welcome friends welcome back to the
kitchen as you can see i've got a pile
of cookbooks out on the counter top sort
of a representative of of of the
collection
and
different variations on the recipe that
we're going to do today we're going to
do chili or chili con carne or as some
of the recipes in these books call it
mexican stew
and i want to talk through the history
of of this recipe a little bit and how
it appears in these books and how
time and geography change your recipe so
i've got the dutch oven here on the on
the cooktop medium heat
i'm going to put in
maybe three tablespoons of bacon fat i
want to melt that down now the recipe
i'm using says to use lard which is
great but i also have bacon fat so i'm
going to use that because
bacon fat is is better and i know that
in this time period
a lot of the instructions in these books
or the ingredients in the ingredient
lists if there is even an ingredient
list
isn't about being exact but just give
you an idea so it would say lard but it
could mean any fat that you have in your
kitchen it wasn't
fully prescriptive it was more
descriptive
so i've got that
we'll just let that come up to
temperature now
chili chili con carne
uh
historians generally accept that the
first chili recipe
published in a cookbook
doesn't appear until
the mrs owens cookbook in 1880
now this is the third printing from 1883
and by 1883
the recipe's gone they've taken it out
um it wasn't deemed to be a very
important recipe so it's taken out
completely it's not in here and i'd
still love to get a copy of the original
1880 so that i could look at it
most people say that
it's called chili it has elements of
chili but it's got a white sauce that's
mixed in
and the white sauce isn't necessarily
something
that you usually find in a chili so
next in i've got some beef and i've got
it cubed up and that goes in and we're
just going to start frying that off pan
could have been hotter
but it's starting to sizzle so
leave that to brown
now since there's probably already
people in the comment section from texas
typing in their comment let's address
the elephant in the room let's start
with origin story
none of the origin stories that
i hear most loudly and most often do i
believe
i believe
sincerely believe
that roasted meat or or cooked meat
stewed meat
with chili peppers
um goes back millennia and that this
idea that it was uh european settlers
who came and started making this out on
the open range while they were you know
chasing cattle
ignores
thousands of years of history of what
was happening on this continent
before europeans arrived
sure beef
beef would be a new addition but other
forms of meat that were already here
would have been stewed with chilis long
before westerners or europeans arrive
the next thing that i'm probably going
to have to discuss is the texas
connection because chile texas texas
chili
i have two cookbooks here from texas
first one is from gebhard's and
gebhard's is a
company that makes chili powder it was
in this time period in the 1800s early
1900s one of the most famous companies
for making chili powder and they've got
a they've got a
homemade chili chili con carne recipe
that is
very sparse
not a whole lot of ingredients which
makes me you know think that it's pretty
close to real
then we get to this cookbook um
and i'm gonna duck it's from marshall
texas
last time i checked marshall texas was
in texas
the chili con carne recipe in this book
has tomatoes beans
pimiento
and kitchen bouquet there's no mention
of chili actually in it um
paprika i guess is what they're calling
pimiento paprika
so not
doesn't fit with the
theory or what the you know contemporary
texas chili beanless chili is
but when you get into these other
cookbooks
1800s early 1900s
the farther north you get
the more you're going to see beans
and part of that i believe is
there's two there's a bunch of things
going on
in texas
people i i've spoken to say that you
serve beans on the side at some point
some cook is going to say why am i
serving the beans on the side why am i
not just cooking them in since
everybody's just mixing
everything together on their plate
anyway they're mixing the beans and
everything together why am i not just
putting the beans in the pot another
part of it is
there would probably be a lot of bean
stews with chili peppers
where someone had a meagre amount of
meat and they put the meat into that and
so there's this sort of confluence of
two different ideas or two different
dishes that become something else
and that idea of beans when you get into
the 1930s in the depression years
beans are something in this dish that
extend the protein a cheap readily
available protein source that extends
the meat or in most cases maybe even
replaces the meat and i think that's an
important distinction
and i'm okay with beans in my chili i
really am
a great recipe that we come to that i
want to talk about is from this cookbook
right here it's called recipes compiled
from
contributed by the women's of circle
number one of the presbyterian auxiliary
and others cotton plant arkansas 1927
and it's got a couple of recipes in here
there's one called mexican stew
and it contains potatoes it is
essentially the recipe we're making
today but it contains potatoes
and i think potatoes are a very
interesting um
very interesting addition
to a chili recipe
in that
contemporary 2022 three weeks ago when i
was in mexico in mexico city
i saw lots of what i would consider a
chili
beef chili
a couple of other spices
and potatoes
and so
from a contemporary lens what's
happening in that cookbook from arkansas
in 1927
i think is something that is not out of
place in today's uh today's
marketplace okay that beef is looking
good and brown
so now in go some onions
so i guess that brings us next to
tomatoes
the recipe we're making today does
contain tomatoes
and most of these recipes do the one
here from gebhard's there is no tomato
this one from arkansas let me just check
it again just to make sure because
they're getting confused in my brain
no tomatoes it's just water and and the
chili pepper and the onions and the beef
and a clove of garlic but the farther
away you get
you do start to see tomatoes in it
these two are interesting to me
these two books i'm going to bring them
a little bit closer
it's so many books on the go
um so the recipe that i'm doing today
i'm not going to tell you about it until
we get a little closer to the
end put the onions in and i'm supposed
to fry it down a little bit
and i think i've reached the point
where we now add in it says a half a cup
of water or stock
put that in i'm going to scrape up off
the bottom
and put a lid on and i'm going to turn
that down
and it says that we stew till meat is
tender
so these two books
one is from illinois and this one is the
congressional cookbook
recipes submitted by congress people
from across the united states
uh
recipes that they think are
representative of where they're from
and so this recipe is from wisconsin so
i don't know but both of these recipes
have chili
chili con
carne with spaghetti as an ingredient
and
that kind of
that kind of brings me to a crossover
with cincinnati chili
different animal altogether but it is
spaghetti
with a spiced meat sort of chili type
base
which comes back to this
book from gebhardt's in texas
in the 1920s gebhardt's was selling
canned chili so ready-made just heated
up chili they also had
spaghetti in chile in a can so this idea
of
serving chili over spaghetti
um
can be linked right back to the 1920s or
the early 1900s in texas and so what
i've got here is the tennessee cookbook
this is published in 1912.
it has a recipe for chili con carne
and the instructions are make the scotch
stew which is the recipe previous add
one quart can of tomatoes run through a
sieve add three tablespoons of chili
powder cook until juice of tomatoes is
absorbed
that's their chili concarne recipe and
if you go back a page though there's
another recipe here called mexican stew
and that is much closer to what we're
making today and it's even rounded out a
little bit better because it has
oregano and camino
as well as the chili powder so you've
got that sort of thing this is the
mississippi cookbook this is from 1922.
and in here it's got
four
five it's got five chili concarne
recipes and they sort of
look like
all of the major variations are
happening here
in these recipes
it's not one thing it's not one thing at
all
you get to this cookbook
this is the mixing bowl this is from
well in ontario
welland is just sort of
sort of southwest of us here close to
the american border close to buffalo
closer to buffalo than i am to buffalo
anyway
and this is from the 1930s
and this is an example of the recipe in
here is an example and i'm not making
fun of this person at all but the recipe
is an example of how an idea travels
and traveling with that idea is sort of
a name
but none of it
works
and it's called chili kilcarny
so they've sort of got the idea
um and you're putting in rice onion
butter pepper salt and a dash of cayenne
along with the hamburger steak
and tomato and so they've sort of got
the idea but they haven't
quite got the idea yet
okay let's check the pot oh look at that
that's looking really good got some
really deep brown
flavors happening in the bottom of that
pot okay so
lid back on let it go
and so that brings us to the recipe that
we're actually cooking today it is from
this cookbook
the toronto queen city of canada
cookbook this was published here in
toronto in 1915 and it has two
chili recipes
it has a chili con carne
beef chili can carne
which is not
again it's this is not quite right they
use sweet chili peppers instead of hot
chili peppers
they're using fresh chili peppers so
fresh like bell peppers i would imagine
not quite right but there is you put in
a little bit of
a little garlic
salt and pepper so not spicy not spicy
at all this is i'm
in the time period 1915 in toronto this
would probably be you know really good
and if you put in red sweet bell peppers
people would think it was hot because it
had red bits in it
just because my family grew up here i
kind of know what's going on
a couple pages over though they have
this recipe for chili con carne
and it's beef kidney or mutton
four large dried red chili peppers
they don't say which ones to use but you
know if you're getting the dried ones
they're probably hot they're from mexico
or from the south
large onion
small can of tomatoes and a couple of
sections of garlic that's it so there's
no there's no oregano there's no cumin
things that i would think that would go
really well in this dish but
and it talks about the history of the
dish and this recipe in this cookbook in
1915
really surprises me surprises me a lot
and i
i think of it as one of those
aspirational recipes you know if you
if you bought a cookbook today
and you saw this really wild exotic
recipe in the cookbook and
you had to go out and had to order
special ingredients in order to make it
that's kind of what's going on here in
toronto in 1915 i imagine dried hot
chili peppers were
relatively difficult to get
so i'm just gonna
i need to soak these in hot water so i'm
just going to get those ready
okay so what i did was
took the seeds and the stems out
just cut them up with a pair of scissors
and now i'm going to pour some
hot water over them just to soften them
up
then after they're softened put them
into a blender
along with a little bit of the water
that we use to soften them
okay that beef is looking
good looking fantastic
that's simmering away nicely now
we add in
the tomatoes
the garlic
and the chili now
the recipe itself says that i was
supposed to pass
the tomato and the chili through a sieve
um
because in 1919 they didn't have the
technology that we have today but i am
pretty sure that mrs powell who wrote
this cookbook
would have if she had it available to
her been using this blendtec blender um
blends anything and she would have been
very happy to use it
why stay in the past if you don't have
to so i'm just going to stir this
together now it just tells me
to
stew it all together for a short time
and just before service i'm supposed to
season it with salt put the lid back on
and let it stew away
some beans and
some of that chili look at that
hey jules hey glenn hey friends i don't
know a fork spoon
fork spoon maybe spoon
i will try smooth
so instead of beans i'm having refried
beans because i really wanted refried
beans tonight and i wanted to open a
conversation about refried beans when we
were in mexico with on the glen and
friends trip yes people were talking
about which beans you refry
yes black versus pinto yeah and so when
we were in
oaxaca it was always black beans wasn't
it or if i got that reversed no i think
we only had black beans i only had black
beans most the time i was okay
so pinto beans or black beans what do
you refry and where do you live let us
know down in the comments so this is
chili or chili con carne
mm-hmm that's really good
it's quite good now i'm going to have
some with beans just because so it's not
it's really flavorful it's not overly
hot no and it's not
just chili
chili spice flavor like i don't actually
like chili that's just julie doesn't
like chili powder chili
a little bit of rice some beans
that's good
i'm in
okay so
what have we learned
um make it however you want well exactly
i mean it appears it appears
it appears in a bunch of books
there's mexican stew which is
essentially this but has adds potatoes i
think potatoes would be good it'd be
really good in that
sometimes mexican stew had tomatoes and
sometimes it didn't have tomatoes but it
always had potatoes
then you move on to chili or chili con
carne
and sometimes it was like this with or
without tomatoes depending on the recipe
with or without some other spices
depending on the recipe and then you
move a little bit farther north where it
was usually ground beef tomatoes beans
chili powder
what we grew up is
green chili
and then you move to like wisconsin
where they put in spaghetti and i think
spaghetti would be really good in it it
would be good once you be really good in
it so anyway
again um
no judging no judging it's being my
stern face it doesn't matter down
through history this is a recipe that
has changed from where it began you know
thousands of years ago
to where it is today and all of the
in-between just make it how you like it
but that's really good and i'm surprised
it came from a cookbook in toronto in
1915.
they talk about
she goes on in the story to talk about
mole
and how you should get a molcajete in
order to make this correctly
and it just blows my mind that it's in
that that it's in that cookbook it
sometimes amazes me
the things that were available during
different eras that are may or may not
be available to me today yes um
i just it always just blows my mind but
i'm gonna sit down and have supper so
give this one a shot i think it's really
good it's a great starting point for all
kinds of other things but it's really
good just the way it is
thanks for stopping by see you again
soon
you