Or, more exactly, cheese enchiladas with Tex-Mex chili gravy, as celebrated by Nelson Minar in “Tex Mex Gravy” on his weblog Some Bits yesterday. A stunning sociocultural contrast to my food posting on this blog yesterday, “Vienne en Isère 3: La Marjolaine”, about Fernand Point’s dacquoise cake La Marjolaine, both elegant and extravagant.
I’ll give you NM’s food take first, then some words about NM, whose interests (all represented on his blog) also include gay activism and queer studies, and software engineering too. A gay foodie techie, who could have imagined such a thing! (And he’s been a friend since was he was an undergraduat…
Or, more exactly, cheese enchiladas with Tex-Mex chili gravy, as celebrated by Nelson Minar in “Tex Mex Gravy” on his weblog Some Bits yesterday. A stunning sociocultural contrast to my food posting on this blog yesterday, “Vienne en Isère 3: La Marjolaine”, about Fernand Point’s dacquoise cake La Marjolaine, both elegant and extravagant.
I’ll give you NM’s food take first, then some words about NM, whose interests (all represented on his blog) also include gay activism and queer studies, and software engineering too. A gay foodie techie, who could have imagined such a thing! (And he’s been a friend since was he was an undergraduate at Reed College.) Then I will return to les dacquoises, for yet another pass.
Minar’s “Tex Mex Gravy”. The summary:
Cheese enchiladas are some of my favorite old school Tex-Mex food. Corn tortillas, orange cheese, smothered in a beefy thick gravy. The gravy is not like a typical Mexican enchilada sauce: no tomatoes or tomatillos. Instead it’s more of a Southern gravy like you’d put on biscuits or serve with turkey, but spiced with chile, cumin, oregano, and garlic powder. The key thing is it’s made with a roux [‘a mixture of fat (especially butter) and flour used in making sauces’ (NOAD)]. And a lot of roux, it really is a thick gravy. You never see this sauce in California or New Mexico and I suspect not in Mexico itself except maybe at the border. But it’s everywhere in Texas. it’s a defining element of Tex-Mex cuisine.
Illustrated by “Sylvia’s cheese enchiladas with Tex-Mex chili gravy” in a recipe by Tanji on the Goodtaste.tv site on 10/27/23:
Tex-Mex cheese enchiladas (photo: Goodtaste.tv)
About Nelson Minar. A BA in mathematics at Reed College, 1989-94; studied in MIT’s Media Lab, 1996-99; then worked as a research programmer and software engineer. I originally met him through the newsgroup soc.motss (members of the same sex) when he was still an undergrad at Reed, and my guy Jacques and I were in our 50s (one of the pleasures of soc.motss is that it fostered friendships between people of all different sorts, including a wide range of ages).
About les dacquoises. Which will bring us to Vienne en Isère and the topic of my posting yesterday, La Marjolaine at Fernand Point’s La Pyramide there. From Wikipedia:
A dacquoise is a dessert cake made with layers of almond and hazelnut meringue and whipped cream or buttercream. It is usually served chilled and accompanied by fruit.
… It takes its name from the feminine form of the French word dacquois, meaning ‘of Dax’, a town in southwestern France [close to the Spanish border].
A particular form of the dacquoise is the marjolaine, invented by French chef Fernand Point, which is long and rectangular and combines almond and hazelnut meringue layers with chocolate buttercream
There’s a recipe in Julia Child & Simone Beck’s 1978 Mastering the Art of French Cooking, vol. 2. Some sources suggest that it originated in the 17th century, when it was invented as a luxurious dessert for the people of the French court.
Certainly, socioculturally in an utterly different world from Tex-Mex cheese enchiladas. But each wonderful in its own way.
This entry was posted on October 25, 2025 at 3:56 pm and is filed under Culture, Friendship, Gender and sexuality, Language and food, This blogging life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.