The Daily Brief

On Friday night, Blondie and I daringly ventured into one of San Antonio’s most popular and certainly one of the most tasty – in the culinary sense – Fiesta events. Oh, dear, now I shall have to explain San Antonio’s yearly Fiesta to those who have not heard the legend; you may think of it as our peculiar version of Mardi Gras, but it has grown into something considerably more. My some-time employer, a San Antonio native, describes it as a city-wide, week-long block party, but it is a great deal more than that. One upon a time, in the 1890s, it started as a parade to commemorate the victory of the Battle of San Jacinto, where people rode around in carriages and threw flowers at each other. That was the humble beginning with the Battle of Flowers Parade. But everybody wanted to get into the act, and now Fiesta covers ten days, beginning to end and takes in just about every part of town and just about every socio-economic element.

There is a grand debutante coronation, where the two-dozen daughters of local elite wear gowns and trains crusted with about fifty pounds of rhinestones, sequins and metal-thread-embroidery (look, I am not making this up!), a raunchy variety show that sends up the whole concept (not making up that part, either!) , half a dozen elaborate parades – one of which is an evening torch-light parade, and anther is on flat-boats along the San Antonio River – an open-air oyster-bake on the grounds of a local private university and exhibitions, parties, open houses, athletic contests, pageants, shows and concerts all over the city, (schedule for this years’ events is here – one more day to party hearty, people!). It’s an excuse for people to dress up in strange costumes, eat, drink, party hearty and bash total strangers over the head with confetti-filled eggs. Like New Orleans Mardi Gras but on the whole, we like to think it is a bit more cooth. The crowds along the parade routes don’t yell at the girls on the floats to show their tits; they ask them to show their shoes. Under their ornate and gorgeous gowns, they are usually wearing running shoes, or crocs. One year, when rain threatened, one of the debutants was wearing swim fins, which earned her quite a lot of laugher and applause.

The culinary crown-jewel just might be NIOSA, or Night in Old San Antonio, a sprawling food-fest in La Villita, the old ‘Little Village’. It’s sponsored by the San Antonio Conservation Society and runs for four nights. My some-time employer has worked on the set-up for years, and knows practically everyone. He asked if Blondie and I would like to go, as his significant other had volunteered to dress up like a gypsy and work in the fortune-telling booth. I have to admit, Blondie was keener on this than I was. It was hot and sticky last night, thunderstorms threatened, and there would be dire traffic downtown, both coming and going. (Which there was – getting out of the parking garage afterwards was a lengthy agony; 45 minutes to get from where we parked to the exit!)

La Villita was crammed with food booths – and the extraordinary thing is, all of it was pretty good, and not that expensive, even if Some-Time Employer basically comped stuff for us, from booths where his friends and buddies were in charge. It was all organized roughly by ethnic neighborhoods; Mexican foods all clustered together, regular American (mostly barbeque of various animal parts) a hugely popular booth with egg rolls and other orientalia, a French-Cajun section offering jambalaya and delicacies like -umm, snails – and the German neighborhood, who had cannily set up inside the biggest building, the assembly hall where they could benefit from the air conditioning. (Sausages, pretzels and cream-horns, but we were all pretty filled by then). The thing about the food is that many of the food booths have been run by the same set of volunteers for years, and they have done a lot of tinkering with the recipes, besides cooking it all from scratch. (One variant of meat-onna-stick is famous locally; this is one recipe for it, but apparently the original was done with beef hearts. It’s a Peruvian specialty; one of the volunteers adapted the recipe for American palates years ago with considerable success.)

And every third or fourth booth offered soft drinks, water and tasty adult beverages – sangria, wine and beer. We even dared to try escargot; snails to you. Having had a couple of cups of beer first helped. Three dark little wads of gelatinous phlegm drenched in melted butter and garlic, served on a slice of baguette; which only goes to prove that if you throw enough melted butter and fresh garlic on anything, you have a chance of rendering it edible. Not appetizing, but at least edible. You could have done a whole fifteen-course dinner, just walking from booth to booth, grazing; appetizers, fish course, vegetable, entree, salad, dessert- eating out of hand as you walked.

In the German area, Blondie and I talked to a re-enactor and local history fan all dressed up like a member of the 19th century Bavarian royal regiment. Blondie refrained from asking him earnestly why he had a feather-duster stuck on top of his hat – since he did have a sword, too. I passed out my “books and writers” business card to a couple of people; I mean, why turn down a chance to network. Got home at nearly midnight, in the middle of a thunderstorm, which mercifully had held off until well after NIOSA closed for the evening. Good times – and I just may do it again, but I think I?ll pass on the snails, next time.

“You have curious things to eat…but I am fed on proper meat” – From R.L Stevensons’ Child’s Garden of Verses

My mother had a fairly open-minded attitude about what exactly constituted edible animal protein; if Dad’s paycheck could afford it, and it was available from any of the places providing our edibles in the 1960s, she would damn well have a go at making something tasty out of it. Beef-heart casserole and fried rabbit made appearances often; so did ground beef in any of a hundred different guises, as well as liver and onions – basically, if it didn’t look too awful and smelled good, we were prepared to be adventurous. Except where liver and onions were concerned, which smelled good but tasted revolting; and which Mom insisted we eat because it was A) cheap and B) good for us.

Generally, that attitude served me well ever since; overseas on Japan and Korea, in Greenland and across Europe. Roast chestnuts – good to go. Unidentified bits of chicken flesh on a skewer, brushed with some kind of soy-based sauce and grilled over a little charcoal brazier – excellent! Stir-fried noodles and strange vegetables – oh, yeah! Strange meaty stews with lots of potatoes, served up in a French youth hostel in the summer of 1970? My traveling friend, Esther Tutwyler and I cheerfully agreed that it probably was horse-meat and ate it anyway. We were hungry and on a budget – and when in Rome, or in this case, Paris – do as the Romans. We were generally baffled by the bread rolls, though – they went hard and inedible after a day or so, and every time we had had a bag-luncheon from whatever youth hostel kitchen was supplying our nutritional needs, there were at least two of them. What to do with the uneaten extras? Seemed kind of ungracious and wasteful to throw them away, but we had to eventually. There was that time we did have a game of kick-football with one, in the corridor of a subterranean hostel in Vienna’s Esterhazy Park, – until the roll skidded underneath the door of someone’s room. We always wondered what the occupant of that room thought the next day, finding a stale bread roll in the middle of the floor.

On the whole, youth hostel food was pretty much like my mothers – fairly edible and usually recognizable; cheap cuts of meat figured fairly highly, and always good sturdy bread. The breakfasts in Scandinavia were especially tasty, for the hostels generally set up a buffet table, with bins of different sliced bread, and every sort of condiment and bread topping imaginable. Kind of strange, we agreed, having salami for breakfast, but when in Rome, et cetera.

There was only one meal that left us completely baffled – coincidently, it was the evening meal in a Scandinavian hostel: Bergen, Norway, if memory serves. The main course at dinner was… well, we couldn’t tell exactly what it was. It appeared on our plates as opaque white gelatinous circles about three inches across and about half an inch thick, obviously sliced from a canned or extruded mass. It had a very faintly fibrous texture and feel in the mouth, but otherwise had no discernable taste at all, offering no clue as to its origin, animal, fish or vegetable. I mean, it tasted and smelt of precisely nothing. It was served with a dollop of almost equally tasteless béchamel sauce (milk gravy to Southerners) and formed a symphony of unappetizing white on each plate. At least we recognized béchamel sauce, but the stuff that it was on? It appeared almost as if the kitchen staff had just opened generic cans labeled “food” and gorped out a neat and faintly rubbery slice on each plate. I had never seen the like – and after fifteen years of Lutheran pot-luck lunches and dinners, and Mom’s cooking, I thought I had seen everything. We ate it – no one opting for seconds. By luck, none of the kitchen staff that evening seemed to understand English, so the mystery food remained a mystery.

Two or three years later, my high school had a Norwegian exchange student. I described the mysterious rubbery, tasteless white stuff to him, and he said it was fish pudding. A Norwegian national dish, apparently. Kind of like lutefisk, but without the rat poison.