All twenty-two entries

The complete roster, in section order.

No.	Entry	Section	What the entry establishes
01.1	Who cooked it	Tejano Kitchens	Tex-Mex is Tejano cooking — food made by Mexican families in Texas — and the name arrived long after the food did.
01.2	The border kitchen	Tejano Kitchens	A kitchen working with what northern Mexico and south Texas both had, which is why it looks like neither one alone.
01.3	What authentic means here	Tejano Kitchens	The markers read as compromise are the actual regional markers, which makes the usual authenticity test the wrong instrument.
01.4	The word Tex-Mex	Tejano Kitchens	Where the compound came from, what it first described, and when it attached itself to the food.
02.1	The Chili Queens	The Chili Queens	Women selling chili from open-air stands in San Antonio's plazas by lamplight for decades, and the sanitation rules that finally closed them down.
02.2	The plaza stand	The Chili Queens	How a stand actually worked: the pot, the trestle, the lamp and the crockery.
02.3	What closed them	The Chili Queens	Health ordinances, screened enclosures and the slow removal of a street trade.
03.1	Cumin	The Pantry	Comino as a genuinely regional marker, arriving with Canary Islander settlers, and why its dominance here is historical rather than sloppy.
03.2	Yellow cheese	The Pantry	A processed cheese that melts without breaking — chosen for behaviour, not as a substitute for something better.
03.3	Wheat	The Pantry	The flour tortilla as a northern-Mexican wheat tradition, not an American shortcut, and what wheat did to the size of things.
03.4	Lard and fat	The Pantry	Why lard behaves differently in a dough and in a roux, and what changes when it is swapped out.
03.5	Dried chiles	The Pantry	Ancho, guajillo and pasilla by flavour rather than heat, and what toasting and soaking actually do.
04.1	Corn, lime, masa	The Comal	Nixtamalisation: cooking corn in an alkaline solution changes its structure, its nutrition and whether it will hold together at all.
04.2	Fresh masa and masa harina	The Comal	What is lost in drying, and where the difference shows on the plate.
04.3	The blistering	The Comal	Dry heat, steam trapped inside the dough, and the puff that tells you the griddle is at the right temperature.
04.4	The flour tortilla	The Comal	Rest, gluten and rolling — why the dough has to sit before it will stretch.
05.1	Chili con carne	The Plate	Meat and chile with no beans in the original, thickened by the chile itself, and how the bowl travelled out of Texas.
05.2	Chili gravy	The Plate	A roux-thickened gravy that no Mexican regional kitchen makes, and the plate of enchiladas built around it.
05.3	The puffy taco	The Plate	Raw masa dropped into hot fat so it inflates, then folded before it sets.
05.4	Fajitas	The Plate	Skirt steak that was once part of a butcher's pay, and what marinade and grain direction do to it.
06.1	The plazas	San Antonio	Military Plaza and Haymarket as working food spaces, and what replaced them.
06.2	The restaurant turn	San Antonio	The move indoors, the printed menu, and what got standardised in the process.