Robert E. Howard (right), author of the Conan the Barbarian stories, Texas, 1930s

"Mexican dishes I enjoy, but they don't agree with me much. However I generally wrestle with them every time I go to the border. Tamales, enchilados [sic], tacos, chili con carne to a lesser extent, barbecued goat-meat, tortillas, Spanish-cooked rice, frijoles - they play the devil with a white man's digestion, but they have a tang you seldom find in Anglo-Saxon cookery. You know a coyote nor a buzzard never will touch a Mexican's carcass - they can't stand the pepper he ate in his lifetime. The last time I was on the border I discovered one Pablo Ranes, whose dishes smoked with the concentrated essence of hell-fire. I returned to his abode of digestional-damnation until my once powerful constitution was but a shell of itself. I aided Pablo's atrocities with some wine bottled in Spain that kicked like an army mule, and eventually came to the conclusion that the border is a place only for men with cast-iron consciences and copper bellies."