Hungry Heart: Konigsburg, Texas, Book 8 (10 page)

BOOK: Hungry Heart: Konigsburg, Texas, Book 8
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He grinned. “Grab a brisket, sweetheart. Time to cook.” He hefted one of the plastic containers and started back toward the door. She grabbed the next one and staggered slightly.

The King turned. “You gonna make it? I can come back and grab it myself.”

Darcy gritted her teeth to keep from snarling. “I’ll be fine.” She hefted the container into her arms, boosting it with her knee, then stepped resolutely toward the door. She could feel the King grinning at her, almost as if his grin had a temperature of its own.

Porky danced around her feet, yipping ecstatically. His friend was back and she had meat!

“I didn’t know how heavy it was,” she muttered. “That’s all.”

“Comes in at twelve to fifteen pounds. Cheap but tasty.” He stepped by her and headed up the path, the container resting on his shoulder. Porky tumbled along behind him.

Show-off.
She wrapped her arms more firmly around the container and followed them.

At the lean-to he placed his container on a small table at the side. She did the same. “Any problem with Porky going after these?”

He shook his head. “He only likes sausage, thank the good Lord. Now we put them on.” He stepped to the smoker, flipping up the top. The smell of wood smoke filled the lean-to as he turned back to the table and lifted the meat out of the container. Darcy watched him heft the brisket into his arms and then lower it onto the grill. “Come here a minute.”

She stepped beside him at the grill, staring down at the fire. Or where she thought the fire should have been. Instead the brisket rested over two aluminum pans. She saw glowing coals heaped at the end of the smoker, away from the meat.

“You use indirect heat with this,” he explained. “It’s got to go for eight or nine hours to get tender. If you give it too much heat to begin with, it dries out and you’ve got something like barbecued jerky. Some people put water in the pans. I think that dilutes the flavor.” He lowered the lid and headed toward the second smoker, raising the lid.

He turned back to look at her over his shoulder. “Bring that other one over here, sweetheart.”

He gave her a guileless grin. Darcy gritted her teeth again and lifted the second brisket out of its plastic container, ready for the weight this time. She walked toward the smoker, hoping Porky would stay in his corner.

“Just set it on there,” the King said easily. “Over the pans.”

She turned toward the grill, gritting her teeth again. Lowering the brisket slowly onto the grill would take a lot of biceps strength plus endurance given the heat of the fire, but thumping it down would make her look like an amateur. She took a breath, bent her knees and brought the brisket as close to the smoker as she could, then let it roll onto the grill.

The King chortled. “Nice. Now we let it go for a while.” He lowered the lid, then pulled a paper towel from a drawer in the table. “Here you go.”

Darcy wiped her hands, blowing out a breath. Obviously, she’d passed a test. Also obviously, it wouldn’t be the last one of the day.

 

 

She worked hard—Harris would give her that. Of course, he hadn’t expected any less. She was a trained chef, used to working in big, high-pressure kitchens. No whining, no excuses, no expecting anybody else to take up the slack or do her work for her.

She’d toted a three-gallon pot of beans from the kitchen to the smokers without complaint, although he knew for a fact the damn thing weighed at least ten pounds. Then she’d hefted it up to the grill, asking only where he wanted it placed.

After they’d gotten the smokers set up for eight hours of cooking, he led her back to the trailer, pausing to refill Porky’s water dish at the kitchen sink. He needed a break himself and he was willing to bet she did too, although he was also willing to bet she’d never admit that she did. She had that over-developed competitive quality that would keep her working until she dropped rather than tell anyone she needed to stop.

He pulled a couple of Lone Stars from his small refrigerator and handed her one. “Sit down. We won’t need to check the meat for another hour or so.”

She sank onto the bench at his rudimentary kitchen table, moving her shoulders to loosen her spine a bit. “You do this every day?”

“Every day except the weekend.” He shrugged. “Sunday’s my day off unless I’ve got a catering job someplace.”

“And you do it on your own?”

“Yeah. Never had anybody who wanted to be my assistant before.” He gave her a grin that he hoped was roguish rather than creepy. After he’d been working awhile it was sometimes hard to tell the difference. “You want a sandwich? I’ve got some pulled chicken.”

She narrowed her eyes. “Does it involve that sandwich bread from the big kitchen?”

“Same brand. Unopened package.”

She sighed. “Okay. And maybe you can explain why you have to supply the kind of bread I could mash up in one fist.”

Fortunately, it was a very narrow trailer. He reached into the refrigerator from his seat and pulled out a plastic bowl of chicken, then the loaf, then the jar of sauce. “How much sauce you like? Wet or sort of semi-dry?”

“Are we heating this up?”

He nodded. “Microwaved.”

“Semi-dry, I guess. Your sponge bread’s liable to disintegrate if we make it wet.”

He pushed himself to his feet, grinning a bit more realistically. God, he loved sparring with this woman, although he couldn’t say precisely why. “Now that’s a typical non-Texan response. No appreciation for tradition. You got to have sandwich bread, lady. It’s part of the mystique.”

He grabbed a bowl from one of the cupboards and a spoon from a drawer, then dumped chicken into the bowl, spooning sauce on top.

She frowned. “What’s in the sauce?”

“Oh, this and that.”

Her eyes narrowed. “I’m here to learn, remember?”

“You can learn all you want about the process of making barbecue, but my sauces and rubs are my sauces and rubs.” He shrugged. “It’s part of what makes my barbecue mine. I don’t share. None of us do.”

She raised her eyebrows, but said nothing. He wasn’t sure whether that was a sign of acceptance or a sign that she was getting ready to stage a sneaky counterattack.

The bell sounded on the microwave and he pulled out the bowl of chicken. Darcy helped him bring the chicken, bread, pickles and butter to the table, along with some sliced cucumbers and onions in vinegar he’d been hoarding in the refrigerator for a few days.

He watched her pile chicken on her plate, then butter a couple of pieces of bread. “You’re going to eat my bread sponge?”

“Sure. I’m hungry.” She dug her fork into the pile of chicken, then took a bite. He watched her as his own shoulders tightened.

Nervous? You’re nervous about what Ms. Darcy might have to say?
That was ridiculous.

She looked across the table, her forehead furrowed slightly. “Not bad. Tasty.”

He let his shoulders relax.
Ridiculous
.

She took another bite. “Ketchup of course,” she said slowly. “Extra vinegar to go along with it. Maybe a little mustard too. And brown sugar.”

She dragged her fork through the puddle of sauce on the plate, then touched it to her tongue. “Something citrus. Probably lemon?”

She raised an eyebrow in question. He kept his expression studiously blank.

Another bite. “Some of the richness comes from chicken fat, but some of it’s added. Butter? Maybe margarine?”

He narrowed his eyes. “No margarine in my kitchen.”

“Butter then. And some kick. Onions, for sure. A little garlic.” Her lips spread in a quick grin. “Oh, you dog. It’s ancho, isn’t it? Why not chipotle?”

He gave up. He should have known she’d figure it out, and she still didn’t have the proportions. “Chipotle would be too heavy for chicken. Ancho’s mild enough for a little kick without overpowering the meat.”

She leaned forward, resting her forearms on the table. “Did I get it all? Minus the salt and pepper, of course.”

Harris gave her a bland smile as he tipped up his beer for a swallow. He would only reveal the two tablespoons of Worchester sauce under torture. “You’re in the ballpark.”

She shrugged. “I can keep working on it.”

“You do that, sweetheart.”

“Do you have a different sauce for each kind of meat?”

He nodded. “Sure. Can’t use chicken sauce on beef. The world would end.”

“Good cucumbers and onions. You make these?”

“Yeah. My grandma’s recipe.”

Her eyebrows went up. “Really?”

“Really. I did, in fact, have a grandmother.” He managed not to snap at her, but he realized it was close. Better dial it down a notch.

Darcy frowned. “Touchy subject?”

“Not especially. I picked up a bunch of recipes from my grandma. She was one hell of a cook.”

“Was?”

“She died a couple of years ago.”

“Sorry.” Darcy took another swig of her beer. “So was she the barbecue empress?”

“More like czarina.” He found himself grinning again. Granny Kent would like that description. Definitely fitting.

“How about the rest of your family. They into barbecue too?”

Oh, Lordy, now there was a question!
“Not so much. They’ve mostly got other interests. How about you—where are you from?”

She gave him a dry smile, as if she recognized the deliberate change of subject. “Lincoln, Nebraska. The rest of the family still lives there.”

“Good steaks,” he said slowly. “Decent ’cue, mostly. Over-sauced like a lot of the stuff in the Midwest.”

“Which brings up another question—why don’t you guys down here cook your meat with sauce?”

Yet another deflection. Maybe she didn’t want to talk about her family any more than he did.
Fair enough.
“Well, sweetheart, it’s all history and tradition, like I said.”

“Okay.” She leaned back in her chair, holding her beer bottle. “What history? What tradition? Or is this just more barbecue bullshit?”

He raised his hands to his chest. “You wound me, woman. Bullshit? You’re talking about Texas here.”

“Home of some of the most unmitigated bullshit known to man, particularly about barbecue. So tell me the history.”

“Okay, but this is only some of the history, you understand. You got all these different barbecue histories in Texas—this one just applies to the area around here and the other German towns.” He settled back in his chair. “First, you have to understand, Texas Germans weren’t great ranchers but they were great butchers.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning they opened meat markets instead of buying up pasture. You got all these little towns—Lockhart, Taylor, Elgin, and so on—and they all had German meat markets. At the end of the day, the owner would take any meat he hadn’t sold and put it in the smoker so it wouldn’t go bad. Then he’d sell the smoked meat along with the fresh meat the next day.”

She leaned forward, spearing a cucumber slice. “Okay, but that still doesn’t explain the bread. Or the lack of sauce.”

He raised his hand. “Patience, sweetheart, I’m getting there. This was also the cotton belt in Texas—lots of migrant workers picking cotton, needing to be fed.”

She narrowed her eyes. “Eating barbecue?”

He nodded. “Yeah. It was cheap and already cooked so they didn’t need to worry about finding a fire. They’d buy stuff to go with it from the groceries that the meat market stocked, like pickles and crackers.”

“And sandwich bread.” She grinned slowly. “Okay, now I see. What about the sauce?”

“These weren’t restaurants, remember, just markets. They wouldn’t have stuff like plates and forks in the early days—or tables for the men to sit at. They’d give the customers their meat on a piece of butcher’s paper and the customers would go outside someplace under a tree to eat. Last thing you want to mess with if you’re eating off a piece of butcher paper is a bunch of sauce.”

Darcy grinned again, shaking her head. “Geez, that actually makes sense. But why hasn’t the bread changed? I mean barbecue places now have tables and plates and forks.”

“Some of them have changed. You can usually get barbecue sauce on the side now, which is how I do it. And even some of the old German meat market places will sell you sides.”

“They didn’t before?”

He shook his head. “For a long time it was still just pickles and crackers. Potato salad was a fairly recent development.”

“And you still use the sponge bread.”

“I do. It’s like the secret handshake of the barbecue fraternity around here. I’d get run out of town if I didn’t use bread out of a sack.”

She laughed and the sound was like a quick kick to his gut. Or actually a quick kick a bit lower. He managed to keep his grin in place while he willed her not to notice the tightening of his jeans. No point in scaring the lady off before he even got a chance to make some moves.

Apparently, the lady had other plans. She pushed herself to her feet a little stiffly. “I better get back down the road. You don’t have anything else you need to show me tonight, do you?”

Why yes, yes I do. Let’s just step down the hall here to my bedroom.

BOOK: Hungry Heart: Konigsburg, Texas, Book 8
11.55Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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