, and it’s built on beef tripe.

That’s cow stomach.

The honeycomb tripe simmers for hours with hominy, red chile, and a squeeze of lime, and Mexican-American families across Texas keep the recipe close.

It’s long been treated as a hangover cure, which is why the table next to yours at a weekend Tex-Mex spot is nursing the same rough morning.

Newcomers do fine right up until somebody explains what tripe is.

Then the spoon stops.

The regulars just keep eating. They learned to love it before anybody told them the parts.

4. Chitlins

Chitlins are pork intestines, and in Black Texan kitchens they hold down the holiday table.

The smell reaches the door before the plate does.

Cleaning them is an all-day job, rinsed over and over before they ever hit the pot, then simmered for hours with onion, vinegar, and a hard shake of hot sauce.

Texas Monthly once gave the state’s soul food a full feature, chitlins and all.

Grandmothers cook a pot at Thanksgiving because their own grandmothers did.

Everyone else catches one whiff, hears the word intestine, and suddenly needs to eat in the other room.

The folks at the table know better.

5. Cabrito

Cabrito is roast baby goat, and along the Texas-Mexico border it’s the centerpiece of a good weekend.

A milk-fed kid gets splayed on a spit and cooked slow over mesquite coals until the skin turns crisp.

The tradition rode north from Monterrey with the ranching families who settled the Rio Grande.

Most Americans hear “goat” and picture a petting zoo, not dinner.

That’s a mistake.

Done right, cabrito is tender and mild, closer to lamb than to anything gamey.

But the word alone sends a lot of transplants straight back to the brisket line.

6. Calf Fries

Calf fries are what a Texas rancher hands you at a spring branding, and the polite move is to eat one before you ask what it is.

They’re bull calf testicles.

Peeled, sliced, rolled in seasoned cornmeal, and deep-fried, they taste mostly like the batter.

The ranch town of Throckmorton, population around 800, throws a whole festival for them every May.

Out West they go by Rocky Mountain oysters, but in Texas they’re calf fries, and the fancier name fools nobody.

Everybody knows.

A first-timer from back East will chew slowly and think the whole thing over.

7. Pickled Pig’s Feet

Reach into the big jar on a Texas country-store counter, and you might come out with a pig’s foot floating in pink brine.

Pickled pig’s feet are just what the name says, trotters cured in vinegar and salt until the meat turns soft and tangy.

They ride in coolers at gas stations and juke joints across East Texas.

Food writers file them under strange eats for a reason.

A regular tears one apart with fingers and a paper towel and calls it a snack.

A first-timer studies the knuckle and the skin and slides the jar back down the counter.

8. Fried Rattlesnake

Once a year, the West Texas town of Sweetwater fills an arena with live rattlesnakes and then serves them for lunch.

The Sweetwater Jaycees have run the roundup since 1958, and it's the biggest rattlesnake roundup in the country.

Handlers skin and gut the snakes in front of the crowd, and the meat goes straight into the fryer.

It comes out looking like pale chicken tenders and tasting like a chewier cousin of the same.

It's a snake.

Roughly 30,000 people show up, and a good share of them eat a piece just to say they did.

Hand a plate of fried rattlesnake to a tourist and the phone comes out before the fork does.

9. Deep-Fried Butter

Every fall, the State Fair of Texas turns deep-frying into a contest, and one year the winner was a stick of butter.

Batter, freeze, fry.

A Dallas cook named Abel Gonzales Jr. dreamed up deep-fried butter and served it at the fair in 2009, where it took the Most Creative food prize.

The batter puffs into a shell, and the middle melts into something between French toast and a warm biscuit.

Doctors weren't thrilled.

It shares the fryer with deep-fried Coke, fried Oreos, and whatever else the vendors cook up under Big Tex that season.