Or, more exactly, cheese enchiladas with Tex-Mex chili gravy, as celebrated by Nelson Minar in “Tex Mex Gravy” on his weblog Some Bits yesterday. A stunning sociocultural contrast to my food posting on this blog yesterday, “Vienne en Isère 3: La Marjolaine”, about Fernand Point’s dacquoise cake La Marjolaine, both elegant and extravagant.
I’ll give you NM’s food take first, then some words about NM, whose interests (all represented on his blog) also include gay activism and queer studies, and software engineering too. A gay foodie techie, who could have imagined such a thing! (And he’s been a friend since he was an undergraduate at Reed College.) Then I will return to les dacquoises, for yet another pass.
Minar’s “Tex Mex Gravy”. The summary:
Cheese enchiladas are some of my favorite old school Tex-Mex food. Corn tortillas, orange cheese, smothered in a beefy thick gravy. The gravy is not like a typical Mexican enchilada sauce: no tomatoes or tomatillos. Instead it’s more of a Southern gravy like you’d put on biscuits or serve with turkey, but spiced with chile, cumin, oregano, and garlic powder. The key thing is it’s made with a roux [‘a mixture of fat (especially butter) and flour used in making sauces’ (NOAD)]. And a lot of roux, it really is a thick gravy. You never see this sauce in California or New Mexico and I suspect not in Mexico itself except maybe at the border. But it’s everywhere in Texas. it’s a defining element of Tex-Mex cuisine.
Illustrated by “Sylvia’s cheese enchiladas with Tex-Mex chili gravy” in a recipe by Tanji on the Goodtaste.tv site on 10/27/23:
Tex-Mex cheese enchiladas (photo: Goodtaste.tv)
About Nelson Minar. A BA in mathematics at Reed College, 1989-94; studied in MIT’s Media Lab, 1996-99; then worked as a research programmer and software engineer. I originally met him through the newsgroup soc.motss (members of the same sex) when he was still an undergrad at Reed, and my guy Jacques and I were in our 50s (one of the pleasures of soc.motss is that it fostered friendships between people of all different sorts, including a wide range of ages).
About les dacquoises. Which will bring us to Vienne en Isère and the topic of my posting yesterday, La Marjolaine at Fernand Point’s La Pyramide there. From Wikipedia:
A dacquoise is a dessert cake made with layers of almond and hazelnut meringue and whipped cream or buttercream. It is usually served chilled and accompanied by fruit.
… It takes its name from the feminine form of the French word dacquois, meaning ‘of Dax’, a town in southwestern France [close to the Spanish border].
A particular form of the dacquoise is the marjolaine, invented by French chef Fernand Point, which is long and rectangular and combines almond and hazelnut meringue layers with chocolate buttercream
There’s a recipe in Julia Child & Simone Beck’s 1978 Mastering the Art of French Cooking, vol. 2. Some sources suggest that it originated in the 17th century, when it was invented as a luxurious dessert for the people of the French court.
Certainly, socioculturally in an utterly different world from Tex-Mex cheese enchiladas. But each wonderful in its own way.
October 25, 2025 at 4:24 pm |
Arnold! It is such a nice surprise seeing this post from you. I’m glad you appreciated my paean to the cheese enchiladas of my childhood. And I am so glad to have known you for so long now, thank you for thinking of me.
You are right that Tex-Mex enchiladas are a world away from your dacquoises. I can’t think of anything in Tex-Mex cuisine to match those. But Helen Corbitt might have had something. She was Texas’ answer to Julia Child and wrote a lot of fine food books that were popular in my mother’s generation. I am sure one of her cookbooks has a pleasant cake, perhaps alternating layers of angelfood cake and Cool Whip with some tinned fruit to gussy it up. Not quite French patisserie but pretty fancy for Dallas.
October 26, 2025 at 6:37 pm |
Now see my follow-up posting “The food train rolls on”:
https://arnoldzwicky.org/2025/10/26/the-food-train-rolls-on/
October 25, 2025 at 6:23 pm |
You are an ornament in a tough world, and have been since you were a kid, three decades ago; your blog piece is a delight. (I am keenly aware that I should be celebrating people while they and I are both still alive.)
Now on Helen Corbitt, I have a fair amount to say, but will need a whole new posting to do it — I hope tomorrow.
October 26, 2025 at 7:16 am |
I am curious what you have to say about Helen Corbitt! I think she is mostly forgotten now and it’s too bad, she had a big influence in her time. I read a couple of her cookbooks this last year. They’re charmingly dated in some ways, but also quite accessible and sometimes interesting food. My mother relied on her cookbooks and I still make her cheese ball that borrows the ideas of mustard and smoke flavor from Corbitt.
Texas Monthly had a great profile of her back in 1999: https://www.texasmonthly.com/food/tastemaker-of-the-century-helen-corbitt/
October 26, 2025 at 6:12 am |
one of the pleasures of soc.motss is that it fostered friendships between people of all different sorts, including a wide range of ages
The phrase “of all different sorts” could also be applied to the friendships themselves, and I’m pretty sure both of you know what I mean by that.
October 26, 2025 at 6:25 am |
Indeed. There are friends, and then there are *friends*.