Book excerpt: Tired of the boring chain restaurant scene? Recipes from Historic Texas will please your palate and nourish your mind. Enjoy a unique bit of Texas history by visiting a wide variety of restaurants located in unusual historic settings-a gritsmill, a Dr. Pepper bottling plant, a church, and a funeral home, to name a few. Two recipes from each establishment are offered to form a well balanced selection of Texas cuisine. A brief history of each of the 70 restaurants is included, followed by basic information such as hours of operation, location, and other important details. The recipes themselves are an eclectic mix of the simple and the exotic, from the Cowboy Omelet at Beaumont's The Pig Stand to the Jicama Salad at Dallas's famous Mansion on Turtle Creek. Two indexes, one to restaurants and the other to recipes, make the book equally useful as both a travel guide and a cook book.