It’s often said we are what we eat, but there’s more nuance to that statement than many might credit.
There’s Texas barbecue. If you scratch beneath the surface, it’s more than just meat in many ways. It helps us understand who we are and where we’ve been.
Take, for example, the meat market pitmaster who many generations ago brought a Texas community together.
The story is told in Texas Monthly, where Daniel Vaughn is barbecue editor. He joined us to share more. Listen to the interview above or read the transcript below.
This transcript has been edited lightly for clarity:
Texas Standard: You write that in 2019, the Texas House of Representatives passed a resolution honoring “Tootsie” Tomanetz of Snow’s BBQ in Lexington – a very famous pitmaster who just been inducted into the American Royal Association’s Barbecue Hall of Fame. But then, as you did a little bit more research into her story, you wanted to know more about the pitmaster who tutored Tomanetz way back in the day. Who was Orange Holloway?
Daniel Vaughn: Orange Holloway is the long forgotten pitmaster who taught Tootsie Tomanetz, one of the most famous barbecue pitmasters in Texas, just how to cook.
I think a lot of people know Tootsie from her work at Snow’s BBQ, who’s been at the top of our Texas Monthly list for many years. But the thing is, long before she was working at Snow’s BBQ, and, really, long before she and her husband were working at their own market in Lexington, she was down in Giddings as really a barbecue greenhorn and didn’t really know where to start as far as cooking barbecue or making sausage. And it was Orange Holloway, who was a long time employee there in Giddings at the City Meat Market that taught her how.
So I gather that this prompted you to sort of make a pilgrimage to Giddings yourself? You went to a family reunion nearby to learn more about Orange Holloway and his impact on the city.
Well, I interviewed Tootsie a while back, and she had mentioned Orange Holloway and really what a meaningful character he was in her life. But there weren’t really a whole lot of details about Mr. Holloway and his life. And he passed away in 1981.
So it had been really a long time and couldn’t really find a whole lot of recent information. One of the family members actually reached out to me and noted that his four children were still alive but were getting rather up there in years. And if I wanted to talk to them, now was maybe the time.
So we gathered together in Giddings at the City Meat Market and shared a meal and talked about their father, Orange Holloway Sr.
That must have been a heck of an experience because, I mean, you go back in time, back when Orange Holloway was at his prime as pitmaster. I guess you might say Giddings was quite a segregated place.
Yeah, it was. And just talking to this group – I mean, we’re talking ages of 96, 94, 91 and 89 for Orange Holloway Jr., Ereline Gibson, Vergie Brown and Myrtle Holloway Mitchell – talking to the four of them, not only about their father, but just about what life was like in Giddings.
It was such a small town, still a segregated town. They talked about wanting to go to the movie theater, but having to go up into the balcony if they wanted to watch anything. There was a side door into the City Meat Market where most of the Black customers would enter right next to the pit.
And so, yeah, it was certainly a different time.
Orange was a Black Texan there in Giddings. He was known for his hunting dogs and there was a notable tragedy involving those dogs. It’s a moving story that you recount and I’m going to suggest people read the full version in your Texas Monthly article. But the short version of those dogs – what happened?
Well, you know, he had these highly trained hunting dogs and he had different dogs for hunting different animals – rabbit dogs, squirrel dogs and raccoon dogs. But the most prized one we have were his wolf-hunting dogs.
Now, “wolf” is just the name that they called coyotes back then. But any of those coyotes who were out and about were likely hunting small calves and sheep. So farmers wanted to get rid of them, and so they would hire Orange Holloway to come out and use those trained hunting dogs to track down the wolves, as they called them.
So, you know, they were, like I said, highly trained and highly valuable. So one day in 1967, he was out hunting and there was a farmer who was unhappy about the dogs being on the property. And so he shot the dogs, killed two of them, and Orange Holloway ended up taking him to court.
There was a local lawyer, Michael Simmang. And I spoke with Mr. Simmang. He’s retired now. But back in 1967, that was his first court case that he argued in front of a jury.
So Mr. Simmang, he went to court and he argued that this white rancher needed to pay for these dog’s compensation. He needed to pay for the damage that he’d done. And the jury agreed. And, you know, Mr. Simmang said that, as far as he knew, that was the first time that a jury in that county had awarded damages to a Black man from a white man.
Orange Holloway had many effects on the community. I gather that the food that he served was so well known people would pass by some of the bigger towns around so they could get his sausage. Is that right?
Yeah, that’s right.
You know, Elgin, Texas, right now is known as the “sausage capital of Texas.” But the legend goes that when Orange Holloway Sr. was cooking at City Meat Market, they would bypass Elgin to come down to Giddings to get the sausage.
Tootsie says she still has the recipe, or at least has a recipe that she thinks closely resembles the sausage that Orange Holloway used to make because he never measured anything. He would basically lay out the ground meat and just sort of, like so much chicken feed, spread the spices across that meat until it looked right. So she has a recipe that she thinks is a good approximation, but she hasn’t made it in many years.
Daniel, why did you want to share the story of Orange Holloway?
Well, you know, I think, certainly in my own writing, I focus so much on the pitmasters who are alive today and those that are sort of making the story of Texas barbecue right now. But I think telling the history of Texas barbecue and certainly telling it through the people who actually did the work and not just the people who own the barbecue joints and the meat markets is an important thing.
So that’s really why I wanted to find out more details about Orange Holloway, the man, and understand how he became so influential as to teach really one of the most famous pitmasters that we celebrate now in Texas.
