Svacina Project

Photo by Dougal Cormie “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”  -William Faulkner  On the west side of Hallettsville in Lavaca County, there’s a large, white house on Highway Alt. 90 that’s been vacant since 2010. It’s my maternal grandparents’ house and my grandmother (our Datu) lived there for over 70 years. (Her husband died in 1979.) My mother (born in 1947) and all her siblings were brought home from the hospital to that house, except my Uncle A. J., who was born inside in June of 1940, when the Lavaca River rose so high, my grandparents couldn’t get to the hospital. Though my grandmother died in 2012, the family still owns the house and has been gathering there ever since. As a complete group, we’ve gotten together only once a year, if that, but smaller groups of us have met there for Easter, for my brother’s 40th birthday, to attend various events in Hallettsville, to retreat from our busy lives for a weekend, or just to visit with each other. In 2019...

Earlier this month, cousins and aunts and uncles from my mother's side of the family met in Hallettsville at my grandparents' house (who are both deceased) for what we hope will be the first annual Kallus Reunion and Chili Cook Off. My grandparents were Texas Czechs 100%; both of their fathers were actually born in Moravia. But steaming, spicy chili runs deep in the veins of their descendants, supporting the "Texas" half of us being Texas Czech. I spent many weekends in junior high and high school at cook offs around South Central Texas. My father and the team he was a part of (which included friends and my Uncle Johnny Kallus) won many chili contests, but also barbecue, beans, sauce, and "wild card" contests. My father and his team even represented Texas at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival in 1996, hauling their huge barrel barbecue pit all the way to the National Mall in Washington D.C. to do cooking demonstrations. The chili recipe his team (Bull H...

Looking through a box of recipes that my grandmother saved from local newspapers, I found a directive for dinner from Emily (Smolik) Buckert, who wrote the longtime Good Taste column in the Victoria Advocate beginning in the 1960s... "Now is a good time to return to the old fashioned goodness of pork chops and some of the dishes that grandmother served," she wrote before offering a recipe for Pork Steaks with Kraut. I absolutely agree, I thought. Now is the time. I made a date to spend last Saturday morning with my friend Lori at the Sunset Valley Farmer's Market and then Central Market looking for ingredients. Lori and I do what I imagine my grandmother did with her neighbors... share surplus produce or dishes we made too much of. Or we test new recipes on each other to get a second opinion. We're thinking about hosting a dinner party together soon, so have been talking a lot about food lately, especially food in the Texas  Czech community and what our grandmothe...