5 Old-Fashioned Texas Recipes Worth Bringing Back to the Table

Some recipes taste like a kitchen full of family.

Texas has plenty of them, and many are easy to make at home.

These are the old-fashioned Texas dishes that, in our opinion, are worth bringing back to the table.

1. Pan de Campo

Texas has only ever named one official state bread, and it’s pan de campo.

The Texas Legislature named it the official State Bread of Texas in 2005.

Still is.

That resolution credits vaqueros and ranch cooks who baked the dough in small portable ovens on cattle drives, a method lawmakers say gave the bread its distinctive texture.

Baking powder is the only rise the dough gets, just enough to keep this flatbread from baking up like a cracker.

A cast-iron skillet gets you close enough to try it yourself.

2. Kolaches

Kolaches arrived with people, not a marketing plan.

The first organized group of Czech immigrants set out for Texas in 1851.

Fayette County became the center of that population as thousands more arrived over the following decades.

The fruit-and-cheese pastry they brought with them became so common that the Texas State Historical Association says it’s familiar to nearly every Texan today.

That’s a long run for a homemade pastry.

Worth the wait.

Gas station versions are easy to find now, but a batch you make with yeast dough is worth the extra time.

Proof yeast dough overnight and bake it yourself, and one bite tells a kolache from a pastry only shaped like a kolache.

3. Tamales

Tamales turn into a production the second December starts.

A San Antonio woman named Maria Moreno was photographed buying corn husks on the city’s West Side on November 18, 1943.

The San Antonio Light took that photo, and that’s more than 80 years of the same December ritual.

Same ritual, every year.

You spread the masa across the husk by hand.

The filling goes in the center, and the husk folds shut around it, one at a time, for however many dozen a family needs.

You can gather your family around the table for that count every December.

The gathering, as much as the tamale, is worth keeping alive.

4. Chili con Carne

Chili con carne wasn’t just a local favorite. Lawmakers made it official in 1977.

The 1977 resolution, still on the books, names chili the “Texas State Dish.”

The dish had been a San Antonio street staple for generations by then.

San Antonio’s chili queens started selling bowls from lantern-lit tables in Military Plaza soon after the railroad reached the city in 1877.

Chili queens’ stands closed nearly a century ago, and their method didn’t need to survive with them: Meat, dried chiles, and a slow simmer are still all it takes.

5. Pecan Pie

Pecan pie joined pan de campo and chili on Texas’s list of official state foods in 2013, the kind of pie you’ve probably already got a family recipe for.

The Texas Legislature named pecan pie the official State Pie of Texas in 2013.

The pecan itself got there first.

Slow is worth it.

The pecan tree has been Texas’s official state tree since 1919, and fossil remains suggest pecan trees grew here before people arrived.

Grocery store versions are easy to find, but a pie you bake from scratch with eggs, butter, and brown sugar is worth the time.

A pie built on a native tree is worth the slow version, not the corner-store version.

Terlingua's Chili Feud

Chili didn't stay confined to San Antonio's plazas.

A New York humorist named H. Allen Smith published a magazine piece titled "Nobody Knows More About Chili Than I Do."

A Texan named Wick Fowler answered the challenge in 1967.

The two men tied in the West Texas desert outside Terlingua.

Neither man backed down.

Smith had put beans in his bowl, the kind of move that would still get you laughed out of the kitchen.