‘Twas the night before Christmas, and all through the state, Texans on Twitter were confounded by a message sent by U.S. Sen. John Cornyn, showing off his holiday feast.
The snowy-haired Republican tweeted a photo of a Pyrex dish filled with slices of dry-looking meat, topped with some sort of red blanket that…may have been ketchup?
“Brisket family tradition,” Cornyn explained.
The backlash was swift — and heartfelt. Texans have elevated brisket to an art form, over the years. If you ask a Texan to describe brisket, you’ll likely get a poetic response about gleaming fat caps and majestic crusts of bark — two features of good brisket that the senator’s supper conspicuously, defiantly lacked.
The state’s senior senator was also accused of tone-deafness. All too many Texas have been dealing with hunger this year and left hurting this holiday season — and Cornyn is in a position to help alleviate some of that distress. To his credit, he recently voted for a $900 billion Covid relief package that extends unemployment benefits, among other things.
But much of the pushback focused squarely on Cornyn’s actual dish. He was accused of defaming brisket, dishonoring the cow that gave its life for this meal and embarrassing the state in public (he’s not the first Texas leader to be accused of this recently).
“Brisket is serious business in Texas,” Cornyn acknowledged, in a follow-up tweet. “Actually, it is Sandy Cornyn’s family recipe. Best I have ever had.”
Did this allay the furor? Needless to say, it did not.
“For the sensitive types out there, there are many ways to prepare brisket, and I love them all,” Cornyn tweeted, the day after Christmas. “This recipe calls for 3½ hours in the oven; refrigerate then trim all visible fat; cut into slices; then another 1½ hours in the oven. Fork tender!”
“Home made barbecue sauce,” he added, a bit defensively.
I called Daniel Vaughn, the barbecue editor of Texas Monthly, to discuss whether Cornyn deserves the roasting he’s receiving.
“He never called it barbecue,” Vaughn noted. “I’m glad that he didn’t call it barbecue. I would never call it barbecue.”
He was preparing to recreate Cornyn’s brisket using a similar recipe he had found on the internet and half a flat from Kuby’s in Dallas.
The recipe, he noted, was reminiscent of that for the brisket traditionally prepared for Passover — although Passover brisket isn’t necessarily slathered in barbecue sauce either.
Vaughn suspected that the sauce, in this case, would have to do a lot of work to enliven the meat, which was about to undergo a lengthy and drying ordeal.
“It certainly has all of the warning signs,” Vaughn said. “Remove all of the fat before cooking; remove all the fat mid-cook; slice it, then continue to cook...”
Still, he was keeping an open mind.
“It’s a family tradition,” Vaughn said. “It’s lasted for a reason, right?”
This was not the first time, he noted, that a Texas politician had baffled the state’s barbecue fans.
“The most important thing about barbecue is sauce,” Gov. Greg Abbott declared in 2015.
Abbott later described the comment as his greatest regret of that year’s legislative session, though he’s never disavowed the sentiment.
“In the rankings, certainly the biggest faux pas was Abbott’s,” Vaughn said.
Cornyn’s decision to post a photo of his brisket seemed to strike Vaughn as more puzzling than anything else: “Any Texas politician who’s posting a photo of brisket that they cooked should assume that people expect it to be a smoked brisket. It just seems like a weird political move.”
That’s definitely the case. And Cornyn, who was reelected by roughly 10 points this year, should have been able to anticipate the razzing he would receive after posting this photo— especially at a moment when many Texans were having a different sort of holiday season than they might have hoped for.
But by the same token, I found myself feeling some sympathy for our recently reelected senior senator. It’s always been the case that the best meals are the ones that are made with love, by us or for us, even if the food itself is the kind that you have to slip under the table to a patiently waiting dog. And this year, the family traditions we can still celebrate, despite social distancing, carry an extra resonance.
Was Cornyn’s brisket barbecue? No. Would a Texan consider it edible? Fortunately, Vaughn has volunteered to be the guinea pig on that. But the brisket that shocked the internet was made by his wife Sandy, for a family celebration in a difficult winter; in that sense, it could easily be the best Cornyn’s ever had.
erica.grieder@chron.com
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December 30, 2020 at 06:00PM
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