I've always told people that chicken-fried steak, one of the iconic dishes of Texas, was the first thing I learned how to make, at age 8 or 9, even though that's not entirely true. Mashed potatoes and whipped cream came earlier; I had a thing for my mother's stand mixer. But those were mere accompaniments: a side dish, a garnish.

Anyone who has ever eaten CFS knows it's nothing if not a whole meal, a crisp, tender-but-chewy mess of meat drowning in rich, peppery cream gravy. Save the diet food for another day, or another state.

My teacher was my stepfather, Vernon Lee Jones, from the little west Texas town of Miles. Tall and lean, Vern's a man of few words, and in my memory we conducted this lesson largely in silence.

But what is there to say, really, that can't be shown? Pound a piece of round steak with a spiked mallet, dredge it in seasoned flour, get some oil real hot in a cast-iron skillet, pan-fry the steak on both sides until it is golden brown. Pour out most of the oil, add flour and pepper and milk or cream, whisk, scrape, let thicken, serve.

Not until I got to Austin for college did I realize there were other ways to make CFS. In the 1980s, the dish was having a moment in such restaurants as the famous comfort food palace Threadgill's and the retro-hip Good Eats Cafe. At those places, the breading was flakier than Vern's, probably because the cooks were dipping the steaks in egg before flouring them.

I haven't lived in Texas for 20 years now, so my experiences with chicken-fried steak have been few and far between and largely of my own making.

That is, until the Smithsonian decided to feature Texas (along with Bhutan and NASA) at this year's Folklife Festival in D.C. (ending this weekend on the National Mall). Among the recipes in the arsenal of things they planned to demonstrate on the Mall was good old CFS.

This recipe came with an official-sounding story of origin: that chicken-fried steak must be related to schnitzel, brought by all the Germans who immigrated to the Texas hill country. The story tells of Jimmy Don Perkins, a short-order cook at a cafe in Lamesa, who on one fateful day in 1911 wrongly assumed that a waitress's ticket for two orders ("chicken, fried steak") was for only one. He figured the only way to make it was to cook the steak like fried chicken. So that's what he did.

The venerable Texas food authority Robb Walsh broke down the dish into three distinct versions. The east Texas one, dipped in egg and then flour, is probably connected to Southern fried chicken. The central Texas version, sometimes using bread crumbs, probably comes from those German immigrants. And the eggless west Texas version I learned to make is probably more closely related to what the cowboys called pan-fried steak.

I recently made some CFS for a friend. "It's so heavy and peppery," he said of the characteristically thick gravy, "and it fights with the beef. Can you rework the recipe to make it thinner, maybe a little lighter?"

I told him yes, I most certainly can make the gravy thinner or lighter, but I won't. Not without the approval of Vernon Lee Jones of Miles, Texas, and I already know what he would say. Or what he wouldn't.

Get $150+ in coupons in every Sunday N&O. Click here for convenient home delivery.