Seeing Perini

Glider time . . . . They don’t make gliders like they used to. Sixty years ago, on my Texas front porch, we had a sofa-sized glider that was upholstered like a sofa, with pillows and skirts and flounces, and coil springs underneath, the whole nine yards. Our glider is loveseat-size, cushions and pads on enameled tubular steel. It glides like it is supposed to, which does for porch ruminating what a swing could never do, but comparing it to the old-style gliders is like comparing a 2006 Ford Echo to a 1955 Buick Roadmaster.

More low clouds this morning with points of blue sky peeking through, but no sunrise, which is probably two weeks now without that moment when the first white-bright ray of sun breaks the horizon like a diamond on the rim of the world.

I glide, I Google, I last. Our television remote has a “Last” button on it, which lets you one-click to the last channel you were watching. I like to keep 67, the Food Network, as the “Last” button so when a commercial interrupts the program I’m watching, I can Last over to see what’s cooking, literally.

Wednesday night I Lasted and found myself looking straight into the eyes of Tom Perini, who operates the Perini Ranch Steakhouse in Buffalo Gap, Texas, just south of my home town, caters Texas-style barbecue events nationwide (including at The White House), and has a cookbook, “Texas Cowboy Cooking,” which you need for two recipes if nothing else: Jessica’s Favorite Green Chile Hominy, and Bread Pudding with Whiskey Sauce. The cookbook is available at Amazon.

I was disappointed to discover that Tom was not the whole show, but part of a show, called “Unwrapped,” having to do with outdoor cooking, cowboy style. His role was to recite the history of cowboy, or chuck wagon, cooking, in the lore of the nation’s expansion westward. Tom is a good resource for this: he learned from real ranch cooks around Abilene and Albany, Texas, and his catering setup includes an authentic chuck wagon, and chuck wagon cooks.

Clips showed the Perini cooks at work, what it takes to keep working cowboys fed, and what they mostly eat. I was tickled by one clip, that looked like chicken-fried steak being sizzled in a cast-iron pot over a cookfire, except the items were way too small to be chicken-fried steaks. I would wager the cooks, historically an impish lot, were cooking up calf fries (truly a prairie delicacy) without telling the TV folks. Tom tells an hilarious story about calf fries in his cookbook, starts at the bottom of Page 73.

Suddenly the story cut away from Perini, and went to the plant where they make B&M Baked Beans. The show’s host, a man named Marc Summers, acted like this was a natural segue, giving the suggestion that you would actually eat eastern-style baked beans with Perini’s cooking, a suggestion that made me wish I could feed Summers a raw calf fry on the spot. B&M beans are fine with a hamburger or a hotdog, but what you want with a Perini chuck wagon steak are Ranch Beans, Page 155, which lifelong Texans, wherever they are living, know simply as red, or pinto, beans.

The show wandered on into other places where you wouldn’t find anything you could call cowboy cooking. They did show where and how Lodge black cast-iron skillets are manufactured, and you can’t call your chuck wagon, or kitchen, complete without a black skillet. Still, it was neat to hit Last and suddenly be looking at someone you went to high school with, who has made a name for himself cooking the same kind of food you grew up on. With the exception of the calf fries.