Once we were in San Miguel de Allende in central Mexico. Naturally, we got a hankering for cheese dip to accompany our familiar chips and salsa and beans and enchiladas.
The language barrier was not so much the problem as that the staff in the small eatery on the historic plaza seemed to have no idea what we were talking about even as it grasped our words.
The staff huddled. What we were served was a blob of melted cheese into which tortilla chips ventured to crumble and never be heard from again. They should have called this quick cheese, like quick sand.
You could take a spoon and raise toward the ceiling an ever-stretching strand of this substance. If you kept pulling with the spoon and rose to your feet, you could lift the plate right off the table.
The staff was amused.
We also spent time in Washington, D.C., venturing to Tex-Mex eateries from Maryland to Virginia where they corrected our orders for cheese dip to say we were seeking "queso," which, upon delivery, was never cheese dip. The consistency was different. The taste was blander.
We were natives of Little Rock. We had spent more than 90 percent of our lives there. We knew cheese dip to be the creamy, lightly dripping, orange-ish, cumin-y, pepper-hinting substance made of American-ized processed cheese, easily penetrable even by a thin tortilla chip, and deriving from the Mexico Chiquito restaurant of the greater Little Rock region, originally--for full credit--North Little Rock.
It's an addictive substance. If you dip one chip, you'll dip four. And if you dip four, you'll dip 20. And you will be full. Then they'll bring the enchiladas.
And you'll do your best to eat them, painfully.
In Washington we grew desperate for cheese dip. I might have made some myself, but my first wife who had the Mexico Chiquito recipe had taken it with her, somewhere, and we weren't in touch.
A few years later it all came clear to me. At the Little Rock film festival, I sat in on a half-hour documentary by Little Rock's Nick Rogers titled In Queso Fever--A Movie about Cheese Dip.
Rogers explained that, as a Little Rockian, he was devoted to cheese dip but discovered as an adult that it was harder to get the delicacy the farther he ventured from home.
What he came to conclude was that the substance of his heritage was a 1930s invention of Mexico Chiquito, and that Little Rockians believed it incorrectly to be legitimate Mexican or Tex-Mex cuisine, and grew so addicted to it that, as the Little Rock area grew, new Mexican eateries entering the market found it necessary to design their own version and present it as standard fare.
It's not Mexican. It's not Tex-Mex. It's Little Rockian, except that there are people in Hot Springs who argue they had it first, which, for all I know, they might've.
But Hot Springs was about as southwestern as its derivation will take you.
All of that is to take note that--of course--cheese dip from Little Rock bested "queso" from Texas in a blind taste test Wednesday in the U.S. Senate. The win by Scott McGehee's Heights Taco and Tamale Company was so overwhelming that the Texans couldn't even filibuster.
Challenging Texas' senators to this competition was the only thing Tom Cotton has done in the Senate that is worth a darn, and I applaud him.
Texas was trying to compete against Arkansas in Arkansas' wheelhouse. It may as well have challenged Alabama to a football game.
By the way, I finally came by the recipe. But now I've lost it. That's all right. I know the ingredients, and the process, and my way of cooking is never to measure but to apply "some" of this and that, whatever feels or looks right.
In a heated double boiler, you make kind of a roux with three or four tablespoons of flour and a near-stick of butter. Then you plop in ketchup and stir. Then you dump in chili powder and paprika and dry mustard and dill seed and garlic powder and more cumin than you think you should. You end up with ugly brown-red clumps.
By the way, use a long spoon and wear a mitt, because it's going to get hot on the bare hand.
Next, add not quite two cups of whole milk and stir like a madman until your arm nearly falls off and all the clumps have dissolved. When the brown-red milky substance is steaming, it's ready to melt quickly and smoothly a couple of cups of grated American, not Velveeta, cheese. Keep stirring. When the cheese is melted and the substance thickened to your liking, pour in some juice from a jar of jalapenos.
If it doesn't work, then you must have messed up the measurements.
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John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, was inducted into the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame in 2014. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.
Editorial on 12/11/2016