Tag Archives: Food History

The Neiman Marcus Cookie That Never Actually Existed

Every few years, an email that predates most people’s inboxes resurfaces somewhere, usually forwarded by a relative who swears it happened to a friend of a friend. The story goes like this: a woman is shopping at Neiman Marcus in Dallas, stops for lunch, falls in love with a chocolate chip cookie, and asks the waitress for the recipe. The waitress says it’ll cost “two-fifty.” The woman agrees, assuming two dollars and fifty cents. Weeks later her credit card statement arrives showing a charge of two hundred and fifty dollars. Furious and refused a refund, she gets her revenge the only way available to her: she mails the recipe to everyone she knows and tells them to keep passing it along.

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Kreuz Market: Lockhart’s Century-Old Barbecue Institution, Explained

Kreuz Market sits in Lockhart, a town of roughly 15,000 people about thirty minutes southeast of Austin that has somehow earned the unofficial title of Barbecue Capital of Texas. The market’s own history stretches back to 1875, when Jesse Swearingen opened the town’s first meat market. Charles Kreuz Sr. bought it in 1900 and put his name on it, and by 1948 the business had passed to a longtime butcher named Edgar Schmidt, whom everyone called Smitty.

For decades under Smitty and later his sons, Kreuz Market did one thing and did it without apology: meat smoked over post oak, sliced and served on butcher paper, no sauce, no forks, no sides beyond crackers, pickles, and onions.

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Remembering Southern Kitchen and the Cinnamon Rolls That Made It Famous

Southern Kitchen ran two locations in Dallas for decades, a West spot at 2356 West Northwest Highway at Harry Hines Boulevard, and an East spot at 6615 East Northwest Highway. Both were confirmed still running side by side as of the 1960s, and at least one diner’s memory places a visit to the Bachman Lake–area location as far back as 1975. The company behind both locations operated under the name Southern Hospitality, Inc.

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Al Pastor Isn’t Mexican in Origin. It Traces Back to the Middle East, and the Story Runs Through One Word: Árabes

Every taco al pastor in Dallas traces back to a wave of immigration nobody puts on the menu. In the final years of the Ottoman Empire, as the empire crumbled and conscription, violence, and economic collapse pushed people out of the region, waves of Lebanese, Syrian, and Iraqi families left the Middle East for the Americas. A significant number landed in Puebla, Mexico, by the early 20th century, and they brought a cooking method with them that had nothing to do with Mexican food at the time: shawarma, meat stacked on a vertical spit and shaved off in thin, charred strips as it turned.

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The Real History of Fritos, Frito Pie, and the Dallas Connection

In 1932, a twenty-eight-year-old confectionery manager named Charles Elmer Doolin ordered a sandwich and a nickel bag of corn chips at a small San Antonio café. He liked the chips enough to track down the man who made them, a vendor named Gustavo Olguín who was getting ready to move back to Mexico and wanted to sell off the business. Doolin bought the recipe, a hand-cranked potato ricer, and nineteen retail accounts for one hundred dollars, borrowed from his mother, who reportedly pawned her wedding ring to help raise it.

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Dallas Invented the Frozen Margarita, Here’s Where to Drink One This Weekend

The frozen margarita was invented in Dallas. The machine that made it is in the Smithsonian, sitting next to Julia Child’s kitchen and the first Tupperware. And somehow, fifty-five years later, this is still not the first thing Dallas tells people about itself.

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A Brief and Delicious History of the Hot Dog — and the Best Places to Get One in Dallas

Americans will eat approximately 150 million hot dogs on July 4th. Not over the weekend. On the day itself. That is a number that requires a moment of genuine reflection — and possibly a glass of water — before anyone starts talking about the history.

The hot dog’s origin is genuinely contested, which is fitting for a food this American. Both Frankfurt, Germany and Vienna, Austria claim to have invented it, which is why we call them both frankfurters and wieners depending on the day. The most specific claim comes from 1487, when Frankfurt credits itself with creating the Frankfurter — five years before Columbus sailed, which means the hot dog technically predates European knowledge of the Americas.

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The Mansion on Turtle Creek: A History of the Most Important Restaurant in Dallas

In 1908, cotton magnate Sheppard W. King and his wife Bertha Wilcox went to Europe and came home with a vision. They wanted a house unlike anything in Dallas — something palatial, something European, something that would stop people cold. They traveled with their architect, collecting antique pieces and authentic fixtures from across the continent. When they built on Turtle Creek Boulevard, they built accordingly.

The result was a Mission Revival manor that became the social epicenter of Dallas almost immediately. President Franklin Roosevelt dined there. Tennessee Williams visited. The house was, as they say in that world, important.

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