Lone Star Steak:

Picture the accountant-turned-buckaroo. During his first night on the trail, he fell off a mechanical bucking bull, tripped on his brand-new Tony Lamas during the Cotton-Eyed Joe, and threw up all over his pearl buttons after trying his first pinch of Skoal. Yet there is one thing this urban cow-nerd can do right- saunter into a downtown cafe and plant his fork into a thick triangle of chicken-fried steak, just like one of the real guys.

Chicken-fried steak easily rivals chili for most popular Texas tidbit title. To many, it is as much a Texas institution as the armadillo, Bob Wills, or lignite coal. In truck stops and diners across the state, it fuels hearty men and women who will belch today and build a better tomorrow. Accordingly, an appropriately colorful history and background have been spun and codified for this ignoble dish.

The first man or woman to fry a steak like a drumstick probably did not live long enough to see how this ingenuity-or clumsiness – changed the history of roadside dining. No one is sure exactly how the dish began, but its origins have been thought to spring from an old Southern tradition of batter-frying salt pork. Another story credits the invention to a West Texas cook, who, when frustrated with a tough piece of longhorn meat, whacked it with a hammer and threw it in his chicken batter. After the cook simmered down, he allegedly retrieved the tenderized slice and fried it. This idea is embellished further in the only published account of the roots of chicken-fried steak, The Lone Star Book of Texas Records. Listed between the Oldest Cake and the Largest Pot of Chili, it reads, “Texans, and the rest of the world, can thank Jimmy Don Perkins for one of their favorite dishes, chicken fried steak. In 1911, while working as a cook in Lamesa, Texas, Jimmy accidentally created the dish when he misread a customer’s order.”

It’s always an awkward task to rewrite history, or in this case, erase it. But the entire Lamesa account evolved in the imagination of a reporter for The Austin American-Statesman. Larry Besaw, himself a gustatory expert on the subject, says he made up the whole thing for a column one slow news day in January 1976. It was subsequently printed as fact in San Antonian Jack McGuire’s syndicated column, “Talk of Texas,” and eventually found its way into the pages of Texas Records.

The rest of Besaw’s story, which was not printed, related how the customer had requested chicken and a fried steak. From the waitress’ hasty scribbles, Jimmy thought the patron wanted a steak, chicken-fried. “The rest is history,” Besaw wrote. The reporter added that his fictitious restaurant was named “Ethel’s Home Cookin’ ” because everytime someone asked Jimmy where his wife was, he’d reply “Ethel’s home cookin’.”

Regardless of where or when chicken-fried steak originated, it no longer thrives only in truck stops or farm-road cafes. It has gone uptown, with its inclusion as a staple of the Gene Street restaurant chain and its appearance on menus with steak and lobster dishes. Even Denny’s serves a frozen, pre-breaded version, but should be commended for having its heart in the right place. Displaced country boys and girls can now find in the city reasonable replicas of the old-fashioned meal of their childhoods. Moreover, the hordes of weekend cowboys now have a meal to match the mood.

It isn’t hard to understand this regional fondness for a 1573 calorie meal that is 50 per cent high in fat, 42 per cent low in carbohydrates, and 40 per cent lacking in protein (by statistics on the American Dietetic Association’s files). The standard platter of chicken-fried steak and accoutrements, about as threatening as oatmeal but texturally more interesting, is the answer for pseudo and authentic Texans who are not asbestos-tongued chili heads. Some people don’t want singed tonsils as a memento of a meal. That doesn’t mean they’re any less interested in cashing in on the “Ah’m uh Texan” fad. Result: new regional delicacy.

Even before its ascendance to the lofty level of a listing on the menu of a McKinney Avenue restaurant (The Dixie House), confirmed cream gravy consumers knew the deeply visceral, nearly anesthetizing pleasure of inhaling a chicken-fried steak. The mere sight of a chicken-fried steak platter has a calming effect: Two patties semi-submerged in a lake of cream gravy, dammed at one end by a dozen crinkle-cut French fries and at the other by a lettuce and tomato-wedge salad. This meal should be enjoyed in the spirit of a good back rub – as a mindless respite from another tedious day. The diner should be sure the waitress has brought enough butter for the rolls, sit erect, take a deep breath, and devour the meal like there’s no tomorrow. When the feast is finished, one should experience a pleasant sensation somewhere between transcendental meditation and the fifth month of pregnancy.

In Dallas, perhaps the most popular inner-city chicken-fried steak is ordered from the menus of Black-Eyed Pea and Dixie House restaurants. Owner Gene Street says his establishments are “somewhere between a Steak and Ale and a Dairy Queen.” The menus offer down-home staples like meat loaf, fried okra, and peach cobbler, alongside pina coladas and banana daiquiris. Street claims he wanted to be the first restaurateur in town to offer chicken-fried steak under the same roof with a full-service bar. But more than that, “It’s always been my favorite,” he says.

Led by the success of his $3.95 chicken-fried steak plate (it outsells other entrees two-to-one), Street now owns 12 Black-Eyed Pea restaurants and 22 leases in the Southeast, with the most recent opening in Houston. “Our biggest corporate mistake was not going into Houston before now,” Street confides, adding that Hou-stonians will pay a dollar more for the plate. Chicken-fried steak will also be the front runner in new Black-Eyed Peas opening in Memphis and Little Rock. The menus, however, will contain “a little bit of an educational process,” Street says, referring to the alias, “southern- or country-fried steak,” used in restaurants outside Texas.

Taking the “chicken” out of chicken-fried steak may be blasphemy to some stalwart fans, but to newcomers it’s a welcome clarification. Most Texas restaurants dropped the hyphen between “chicken” and “fried” long ago. Surely there are initiates who encounter the strange double-meat listing for the first time, and marvel at such a bargain price for a chicken and steak combination plate. One native Texan 29 years old even admitted she always assumed the dish was poultry, “but I guess I never really thought about it before,” she said.

This is not as dumb as it sounds. Chicken steaks exist, as do television magazines. And the taste of chicken-fried steak – mostly gravy and crust – certainly does not identify the nature of the meat within. Traditionally, the preparation of this golden-crusted wonder started with a tenderized round steak rolled in flour, dipped in egg wash, and dropped in hot grease. Yet the real thing is becoming harder and harder to find. Round steak’s price is slowly approaching that of sirloin. The high cost of ingredients, plus spiraling utility bills, are causing some restaurant owners to chicken-fry ground or soybean-stretched beef in order to hold down menu prices.

Testimony to the popularity of less expensive patties comes from Loggins Meat Company of Tyler, perhaps the largest producer of meat patties in the state. The Loggins boys, under the direction of founding father Bob Loggins, can turn out in eight hours enough breaded patties to feed every man, woman, and child in Lubbock. With a total weekly output exceeding one million pounds of meat, Loggins sells to such customers as Bonanza Sirloin Pit Steakhouses and the U.S. Defense Department.

This GM of the red meat business offers four types of chicken-fried steak patties, each in breaded or unbreaded form. Sales manager Ronny Loggins says their best seller is not a solid beef cut, but a “breaded beef buffet,” chopped from the whole carcass and pressed into patties. The beef buffets – basically breaded hamburger – have caught on because they are cheap and easy to cook, Loggins says. A case of 200 five-ounce patties costs a restaurant owner 34.5 cents per patty, compared with 67.25 cents each for the same weight of minute steak, which is the closest thing to round steak that Loggins sells. To fix a pre-breaded patty, the cook simply takes it from the freezer and drops it in hot fat. With a steaming ladleful of cream gravy poured on top, “they’re real tasty,” Loggins says.

Few people seem to mind the gradual extinction of real chicken-fried round steak, if the crowd at The Stallion Drive-in in Austin is any indication. This shrine to the eating habits of the common man often serves 400 ground-beef patties a night. It’s almost 70 per cent of The Stallion’s business, says employee Art Mowdy. Surely the students, bikers, cowboys, and legislators who continue to flock to The Stallion know that the substance under all that gravy and crust is very likely not steak. Still, they keep coming back.

But all this talk of low-grade meats, inner-city restaurants, and drugstore cow-pokes obscures the broader aspect of the chicken-fried experience. One can only appreciate the essence of this humble patty if he returns to its home, the roadside cafe, to stop, look, and listen.

Notice the waitress: her plastic, embossed nametag reads “Bootsie,” and she plugs her ticket pad into the pocket of her flowered smock like a six-shooter. Feel the featherweight knife and fork she has placed before you, wrapped diagonally in a paper napkin. Hear the scratches on the jukebox recording of “Take This Job And Shove It”; everyone in the room would like to sing the chorus to someone they know. Squint up at the harsh fluorescent lights that beckon customers from the interstate. Listen to the rumbling lull of the 18-wheelers downshifting on the exit ramp outside. But most importantly, study the cast of characters around you. Listen to their talk – of deer hunting, diesel fuel, and stealthy smokies. These are the men who inject every bite of chicken-fried steak with a legacy. If Wheaties are the breakfast of champions, chicken-fried steak is the supper of born losers who never gave up.

“Pa, if I eat all my chicken-fried steak, can I have a tattoo on my arm too?”

“Quiet boy, finish your meal.”