ode to chicken fried steak

After a pal noted back in May 2016 that there wasn’t an ode to chicken fried steak (at least easily available via the interwebs [something I confirmed]), I performed my civic duty and wrote one during the plane ride between Houston and Austin that night. I polished it up, and here it is. Photo from the Food Network.

Ode to Chicken Fried Steak

A thick iron pan shiny with lard and history
shimmers on the stove and then cackles,
slapped with a pepper-battered
wedge of undercut beef pounded thin
as your wallet and flat as its birthplace,
the featureless plains of the Llano Estacado.

Deep in the pocket of your Austrian foremother
as she sailed westward over the moody Atlantic
bided a comfort of home, a memory in beef:
the family recipe for wiener schnitzel.
But America changes everything, even your memories.
You make do as you make do.

Meat from a mewling calf was too much of a luxury
among the dusty cotton rows of lonesome Lamesa,
but what to do with the hindquarters of that old steer?
Why not pound it with a cubed cleaver?
and batter it like a bug-fed yard fowl?
and sear it to the warm hue of rusty Ogallala sands?

Your plate arrives, its edges challenged with fried glory,
a thick ambergris of speckled gravy apron’d across its girth.
The first slice steams with the fog of the Alps,
of sod cabins long returned to sod, and the grit of forebearers long gone.
That flavor in your mouth, available from Abilene to Zapata,
is the taste of providence.

It’s the taste of Texas.