Bluebonnets and Barbecue

AUSTIN, Texas —  April is not the cruelest month, as T.S. Eliot would have it, at least not April in Paris, Texas, and points south.

As the singing cowboy said, the stars are bright and the sage is like perfume, and in a good springtime--such as, by all accounts, this year’s--the hills and fields and roadsides are blanketed with intensely beautiful wildflowers: bluebonnets, scarlet Indian paintbrush, buttercups and poppies as thick as those Judy Garland fell asleep among in “The Wizard of Oz.”

Spring and early summer is the time to feast your eyes on the riotous display of vivid wildflowers and treat your palate to what many believe is the best barbecue in America.

By happy circumstance, the prettiest bluebonnets and the best barbecue are found together in central Texas. Imagine a triangle formed by the cities of Austin, San Antonio and Fredericksburg. It’s in and around there that the looking and the eating get really good. When my husband, Harry Basch, and I first visited here nearly a decade ago, on assignment for a food magazine, we found out how neatly the bluebonnets and barbecue fit together. We were visiting Lady Bird Johnson at the LBJ Ranch on the banks of the Pedernales River. After describing her home-state highway beautification project (which had been the nucleus of a nationwide wildflower-planting program during her husband’s administration), she gave us the recipe for the barbecue she and the late president used to serve their guests.

We also are convinced that traveling around America in an RV, with its own stove and refrigerator, is our personal reward for having spent 20 jet-lagged years sampling indigenous foods around the world at inappropriate hours. Now, at last, we can set up taste tests and note-taking for our food and travel writing in the privacy of our moving home.

We started RVing in 1992 when, while researching a ski guide, we rented a 27-foot Winnebago Brave motor home to visit the more remote areas. We liked it so much that at the end of our trip we bought it, astonishing not only our friends but ourselves. Since then we’ve spent three to four months a year on the back roads of America and found a freedom in travel we’d never experienced before.

We set out in our motor home last spring to drive across Texas from west to east, using Interstate 10 as the rough route. Texas is an RV-friendly state with electric and water hookups in many of the state parks (see Guidebook, L13, for recommended campgrounds).

We hit the first big bunch of bluebonnets (Lupinus texensis) at a rest stop near Sonora just after passing through a scenically challenged section of I-10. This was not a cute little cluster or a photogenic patch, but a blue carpet of thousands and thousands of bluebonnets in every direction. Up close, they bear a strong resemblance to a wildflower in California we call lupine (Lupinus subcarnosus), but since we’re in Texas and this is the state flower, bluebonnets they are.

From that spot near Sonora (about 90 miles north of the Texas border town of Del Rio), all the way east through the Hill Country around Austin and almost to the Louisiana border, we witnessed one floral spectacular after another, each seemingly more magnificent than the one before. Sometimes splashy red Indian paintbrush kicked in; other times lavender verbena; sometimes yellow buttercups, as the Texans call them, looking very much like black-eyed Susans.

The lavishness of the displays was treated offhandedly by herds of Texas longhorns lying insouciantly among the flowers like neo-Ferdinands. Late one day we saw an ostrich, then a pair of deer running across the road in front of us, leaping over a fence to disappear into the woods before we could get our cameras ready. There were flocks of long-haired mohair goats grazing behind fences, especially around the town of Leakey in Real County, a part of Texas that accounts for 92% of all mohair produced in the U.S.

For floral displays, the most outstanding routes during our drive were along U.S. 377 from the town of Junction on I-10 northeast to Mason, then east along Texas 29 to Llano where bluebonnets were mixed with Indian paintbrush. In the same vicinity, one of the state’s most scenic wildflower routes, the Highland Lakes Bluebonnet Trail, meanders a back road from Austin north via U.S. 183 and along FM (farm-to-market road) 1431 past man-made lakes and small wineries, and through the little burgs of Marble Falls, Burnet, Buchanan Dam, Kingsland and Llano. Some stretches are narrow, so if you’re driving or towing a large RV, you should check locally on road conditions.

The aroma of succulent barbecue kicks in around Fredericksburg, where folks will remind you that an important part of Texas barbecue comes from the sausages European settlers, mostly Prussians and Poles, introduced and still prepare.

Barbecue in Texas is a much more precise preparation than in California, where anything tossed on a grill with hot coals is called barbecue. For someone who grew up in the Southeast on chopped pork barbecue smothered in tomato-based sauce, Texas barbecue is a revelation--a purist’s dream, where the goal is to taste the meat at its most delicious before it is sullied by a single drop of sauce.

As viewers of TV’s “Oprah” know, Texans like beef. Some barbecue establishments offer pork chops and ribs, but the pride of the house is almost always slow-cooked cuts of beef. Cooking fuel depends on local supply, with mesquite dominant in the Hill Country and pecan wood as you move east.

Sometimes it seems everybody in central Texas has a part-barbecue establishment: rusty tin-sided contraptions by the side of the road with crude hand-painted signs faded by time. If smoke is coming out and you can smell the meat, it’s open that day.

On a sunny Tuesday morning, we drove from Austin up Texas 95 to Elgin (pronounced with a hard “g”) to the Southside Market and Bar-B-Q, a sprawling stone building on the edge of town that resembled a warehouse, where we got a half-pound order of Elgin hot sausages to go. Now note, please, it was 9 a.m.; our total nourishment to that time had been a Thermos of tea, and we planned to stow the sausages until lunchtime, then reheat them. But the fragrance filled the RV, and we tore into the package while we were still in the parking lot. The flavor was incredible, smoky and a bit spicy but full-flavored and rich, leaving us craving more. Reluctantly we consigned the rest of the sausages to the refrigerator meat tray in a pair of zippered plastic bags. (The very last sausage, sliced cold from the refrigerator many days later, had the same punch and flavor as the first bite.)

From Elgin, we headed north on 95 to the junction with U.S. 79 and the tiny town of Taylor, where we searched out the venerated Louie Mueller, the only business still extant in a plain and ancient block marked by vacant buildings, broken sidewalks and years of neglect. The dark brick facade and broken screen door on West 2nd Street did not instill confidence, and inside, several neon beer signs provided just enough light to see the quiet, dark room, smoky from decades of wood fires. Although it was only 9 a.m., several tables held the remains of hearty barbecue breakfasts, the meal for local workers.

We ordered half a pound of brisket to go, with a container of sauce on the side, and again, made a basic tasting before putting the rest aside for lunch. At first the sauce seemed disappointing, thinly textured and bland as tomato soup, but then a second flavor kicked in, a deep, intense wallop of coarsely ground black pepper that lingered on the tongue. The brisket itself was dark and crunchy on the outside, tender and flavorful with some chew on the inside.

Doubling back south again on U.S. 183, we found Kreuz (say “Krytz”) Market in Lockhart, which reeks of authenticity and decades of barbecued meats. You enter from the parking lot into a hot, dark back room with four or five workers who fork up the meats you order directly from the pit, slap them down on a big wood slab and slice, wrapping everything in pink butcher paper. Both the brisket and the beef shoulder roast are charred on the outside, juicy on the inside.

Because of Kreuz’s fame, Black’s, the other major barbecue spot in Lockhart, has an Avis complex, and festoons the highway into town with tacky signs such as, “Black’s is open 8 days a week.” But Black’s gets high marks for the smoked pork loin, tasty enough when it’s hot but absolutely delectable cold the next day between slices of Italian bread spread with chimayo mayonnaise from Jardine’s.

A food footnote: Jardine’s Texas Foods at Jardine Ranch in Buda, just south of Austin off I-35’s exit 221 on Loop 4, sells packaged Texas sauces and seasonings from its production plant at much less than the retail price in gourmet food shops and airports around the country.

Twenty miles south of Lockhart, right off the interstate at the City Market in Luling--famous for its annual late-June “Watermelon Thump”--we tasted the spareribs and sausages the first visit, brisket the second. If you go around lunchtime, you’ll queue up with local businessmen in suits and ties.

Just as Calvin Trillin avowed he never ate in a restaurant “that’s over a hundred feet off the ground and won’t stand still,” we’ve learned to avoid barbecue establishments that advertise on billboards. Bubba’s in Ennis decorates the I-45 between Dallas and Houston with screaming yellow billboards on an intellectual level with Florida’s ads for roadside alligator wrestling. It is, hardly surprising, a big, bustling tourist trap. But there are plenty of great barbecue places in Texas. (See next column for a starter list of 10 we particularly like.) And we’re already planning another Texas RV tour to find still more.

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GUIDEBOOK: Miles of Smiles

Getting there: For non-RVers who want to fly in, then rent a car, there’s nonstop service on American, direct service on Southwest and United from LAX to Austin; round-trip fares begin at about $200.

Where to park: Some recommended area RV campgrounds:

* Junction KOA, one-half mile off Interstate 10 via exit 456, then south one-half mile by the North Llano River; reservations, tel. (800) KOA-7506. Well-kept sites with full or partial hookups.

* Stephen F. Austin State Park near San Felipe; tel. (409) 885-3613. A grassy, tree-shaded park way off the highway with huge sites that provide hookups, tables and grills, and lots of deer and birds (as well as mosquitoes).

* Oakwood RV Park, two miles south of Fredericksburg on Texas Highway 16; tel. (830) 997-9817. A new, modern campground with 132 sites, most of them shaded.

* Pedernales Falls State Park, nine miles east of Johnson City on FM 2766 (between U.S. 81 and U.S. 290); tel. (512) 389-8900 for rates and reservations, (800) 792-1112 for information only. Campsites with electric and water hookups.

For more information: Department of Economic Development--Tourism Division, P.O. Box 12728, Austin, TX 78711-2728; tel. (800) 888-8TEX, fax (512) 936-0089.