Texas Food Explorer: How the hell did pralines end up a Tex-Mex Staple?
Answer: hell if anyone knows, but it's an amazing story anyway.
It seems like either everything I thought I knew about pralines is wrong or everything Wikipedia claims to know about pralines is wrong.
As with many Texans of my age and a little older, I was first exposed to them as a little free dessert handed out with the check after a Tex-Mex meal. (Befitting their Louisiana Creole history, they were a form of lagniappe — a little something extra for free.) These pralines were invariably brittle and flat and featured fairly large slivers of pecan.
According to Wikipedia that variant of the praline is what is known as a French praline, in contrast to a Louisiana praline, which is reportedly thickened with milk or cream and often roundish And having the consistency of fudge. Generally the pecan meat in this variant is minced, or their ratio of nut-to-sugar is heavily in favor of the pecan. The entry goes on to say that in New Orleans and the rest of south Louisiana the locals often called this " pecan candy,” and to this day, oddly enough, you often find them as positioned as an impulse buy next to the cash register in taquerias, but not Tex-Mex places.
In Louisiana, as with beignets, in the old days pralines had not yet taken the form that most have today, whether that be the chewy Louisiana form or the brittle Tex-Mex form. nor was there necessarily a presence of pecans.
According to a report in an 1885 issue of the New Orleans Times Democrat, the tradition of pralines and their preparation and sale occupied a niche strikingly similar in that city’s food culture to that of San Antonio’s Chili Queens 500 miles to the west: they were made by poor women and sold from public stalls in Jackson Square and along NOLA’s “principal boulevard,” which I took to mean Canal Street, but perhaps it referred to St. Charles.
Already by 1885 the Praline Ladies were seen as charming relics of the city’s Creole past – in the days of French and Spanish rule and slavery – per the article, the Praline Ladies were exclusively Black. In slavery days, some were ordered to sell their wares to bring home extra money to their owners, but many owners allowed them to keep at least a portion of their earnings.
As with the Chili Queens, who also sold tamales and other dishes, the Praline Ladies did not limit themselves to a one-item menu: they also sold cones of popcorn (called “tac-tac” in South Louisiana in those days), something called “Creole Beer” (which for the purposes of this post I will omit to even try to define), not to mention pound and sponge cakes and other sweet temptations for the youth of the Crescent City.
Of note: a strong tradition of street popcorn still exists in Chicago’s African-American community – thanks to my wonderful nurse Kelly Brown, of that city’s West Side, I was recently able to sample a small bag of homemade Windy City popcorn and it was mindblowing – a little like Cracker Jacks but far more mysterious and complex. And fresher too. An episode of the HBO comedy South Side delves into the tradition as well. The flavorings reach the level of craft beer in terms of secrecy and snobbery. And in the days of the Great Migration, many Black New Orleanians migrated to the Windy City.
Pound, sponge and Bundt cakes likewise retain a place of prominence in African-American cuisine. Bundt-Cake-A-Holic was one of the last businesses standing in the food court when Northwest Mall closed down a few years ago – the Black-owned local business operated yards away from the portals to the Post Oak chapterhouse of Alcoholics Anonymous. That’s Houston for you.
Okay, getting back on point – that same 1885 article specifically referred to the Praline Ladies selling a product unnamed but described as a pecan-studded nougat prepared with molasses, and also, confusingly, referred to pralines as specifically composed of sugar and coconuts. (As America’s gateway to the Caribbean, New Orleans had them early, along with bananas, guava, pineapples, and, some believe, marijuana, which is why jazz was invented there. Musicians felt freer to improvise once tuned up on reefer brought in from Cartagena and Veracruz.)
Before we move on, it was reported that the Praline Ladies had another role: as “postmistresses” for young lovers cruelly separated by their parents. So I guess that meant you could leave a letter or message with them to deliver to your intended your parents disliked; while it’s easy to imagine this reference refers to slaves brutally severed from their lovers by sale, it seems more likely that these women were confidantes to free people, both White and Black. (There were more free people of color in New Orleans than anywhere else in the South aside from possibly Charleston.)
A reporter from a Times-Democrat’s rival paper filed this take on the phenomenon of the Praline Women:
So yeah, wow, what a diversion, but it still left me clueless about how pralines have come to take their modern form, and also how they came to be associated with Tex-Mex and Mexican food. (By “quadroons,” the writer mean people of one-fourth Black heritage, but I’ve been told by a native of New Orleans that the local stereotype of a Praline Lady was not unlike that of the recently canceled Aunt Jemima.)
A brief note on their distant past: it’s believed they were brought to French Louisiana by Ursuline nuns. They’d been invented not long before by the personal chef to a French noble by the rather grand name of César, duc de Choiseul, comte du Plessis-Praslin. (They are more accurately pronounced “Prah-leen” than “Pray-leen.”) The nuns were in charge of the so-called “Coffin Girls,” orphans and fallen young women the French crown dispatched to New Orleans to serve as breeding stock for the colony. And somehow from there, their preparation jumped to African slaves. (The Coffin Girls were so named for two reasons: their life expectancies were acknowledged by all to have been short, thanks to yellow fever and child-bearing, and so all their belonging were with them to New Orleans in a coffin provided for them by the King.)
How it happened that the tradition jumped from the Coffin Girls and their nun teachers to African-Americans is just as mysterious as how they became a staple in Tex-Mex restaurants, and the variants now seen between those and the others that you will still find in taquerias. Not even Texas-Mexican food historian Adan Medrano knows, but in our long discussion about the topic, he furnished me with a hopeful note for the human race:
“One day we will all be the color of pralines.”
(Dedicated to the memory of my grandmother Charlotte Ann “Susy” Plummer Taylor, who loved pecans in all their forms.)
Well, it reminds me of the candy you would get in the Monterrey House basket back in the day. That candy was pretty similar to pralines but thicker and softer, looking a bit like a caramel colored fudge.
I read about this not too long ago. The company that made it was called La Colmena. There's a recipe online for this candy, called leche quemada. Linking here along with a story about the Monterrey House candy. So, there's definitely a connection ingredient-wise!
https://thegigistory.com/the-monterey-house-candy-your-childhood-favorite-then-and-now/
https://www.justapinch.com/recipes/dessert/candy/mexican-candy-leche-quemada.html
GOD, I LOVE IT WHEN YOU WRITE ABOUT TEX-MEX!! :)