During a recent lunch at Mercado\u2019s Cafe, in Tyler, I noticed an elderly woman with her white hair in braids eating lunch with her mustachioed husband, who was wearing a T-shirt tucked into jeans with black suspenders. They were sitting at the table next to mine. The woman grabbed a tortilla chip to dip into a cup of red salsa with a swirl of Parkay floating on top. \u201cIt makes the salsa,\u201d she told me, referring to the margarine spread masquerading as butter.<\/p>\n
I was dining with chef Lance McWhorter, a seventh-generation East Texan, and fellow journalist Greg Castillo. I scanned the dining room, which was decorated like a party store that specialized in old-timey Americana and Cinco de Mayo decorations. We craned our necks to see around the flower-filled fountain in the center of the main dining room. I stood up to peek into booths. Every table, like ours, had a squeeze bottle of Parkay and a monkey dish (a small, flat-bottomed bowl) of red salsa. Each dish contained an identical buoyant dollop of the butter substitute.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve heard tales of this northeast Texas food tradition from friends who grew up in the area, as well as from people across the state who are surprised folks haven\u2019t heard of the practice. Most explain it like Christi Schambach does. The Tyler native, who now lives in Houston, first tried butter in salsa as a five-year-old. \u201cI remember our parents told [my siblings and I] to put the butter in our salsa because we thought it was too hot,\u201d she says. \u201cIt kind of helped take the heat down.\u201d When she moved to Houston, she was taken aback by the absence of Parkay on Mexican-restaurant tables. Friends teased her. \u201cIt is the weirdest thing, but I crave it,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n
The origin stories for this tradition skew fuzzy, but one legend has it that the custom began in the very same building I was sitting in, according to Jeff Bonner, the nephew of Mercado\u2019s Cafe founder Andy Gugar, who also started the restaurant\u2019s sister chain, Posados Cafe. Shortly after Mercado\u2019s Cafe opened, in 1987, Gugar\u2019s diaper-clad son, Rickey, was sitting in a high chair at a table in a comfortable side dining room. The tot was crying from the spiciness of the salsa that came alongside the chips. \u201cBut if you took it away from him, it was a literal fight,\u201d says Bonner, the restaurant group\u2019s director of operations. Neither he nor other family members remember whether baby Rickey grabbed the butter first (it was on the table to be eaten with the fluffy sopaipillas) or it was Rickey\u2019s mom who squirted the butter into the salsa to reduce the heat. Regardless, \u201cfrom then on, he was able to eat it, and that\u2019s where the thing started,\u201d Bonner says.<\/p>\n
McWhorter grew up with butter in salsa and says it\u2019s a generational habit that stuck. \u201cIt\u2019s definitely a boomer thing, but I honestly think it serves no purpose,\u201d says the 54-year-old owner of Heritage East at Culture ETX, a restaurant on Tyler\u2019s main square. He remembers his grandparents loving it. \u201cIt\u2019s just boomers trying to get their money\u2019s worth. It is literally like, \u2018I\u2019m getting everything that I can for my eight-dollar enchiladas. If it\u2019s on the table, I\u2019m going to use it,\u2019\u200a\u201d he quips. But he refuses to call Parkay butter. \u201cIt\u2019s butter-adjacent lubricant,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n
Over lunch, we joked about the proper Parkay-pouring technique:\u00a0 Does one swirl it in from the edge or start at the center and go outward? It has to look pretty, after all. McWhorter, Castillo, and I took turns attempting to apply the correct amount of pressure and movement to the bottle to create the signature swirl. We ended up with blobs instead\u2014unattractive yellow archipelagos of food science.<\/p>\n
The liquid never fully integrated into the salsa. At best, it created narrow stripes of Parkay that sloughed off the chips. If any part of the Parkay clung to the salsa on the chips, the mixture did not taste like butter, as the late-twentieth-century TV advertisements claimed<\/a>.<\/p>\n If the salsa is thicker, though, the Parkay blends better, as Castillo and I realized at the Tyler location of the Jalape\u00f1o Tree, an East Texas chain also famous for the butter-in-salsa tradition. The Parkay there created a creamier, richer salsa\u2014if vegetable oil is capable of such alchemy\u2014but only when small amounts were used. Our server, a Tyler native named Rachel, reiterated the tradition while admitting confusion. \u201cIt\u2019s a thing we do here,\u201d she told us. \u201cI don\u2019t know why, but everyone does it. I don\u2019t get it.\u201d She shared that Parkay is also smeared on tortillas, evoking the once ubiquitous statewide practice<\/a> at Tex-Mex restaurants. But the East Texas tradition of putting Parkay in salsa\u2014as strange and insular as it may be\u2014seemingly shows no sign of decline.<\/p>\n Read Next<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"During a recent lunch at Mercado\u2019s Cafe, in Tyler, I noticed an elderly woman with her white hair…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":474417,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[2604,1551,160532,160533,3570,3090,27,29,28,9011],"class_list":["post-474416","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-texas","tag-east-texas","tag-feature","tag-salsa","tag-taco-history","tag-tacos","tag-tex-mex","tag-texas","tag-texas-headlines","tag-texas-news","tag-tyler"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/474416","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=474416"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/474416\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/474417"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=474416"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=474416"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=474416"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}