Food Blog: Revisiting Cowboy Caviar

Friday, July 29, 2022

Revisiting Cowboy Caviar

July 29, 2022

David Malosh for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Vivian Lui.

What to Cook This Weekend

By Sam Sifton

Good morning. Helen Corbitt was a dietitian from New York who moved to Texas in 1931 to manage the tearoom at the University of Texas at Austin. She went on to work at the Houston Country Club, and for years as the director of food services at the Nieman Marcus department store in Dallas. When she died in 1978, at 71, after more than 45 years in the state, she left behind a legacy of cookbooks and recipes that led Texas Monthly to name her the state's Tastemaker of the Century.

Among Corbitt's creations: cowboy caviar (above), a simple salad of black-eyed peas with vinaigrette that's become a tailgate and potluck standby all over the South.

"The recipe has evolved over the years, and you can find a number of variations online. Some contain corn and black beans," my colleague Margaux Laskey reports, "and others avocado. Some call for bottled Italian salad dressing, others homemade. No matter how you tweak it, it's always good with a pile of tortilla chips."

Alongside barbecued goat, perhaps!

Also on my weekend menu: this miso fish chowder, a lovely riff on the New England classic, with miso, bacon and clam juice taking the place of cream. Try it with new summer potatoes if you can, though Yukon Golds will do just fine. Maybe serve that with ears of this spicy corn on the cob with miso butter and chives?

This would be a good weekend for shrimp burgers. Also for actually grilled cheese sandwiches and summer squash casserole, with either a Texas sheet cake or this marvelous peaches and cream pie for dessert.

But what I'm definitely going to cook is something I learned from my pal Derr: grilled swordfish alongside asparagus and par-cooked baby potatoes, with a tureen of hollandaise sauce. If you can eat that outside at a table with a tablecloth on it, with a sweating glass of supercrisp white wine? That's Gatsby.

There are many thousands more recipes to cook this weekend awaiting you on New York Times Cooking — and plenty of inspiration on our TikTok, Instagram and YouTube accounts. Yes, you need a subscription to access them. Subscriptions support our work! If you haven't taken one out already, I'm hoping that you will consider subscribing today. Thanks.

(If you run into problems doing so, or with using our technology, send up a flare: cookingcare@nytimes.com. Someone will get back to you. You can also write to me if you'd like to say hello: foodeditor@nytimes.com. I read every letter sent.)

Now, it's a far cry from reading about artichokes or the flavor of a just-picked wild strawberry, but two dudes in the Catskills are trying to find remains of 40 planes that have crashed in the woods between 1930 and 1989. The Times Union of Albany tells their tale.

New Billie Eilish for you: "TV."

Clare Sestanovich has fiction in The New Yorker this week: "You Call Me."

Finally, here's the evolution of an office desk, 1980 to 2014, from the Twitter feed Lost in History. I have some quibbles, but still: It's a lot. I'll see you on Sunday.

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