Beef Dungeon

Lone Star Cowboys love their brisket Bar-B-Q, and Daniel Boone scratched the best ever recipe on the wall of the Alamo —a culinary foot note in Texan history. The Alamo petro glyph reported Crocket shot a Mexican long horn and prepared the beast with Sam Houston’s Grandmother’s recipe, providing the final entre for the courageous warriors who spilled their blood for Texan independence.

Today, meat handlers at Smitty’s in Lockhart, Texas apply a recipe much the same as the Alamo’s last supper, luring beef eaters into a smoky hole that looks more like a Medieval torture chamber, or 19^th Century iron smelting cave. Log fires burn here and there and all over belching hell’s inferno into brick/iron calderas filled with brisket, ribs and sausage—once vital organs, now sucking smoke and soaking fire. There appears to be more beef smelters than customers, that is, until you walk into the informal bingeing area, a grand hall large enough to feed the Devil’s legions. There booted Texans muscle their wives and kids away, plop down on folded chairs and gorge themselves insane.

  Understand Smitty’s Bar-B-Que, a Reader’s Digest’s “Best of the best,” satisfies, because, hidden somewhere in a tiny room, a kitchen genius hand mixes a secret sprinkling of herbs and spices, then pats that onto beef, sealing in the brisket flavor and grabbing fast hickory sparks and mesquite smoke, providing a deeply rewarding taste.  

  Jill and I (with Josh and Jon Martin) sashay to the ordering stall, put down our money and walk into the jousting hall, our hands full of vital parts from some cow freshly dead. I search fruitlessly for a fork, no plates either (superfluous tools actually). The meat comes served on a piece of grease sopping butcher paper. Stacked above the protein rests a pile of white doughboy bread (having never seen so much since the First Great War). For vegetables they throw in an eye dropper full of coleslaw, and parade numerous glass soldiers of hot sauce, so called tomato substitutes. No need for greens anyhow, the cow having ate all I need weeks ago.

  Ranch beans, the most important accouterment, completes the repast. It comes by the bowl, pepper hot, a Tex-Mex Pinto preparation that stomps wildly in the bowels.

  Smitty’s Lone Star meat fest provides a fascinating lesson in Texan etiquette. A burly Austinian pulls up a chair plops down ten pounds of roasted meat and digs in. Behind him stands the wife, baby in one arm, and another en utero, bulging beneath her blouse. She wrestles a baby seat one-handed onto a folding chair, struggling unseen, while her husband burns through beef like General Sherman shoving toward the sea.   

  While smoke billows from the pits of hell, while the dining hall fills acrid and dark, portending a fire of Hindenburg proportions, I throw the bread aside, grab a fist full of ribs and chew. Delicious! Next the brisket…Delicious! Next the sausage…Delicious! Next the beans…Delicious!  Next the nitro-glycerine and the stomach pump…Ugh!

  Complete and satisfied, I shove back from the table, stretch my legs, and sit there looking at the ceiling. My hands fold over my blooming stomach, and I imagine the last steer in Texas . I see the mournful beast plodding through the Big Country toward a dry water tank. He laps the galvanized metal, looks up, and sees a cowboy wrestling a truck toward him. The cowboy, short on cash, holds in mind a final solution for the sexless bull. And evolution, not being kind to the animal, leaves him limp, unable to stampede. His few months on the planet have slowed his mind and fattened his belly. He drops his horns, lumbers up the ramp, and stumbles mindlessly toward eternity, bawling loud and long…His first and last trip to Smitty’s Bar-B-Que.

(NEXT ESSAY: COYOTE DOG)