PinAustin Jewish Community BBQ Sauce Image Used Under Creative Commons License from Wikipedia.org
Citizens! I’ve just returned from a week-long trip to Texas Hill Country near Austin, where I had the pleasure of trying the food at 3 local BBQ legends. I plan to do a writeup of my experiences at all 3 tomorrow for you, as I am exhausted from a long day of travel.
In the meantime, to tide you over, allow me to share this excellent recipe for Texas-style BBQ sauce. Interestingly, this recipe was created by the Austin Jewish community during the 1970’s for use on the area’s legendary BBQ Brisket.
What makes that pairing so fitting is that brisket’s entire place in Texas barbecue arguably began with Jewish immigrants in the first place, not the other way around. Ashkenazi Jews had been eating brisket since at least the 1700s, favoring the cut precisely because it comes from the front of the animal, which meets kosher dietary law, and because its toughness made it cheap at a time when few other people wanted it. When German, Czech, and Jewish immigrants converged in Central Texas in the late 1800s, the local cattle industry was shipping its prized cuts north to Kansas and Chicago and treating brisket as scrap, which meant an abundant, inexpensive supply landed in the hands of the very communities who already knew how to make it worth eating. Jewish delis in Texas were putting smoked brisket on their menus by the early 1900s, with newspaper advertisements aimed specifically at the Jewish community appearing as early as 1910 — years before brisket ever showed up on a mainstream Texas barbecue menu. It wasn’t until the late 1950s that a barbecue restaurant outside the Jewish community, Black’s BBQ in Lockhart, began serving brisket as its signature meat, and only through the 1960s did the rest of Texas barbecue fully adopt what Jewish Texans had already been perfecting for half a century.
Few Jewish communities in the United States have been transformed over the past few decades the way Austin, Texas has. For over a century, Austin had been home to a small Jewish community that was often overshadowed by places like Houston, Dallas, San Antonio, and even Waco.
Originally named Waterloo, the small village on the banks of the Colorado River was selected to be the capital of the Texas Republic in 1839 and was renamed to honor the father of Anglo settlement in Texas, Stephen F. Austin.
It was a relatively sleepy capital city, known more for its laid back atmosphere than as a bustling center for commerce. Since the 1980s, this has changed, as Austin has emerged as a center for high tech industry. As Austin has grown, so has its Jewish population.
Since 1968, Austin’s Jewish population has increased by over twenty-fold, becoming one of the fastest growing Jewish communities in the country. By the 21st century, Austin had become a diverse and vibrant center for Jewish life in the Southern sunbelt.
This recipe is still a winner today.
Citizens, sauce this over a proper smoked brisket and you’re tasting a genuine piece of only-in-America culinary history — a Central European Jewish tradition and a Texas cattle economy colliding into something neither culture invented alone.
Get Recipe Ingredients
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