Sunday is Texas Independence Day. Over the last decade I’ve managed to acquire several vintage Texas community cookbooks as well as several other Texas-related cookbooks from businesses such as the Imperial Sugar Company.

It’s possible that I’m overcompensating for having moved here from Michigan by way of California.

I’ve decided to start featuring these cookbooks, or at least their better recipes, for Texas Independence Day. March in Central Texas is a good time for celebrating outdoors—usually. Unless there’s a polar vortex rolling through, it’s cool but not cold, and neither dry nor humid.

One of the cookbooks I would have liked to feature earlier is the 1975 Potter County Home Demonstration Council Bicentennial Cook Book, published to coincide with the American Bicentennial. I acquired this cookbook too late for it to go into my Sestercentennial series’ inaugural entry, A Bicentennial Meal for the Sestercentennial, and that’s too bad, because it’s a very nice book. Lily Ward’s Potato Chip Cookies were the best of the three potato chip cookies I featured in last year’s National Potato Day cookie post. They were so good, I included them among the three treats I mailed out to friends over Christmas.

Mrs. C.D. Baldwin’s Hawaiian Fudge is also the inspiration for my own Les Johnson’s Antimatter Creams. It would never have occurred to me that you could heat fresh banana to 240° without harming it if I hadn’t made her pineapple fudge. Both pineapple and banana are great additions to a nut fudge. The added green food coloring, however, was only really appropriate for the radioactive variant.

Condensed milk, dates, pecans, coconut, candied fruit… good. But rich. Very rich.

The radiation-green coloring also brought it to mind when thinking of radioactive foods.

Sour cream and onion is surprisingly good in a sandy.

Two other recipes that have made it into my rotation are Mrs. Gwen Roof’s Sesame Fried Chicken and Mrs. A.W. Brown’s Pecan Pie.

Mrs. Roof’s sesame fried chicken is an easy long-oven bake, perhaps more appropriate for March in Texas than July. The leftover batter also makes some very nice hush puppies.

Mrs. Brown’s pecan pie uses sweetened condensed milk for both its creaminess and its sweetness. It’s still a rich pecan pie, but without corn syrup or granulated sugar. Her pecan pie wasn’t the only condensed milk recipe that I made from this book. One of my first recipes was Mrs. Francis Gatlin’s Chinese Fruit Cake. It has not entered my rotation, not because it wasn’t good but because it was so incredibly rich! It also required waiting “several weeks” before eating it. Faster than a real fruit cake, but a lot longer than any other condensed milk recipe I’ve made.

The pecan pie, however, caught my eye because it required no baking. I was in charge of the family Thanksgiving this year, so recipes that didn’t require as much work were a benefit. But it also features maple syrup. I’m not aware that maple syrup is a particularly Texas thing, but it is very much a Michigan thing. And maple syrup is great with pecans.

Mrs. Brown’s Texas Pecan Pie

Servings: 12
Preparation Time: 1 hour
Mrs. A.W. Brown
Review: Potter County Bicentennial Cook Book (Jerry@Goodreads)

Ingredients

• 2 eggs
• 11-14 oz sweetened condensed milk
• 8-10 tbsp maple syrup
• 1 cup chopped pecans
• ½ cup pecan halves
• prepared pie crust

Steps

1. Beat eggs in a saucepan with tall sides.
2. Whisk in the condensed milk, syrup, and chopped pecans.
3. Cook until thick, about 180° to 185°.
4. Pour into prepared pie crust.
5. Top with pecan halves.
6. Cool.

Because the pecan pie uses a no-bake filling, you can use any pre-baked or prepared pie crust you want. You can pre-bake a normal pie crust. Or you can use a graham cracker or cookie crumb crust. I made a cookie crumb crust using granola bars I’d picked up in the discount rack of the local grocery store. I followed the cookie crumb crust recipe from The Joy of Jell-O, which I’ve also featured in A Traveling Man’s Cookery Book.

Sesame fried chicken. No, I don’t know what that dollop of sludge is behind it. Cream of potato?

The hush puppies from the leftover batter were good, too.

A maple no-bake pecan pie in a banana cookie crumb crust. Was good!

It’s hard to get more Texan that fried chicken and pecan pie, and these are two very good examples of each. They’ll make a great Sunday Dinner for any given Sunday, but especially for Texas Independence Day this year.