Nanny's Texas Table: Texas Country Cooking at the Houghton Ranch

This volume gathers more than 200 recipes from the West Texas country repertoire of the late Martha ""Nanny'' Houghton. The recipes are mostly for solid down-home food that is tasty if not nutritious, suitable for serving to large groups of ranch hands and relatively quick and easy to make from readily available ingredients. Classic recipes for cowboy biscuits (fried, not baked, by trail cooks in kettles called ``Dutch ovens''), prune whip, barbecue, summer squash and chili are offered, as well as imaginative recipes that support Nanny's reputation for culinary ingenuity: a piquant wilted lettuce salad made with bacon drippings, a light onion soup with a chicken and fennel base, and Southern-style vegetables with Tex-Mex seasonings such as chili or jalapeno peppers. Ross, who markets a line of specialty foods based on Nanny's recipes, also shares a chatty, personal history of the 248,000-acre Houghton Ranch and of Nanny's life (18941983). Illustrations not seen by PW. (July 24)