It’s nearly 100 degrees (F) and 85% humidity
outside here (as it is for many of you) and I’m hungry for comfort food. Not
just any soup or casserole or pasta, but chili. And not just any chili, but my
mother’s chili. I have the recipe and even if I follow it exactly, it still
doesn’t taste quite like when she made it. But that got me to thinking
about the origins of chili.
To explore a bit, let’s dig into
the history of the state dish of Texas, chili. The one thing known for certain
is that chili did NOT originate in Mexico. The Diccionario
de Mejicanismos, published in 1959, defines chili con
carne as (roughly translated): “detestable food passing itself off as Mexican,
sold in the U.S. from Texas to New York.”
Historians believe chili came from the
Canary Islands to what is now San Antonio in the 18th century. Dallas
millionaire and chili lover, Everrette DeGolyer’s research stated that the
first chili mix was a pemmican-type brick on dried beef, fat, pepper, salt, and
chile peppers pounded together and shaped into bricks for the cowboys and gold
prospectors around 1850. A brick could be dropped into a pot with water and
boiled into, well, chili.
In Texas prisons the “bread and water“ was a stew made of a tough cut of beef cut into fine pieces and boiled with chiles and spices.
The food became a kind of status symbol of the Texas prisons and the inmates
used to rate jails on the quality of their chili.
Texas chili went national in 1893, when Texas set
up a San Antonio Chili Stand at the Columbian Exposition in Chicago.
You can still get
the original spice blend created in 1890 from Pendery’s World of Chilis and
Spices in Fort Worth. (www.Penderys.com)
Any chili afficionado will tell you it all starts
with the meat, or in the case of Texas chili, beef. Ranching is big business in
Texas, after all. To compete in the Terlingua Chili Festival, the most famous
chili competition in the world, you must use beef, cut up in some fashion.
Strips, chunks, cubes, but some version of chopped up beef. I use ground
(gasp!).
Next you brown and drain the meat; add… Well, here.
I’ll let William Clark Green tell you how to make it.
The Chili Song – performed by William Clark Green
See you next month!
Tracy
