Cooking things in a quandary: Chicken portuguesa

The other night I served up a dish that, so far as I know, hasn’t been made anywhere in the world in at least eight years.

The kitchen of the Hotel Crosby in Cd. Acuña, across the Rio Grande from Del Rio, Texas, was famous for two things:  being the second place in the whole world that nachos were ever made (that’s another story worthy of the telling, one day) and the only place ever that Chicken portuguesa was served.

I ate chicken portuguesa in the Crosby’s dining room when I was a boy in the ’60s and my family would go on trips to the border.  It was the house speciality and renowned, involving chicken quarters baked in not one but two sauces at once, under a blanket of melted cheese.  The dish, served on a platter in a great pool of sauce and with many tortillas for scooping it all up, was complicatedly delicious, almost but not quite too peppery for a middle-sized kid.  The Garza Gonzales family, which owned the hotel, jealously guarded the recipe.  Duncan Hines himself once tried to pry the recipe out of them and failed.  He had to settle for a “worth going out of your way” recommendation in his guidebooks.

My family stayed at the Crosby since before the the Depression, when my grandfather worked as a project engineer for the Texas Highway Department, building US 83 and US 277 up the Valley.  We were on first-name basis with the staff, especially with the manager, Esther Aguilar.  Esther and my grandmother Frances were friends, to the point that Frances once invited Esther to cross the border and spend a vacation with her in Comanche.  (This was a thing which just Did. Not. Happen. in our place and time.)

Such a long friendship had its fruits over the years, and finally included the one thing Duncan Hines never got:  the famed recipe for chicken portuguesa.  Esther entrusted it to Frances, enjoining her that it was only to be prepared by her during her lifetime and then passed on only to her children on her death.

As it happened, Frances handed down the recipe sooner than “on my death,” but she passed it to her son Joe, who passed it to me.  I tried making it once in my thirties, but I didn’t have enough experience and technique yet; my mother made me throw it out halfway through cooking as inedible.

But now I am old and have experience in a kitchen. When I got out the recipe this week it all made sense and I succeeded at it.  I made a couple of changes—notably substituting shredded Longhorn cheese for the Velveeta called for in the original—but when the cazuela came out of the oven, everything smelled and tasted as it had in the Crosby dining room in 1969.

And now I come to the quandary.  Usually when I write about cooking something I’ll post the recipe for it, BUT! Chicken portuguesa has been handed down only in our family since the 1970s, as Frances promised we would, but it seems to me that promise was maybe predicated on the continuing existence of the Crosby Hotel, its dining room, and its secrets.  And the Crosby closed forever at the end of 2011, the victim of terrorist and border-wall hysteria.  So am I now absolved from the promise of secrecy, since the thing which required the secret to be kept is gone?  Or does the promise have its own life, independent of the things that occasioned it?  I don’t know quite what I think, so I’m going to ask for your input on it.