Unlike the restrained salt-and-pepper seasonings of German- and Czech-style sausages in Central Texas, these links hit you with garlic and leave you with the heat of black and red pepper and chili powder. It’s tougher to chew, so most squeeze the contents out onto bread the way you might work a toothpaste tube or a link of boudin. The sausages start with a beef casing instead of pork. I realized the disservice I’ve done to Texas by not crowing enough about Patillo’s history-or their beef links, which are unique to Southeast Texas. You were black or white.” As he talked, it hit me that Patillo’s is the oldest African-American owned barbecue joint in the state. “Back in the time when I was born, there wasn’t any mixed. I was embarrassed to ask, but I wanted to know how he identified himself. Robert Patillo, with fair skin and wavy white hair, sat across a table from me. To distance herself from the family, she used the name Martha Mack. Roxie’s mother, Martha, was the half-black daughter of a housekeeper and a patriarch of the wealthy McFaddin clan. His name doesn’t show up on the otherwise-heralded Pattillo family lineage. According to family lore, Jack Patillo (or Pattillo) was the son of George Alexander Pattillo and his black housekeeper. The Patillos were dismissed before they even starting selling links. I could blame geography or beef fat for Patillo’s relative anonymity, but I know it’s neither. And “she developed the all-beef link, and that’s the way it has always been made.” The thin, gravy-like barbecue sauce they still make was hers, says Robert. (She made him drop one the “t’s” to become Patillo.) Five years later they opened a small restaurant together downtown, cooking with recipes from Roxie’s mother, Martha McFaddin. Robert Patillo says that Jack married into the recipe by way of his second wife, Roxie, in 1907. He hand-stuffs the same spicy beef links that his great-grandfather Jack Pat(t)illo cooked when he opened the doors in 1912. Robert Patillo runs the restaurant now in a wooden structure his forebears built in 1950. These family ties aren’t simple, and the stories behind them don’t figure into Patillo’s marketing strategy. The recipes they still use today came from a woman who traced her ancestry to the McFaddins, a powerful local family who amassed wealth from land and cattle. Its founder, Jack Pat(t)illo, is believed to be a direct descendant of one of the earliest Texas settlers, George Alexander Pattillo. Patillo’s Bar-B-Q in Beaumont, Texas, is the fourth-oldest barbecue joint in the state. This feature was originally published in the Fall 2015 issue of Gravy , the quarterly magazine from the Southern Foodways Alliance.
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