Texas Is Chili Country: A Brief History with Recipes

By Judy Alter

Texans love to eat, and one dish they can’t get enough of is chili—so much so that chili con carne is Texas’s state meal. This seemingly simple staple of Texan identity proves to be anything but, however. Beans or no beans? Beef, pork, or turkey? From a can or from scratch?

Texas Is Chili Country is a brief look at the favored fare—its colorful history, its many incarnations, and the ways it has spread both across the country and the world. The history includes chuckwagon chili, the chili queens of San Antonio, the first attempts at canned chili, the development of chili societies and the subsequent rivalries between them, and the rise of chili cook-offs.

And what would a book about chili be without recipes? There are no-fat recipes, vegan recipes, and recipes from Mexican-American cooks who have adapted this purely American food. Some have been tried, but many are taken on faith. Recipes are included from state celebrities such as Ladybird Johnson, Governor Ma Ferguson, and chili king Frank X. Tolbert.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Texas Tech University Press
• Release date: Apr 5, 2020
• ISBN: 9780896729476

Judy Alter

An award-winning novelist, Judy Alter is the author of six books in the Kelly O’Connell Mysteries series: Skeleton in a Dead Space, No Neighborhood for Old Women, Trouble in a Big Box, Danger Comes Home, Deception in Strange Places, and Desperate for Death. With Murder at the Blue Plate Café, she moved from inner city Fort Worth to small-town East Texas to create a new set of characters in a setting modeled after a restaurant that was for years one of her family’s favorites. She followed with two more Blue Plate titles: Murder at the Tremont Inn and Murder at Peacock Mansion.

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Chili cook-offs are international entertainment these days, but the most famous and granddaddy of them all is held at Terlingua, a ghost town in West Texas that comes alive once a year for this event—more about that later. The least famous of them all was held in my living room in November 2010. It started when friends on a gluten- and dairy-free diet wanted to adapt Judy's Mild and Tentative Chili to their dietary needs. I said okay, I'll make regular chili and you bring your version. Then we invited my neighbors, Jay Mitiguy and Susan Halbower. Jay is a great experimental cook and a chili purist, having judged at the Terlingua festival. So our cook-off consisted of three pots of chili and quite a lot of beer.

Jay's chili was the hands-down winner because it was authentic—really more like a sauce with meat in it, well-seasoned, and really good. Elizabeth and I put beans in our chili, which is as one chili aficionado said, a hanging offense in Texas. Jay pronounced my chili more like a stew with beans using chili spices but Susan ate it with some appreciation.

But our mini-cook-off shows that there is basic, true, authentic chili, and then a lot of different directions to go with it. My children like to sprinkle diced red onion and grated cheddar on their chili, which would make the purists cringe (a lot of things in this book are going to be hard for purists to handle). I've seen people crumble saltines into their chili as though it was soup and others float a dab of sour cream.

My thanks go to those good friends who cooked chili that night and to others who have eaten several varieties of chili at my table as I tried out recipes. I am afraid to attempt naming the people who sent recipes for fear of leaving some out, but each has my thanks. (A hasty disclaimer: Not every recipe in this book has been kitchen-tested.) Special gratitude goes to Kathleen Tolbert Ryan who heartily supported this project, invited me to Tolbert's Restaurant, the mecca for good chili, and provided family pictures and mementoes of her famous chili-head father Frank Tolbert and Terlingua festivals through the years. The restaurant still uses Frank Tolbert's original recipe, but Frank, Jr., told me it serves about forty gallons a day.

Grateful thanks too to Jay Mitiguy who ended up as major photographer for this project.

In his classic book on chili, Frank X. Tolbert wrote:

When speaking of a bowl of red, I refer to chili con carne—honest-to-God chili, and not the dreadful stuff masquerading as chili which is served in nine out of ten cafes. Real chili con carne is a haunting, mystic thing. As Margaret Cousins, my former Doubleday editor, wrote, Chili is not so much a food as a state of mind. Addictions to it are formed early in life and the victims never recover. On blue days in October I get this passionate yearning for a bowl of chili, and I nearly lose my mind, for there is nowhere I can go in New York City to buy the real thing.¹

First, there is a need to establish an important distinction: chiles are the peppers; chili is the dish we eat. Chili pequines (sometimes called chiliquines) are native, wild peppers, tiny and fiery hot. I remember once having a small bush grow in the crack at the curb in a house where we lived. These tiny chile plants bear small fruit that starts out green and turns bright red as they ripen—and hot, about forty times hotter than jalapenos. They were no doubt used in the first chili made in Texas. Today, anchos have replaced chilipiquines, principally because they are not as hot. Ancho chiles, however, require cultivation.

Contrary to popular belief, chili con carne is not a Mexican dish. One mid-twentieth-century Mexican dictionary described it as a detestable dish sold from Texas to New York City and erroneously described as Mexican.²

Chile peppers have been used in cooking for centuries. They show up in the great cuisines of ancient China, Indian, Indonesia, Italy, the Caribbean, France, and the Arabic states. In 1598 Don Juan de Onate came to New Spain, bringing with him green chile peppers, which means they've been growing in the American Southwest for over 400 years. It is more than likely, however, that the Aztecs, Incas, and Mayan Indians were cooking with meat, beans, peppers, and herbs long before the conquistadores arrived. Peppers were also grown in the Canary Islands, and when islanders were brought to San Antonio as early as 1723, they brought peppers with them.³

Some writers hint at a connection between chili and the Lady in Blue legend. Sister Mary, in Spain, would go into days-long trances; when she awoke she talked of being in a distant land and preaching Christianity to the heathen. She never physically left Spain. But American Indians referred to La Dama de Azul, or The Lady in Blue, indicating that they had seen her. It is said that the first recipe for chili con carne was put on paper in the seventeenth century in Spain by Sister Mary.⁴

One scholar believes chili as we know it began in the 1840s in a form similar to the Native Americans' pemmican—a pounded mixture of dried beef, beef fat, dried chili peppers (chilipiquines), and salt into a mixture that could be boiled on the trail by travelers to the California gold fields—rather like a concentrated form of today's brick chili.⁵

It seems likely that the Texas version of chili originated at a chuck wagon cook's campfire. It did not contain vegetables such as tomatoes and onions but was simply bite-sized pieces of coarsely ground or chopped meat with suet (raw beef fat), the pulp of chile peppers, crushed leaves of oregano, ground cumin seeds (sometimes called by the Spanish term comino), and chopped garlic cloves. Essentially it was a beef stew with peppers. Old-timers would not tolerate tomatoes in any shape or form in their chili, and they insisted suet or beef fat was an essential ingredient.

Chili probably first appeared publicly in San Antonio in the 1880s, although it may have been earlier. By the 1880s, the chili queens offered their wares every night in the city's plazas. The queens appeared about dusk with huge pots of chili. The queens and their families had prepared the food at home during the day, and brought charcoal stoves to the plaza to keep the chili warm. The chili