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Comment by conductr | Hacker News Reader

It’s a controversial topic in Texas, especially since I live in Dallas as an adult, but since you mentioned the food and drink legacy- the immigration waves that come through Galveston/Houston continue to make absolutely amazing food scenes.

A set of my great grandparents were actually a Czech immigrant who married a German immigrant. First part of my life I thought everyone in the world ate kolaches every weekend for breakfast, lol. Also, when modern Texans say kolaches they generally mean a sausage klobasniky. The Czech stop is a well know spot, but the thing that distinguishes them and some other places in West is they still serve a wide variety of actual kolache (fruit/sweet).

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As a child, I also ate them for breakfast every time I spent the night at my grandparents' house. I'm in Houston now, and this afternoon I was talking to a neighbor from the town of West (which is a few hours northwest of here). My Czech grandparents lived an hour south of Houston but the neighbor and I both agreed on how much we like prune kolaches. I also love apricot. Some places use canned fruit which might taste fine to someone who doesn't know better, but it's a terrible clash with memories of what my grandmother made (and what some of my cousins still make), and I refuse to pay for them at any shop which does that. We also talked about the poppyseed ones, and how for us it's so heartwarmingly nostalgic but often other people who didn't grow up with poppyseed struggle to understand the appeal.

I did the same at my grandparents in Crosby, just north of Baytown. That land was passed down through the family going back to our ancestors who were part of the Old 300. The Czechs that moved into the emerging area now known as Crosby passed along amazing recipes like kolaches and my grandmother befriended the wife of a Czech coworker of my grandfathers - now kolaches are absolutely part of the family recipe book.

Yes, I love those flavors and the cream cheese ones too!! If memory serves me, these ones were actually the most popular with our grands generations and they’ve become quite a rare treat these days. Many places don’t serve them and you really have to seek them out

I'm Polish-Irish-Czech, and my dad used to make poppyseed coffee cake. When I lived in Chicago, I'd often get poppyseed rolls made by local Polish bakeries. I miss those, that kind of food is hard to find around here, but at least I can get locally-made pierogi.

6th gen Texan here with a very german sounding last name. My dad's side of family immigrated from Switzerland through Galveston. The original surname was sprinkled with umlauts. Someone tried Americanizing the name so people could pronounce but we still have pronunciation problems... and with the new spelling, French people think I'm one of their own.

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