Lone Star Eats: A Gathering of Recipes from Great Texas Cookbooks
As cookbook projects go, Terry Thompson-Anderson's latest was supposed to be quick and easy.After all, how many Texan recipes can there be?As the Fredericksburg chef and author learned, more than she thought.In Lone Star Eats: A Gathering of Recipes from Great Texas Cookbooks (Shearer Publishing, $21.95), Thompson-Anderson took on the challenge of compiling Texan recipes from more than 150 recipe books.The book was actually (publisher) Kathy Shearer's idea, Thompson-Anderson says. There's a niche in the cookbook market that's missing.The niche Shearer and booksellers were trying to pinpoint is made up of recipes found in Texan Junior League, community and church cookbooks that have either gone out of print or are not being reprinted.We have bold, big, robust flavors in Texas, she says. People are into full-flavored food today. Our flavors are fun and exciting, different. It's its own cuisine.After scouring her collection of recipes and Texas cookbooks, Thompson-Anderson ended up with more than 150 books to glean recipes from.The books covered half of the office, she says. It took four months to pour through and pull out recipes that were representative of the way people cook at home in Texas.Thompson-Anderson looked for recipes that included a variety of ingredients, a broad spectrum of vegetables, and side dishes that could be paired with every kind of entrée. Because of Texas' long coast, Thompson-Anderson made sure to include a variety of seafood dishes. And don't forget about game.I wanted to be sure we had a lot of game recipes in there, she says. So many Texas families have hunters and people are always asking me for game recipes.She had help in the form of patrons and staff from the Heritage Hair Salon in Fredericksburg.I would take five or six books with me at a time when I went to get my hair done, she says. I'd ask them to look through the books and pick out a recipe they could not live without.The process of narrowing 800 recipes to a more publish-able 500 was long. Thompson-Anderson and her team sent letters to the publishers and authors of the original books requesting permission to reprint. Replies were steady, but not instantaneous: Some publishers refused permission. Junior League committees had to approve reprinting.One of the books Thompson-Anderson hoped to use was the now out-of-print Aldophus Hotel Cookbook, originally published in the early '80s.The book was just fabulous. It had so many wonderful things that I had cooked, Thompson-Anderson says. But we couldn't get any response on how to locate anybody.Altogether, the process of locating recipes, asking for permission, testing recipes and designing the book took almost a year and a half. Lone Star Eats is broken into appetizers, beverages, breads and pastries, breakfast and brunch, salsas, relishes and pestos, salads and salad dressings, soups and chili, fish and shellfish, poultry and game birds, meat and game, pasta, Tex-Mex, casseroles and stews, side dishes and desserts. The book also includes an index of recipe sources and contact information.The dessert chapter was probably the most complicated. I wanted to include old, old recipes and I had to make sure not everything was chocolate, she laughs.Because of the age of some of the recipes, Thompson-Anderson tested the recipes to make sure amounts and procedures were user-friendly and accurate.Lone Star Eats might be her fifth book, but Thompson-Anderson learned a few things along the way, including how important meat is to Texan palates.It opened my eyes to the extent of red meat we consume in Texas, she says. It's much more serious than I had imagined. --San Antonio Express News