 |
 No dust cover to show off on
this one. This was the first book in the collection. What better? Chili and
milk. I have to admit that I have not as yet made HAS's receipt, but I will
soon. (The dust cover pictured here I got by purchasing another copy of
the book, not signed, but now the book feels complete).
In recent investigation of web sites devoted to Chili, I have found a
number of differing opinions on this contest. Some have a number of facts
different than in the book, some actually still criticize Smith for his
writings on Chili. I have to say, this has to be H. Allen's most controversial
novel.
The Recipe
Make sure you have good meat_ three pounds of lean chuck, or round, or
tenderloin tips. Be sure the meat is trimmed down to where there is not a
shred of gristle in it. Texans are great gristle eaters and I find most of
their chili inferior for that and other reasons. The poor creatures just
know any better. Out, then, with all gristle! Have the meat course ground.
Sear it in an iron kettle. If you don't have an iron kettle you are not
civilized; go out and get one. Don't break up the chunks of beef. It is good
to have lumpy meat in your chili. When you've got it seared, add one or two
small cans of tomato paste or tomato sauce or if you want to use fresh or
canned tomatoes put them through a colander. Now chop one or two onions and,
if you hanker for it, half a bell pepper. Add these ingredients to the pot
with a quart of water. Crush a couple or ore cloves of garlic and then add
about half a teaspoon or oregano, maybe a couple of pinches of sweet basil,
and a quarter teaspoon of cumin seed or cumin powder. A lady in San Diego
has written me that she buys the cumin seed whole, roasts it in an iron
skillet, then uses a rolling pin to convert it into a powder - she says
store bought cumin powder can become stale. A perfectionist. Now put in some
salt and for a starter, two tablespoons of chili powder. If you can get the
Chimayo ground chilies, packaged in Albuquerque, do so by all means. I will
speak of it later, for I think it is the best I've ever used. Sometimes when
they are available I use chili pods but don't be skittish about using a good
brand of chili powder. Simmer your chili for an hour and a half or longer,
adding some Ac'cent to sharpen the flavor, and then about ten minutes from
conclusion, add your beans. Use pinto beans if you can get them; if they are
not available, canned kidney beans will do. Simmer a bit longer, doing some
tasting and as the Gourmet Cookbook has it, "correct seasoning." When
you've got it right, to suit your personal taste, let it set a while. It
will taste better the second day, still better the third, and absolutely
superb the fourth. Texans consider it a bloody sacrilege to cook beans with
chili. I say they're all daft. They also scream bloody murder at the idea of
any sweet pepper being included. You'll have to make up your own mind - just
don't let their raucous way of talking overpower you. On a personal note: I
cannot eat chili without a large glass of cold milk at my elbow. No beer, no
water, no wine - just cold milk.
Here is an interesting item I found, a letter to an editor where HAS
refers to his up coming Chili article and his feeling that it will get a huge
reaction.. which it did.
Nobody Knows More About Chili Than I Do
By H. Allen Smith
When I was a boy of ten in Decatur, Illinois, my mother
gave me twenty cents every morning, half of it for carfare to school, the
remaining dime for my lunch. I could have spent that dime on candy or ice
cream, but I can’t recall that I ever did, because it was at this magic and
benign moment in time that I discovered chili.
Day after day I went to Chili Bill’s joint a couple of blocks from the
school, sat at a scrubbed wooden counter, and for ten cents got a bowl of
steaming chili, six soda crackers and a glass of milk. That was livin’!
I have been a chili man ever since those days. Nay, I have been the
chili man. Without chili I believe I would wither and die. I stand without a
peer as a maker of chili and as a judge of chili made by other people. No
living man, and let us not even think of woman in this connection, no
living man, I repeat, can put together a pot of chili as ambrosial, as
delicately and zestfully, as the chili I make. This fact is so stern, so
granitic, that it belongs in the encyclopedias, as well as in all standard
histories of civilization.
That is the way of us chili men. Each of us knows that his chili is
light-years beyond other chili in quantity and singularity; each of us knows
that all other chili is such vile slop that a coyote would turn his back on
it.
My brother Sam believes that he should be given the Nobel Prize for
chili-making. He and I didn’t speak for a year and a half because of our
clash of view on chili-making. Word got to me that Sam was telling people
that our pop had called him the greatest chili maker in all Christendom. I
knew this to be a falsehood; my father has said that I was the
greatest. My sister Lou tried to deescalate our feud by saying that pop
actually had remarked that he was the greatest chili-maker in the civilized
world.
Brother Sam has gone along for years making chili without so much as a whiff
of cumin seed in it, and cumin seed is an essential to chili as meat is to
hamburger. I was at Sam’s house once and in a moment of fraternal feeling
ate a spoonful of his foul chili. I remarked helpfully that it had no cumin
seed in it and Sam said that I could leave his fireside and never come back.
“One bowl of your chili,” said I, “would pollute the waters of the Great
Salt Lake.” And off I stomped.
Thus began the feud and it came to an end only after news reached me that
Sam was warring on another chili front. He and I both believe that proper
chili should be soupy, with lots of broth. He has a friend named Van Pelt
who composes thickened chili, Texas style. My chili and Sam’s chili are
eaten with a soup spoon; Van Pelt eats his from a plate with a fork. Sam and
Van Pelt broke off relations for a while after a highly seasoned argument
over thin verses thick. Van Pelt contended that Sam’s chili should be eaten
through a straw and Sam said that Van Pelt’s lava like chili could be molded
into balls and used to hold down tent flaps in a high wind. I was proud of
my brother after that; he stood firm against the wretched sort of chili that
is eaten from a plate with a fork.
I voted for LBJ in 1964, but I now renounce that vote, for I didn’t know of
his evil ways with chili. Down on the Pedernales, the President has his
chili put together by Mrs. Zephyr or that piebald old character Walter
Jetton, who spends his time at the ranch barbecuing up a storm and talking
in an ignorant fashion about chili. Miz Wright serves chili without
beans. Walter Jetton has two recipes: in one he ignores beans, in the
other he adds beans and thickens things with cracker meal. There’s an old
Texas saying that originated in the cow camps, concerning any range cook
whose grub was consistently miserable. Of him the cowhand grumbled, “He
ain’t fit to tote guts to a bear.” That, precisely, is what I say of Mr.
Cracker Meal Jetton.
You may suspect, by now, that the chief ingredients of all chili are fiery
envy, scalding jealousy, scorching contempt and sizzling scorn. The
quarreling that has gone on for generations over New England clam chowder
versus Manhattan clam chowder (the Maine legislature once passed a bill
outlawing the mixing of tomatoes with clams) is but a minor spat alongside
the raging feuds that have arisen out of chili recipes.
A fact so positive as the fact that chili was invented by Texans will, by
the very nature of its adamantine unshakability, get shook. Lately it has
become fashionable to say chili; (contrary to all popular belief), was first
devised by Mexicans and then appropriated by the Texans. Some of the newer
cookbooks come right out and say that chili is the national dish of Mexico.
In Elena Zelayeta’s Secrets of Mexican Cooking it is asserted that
the popular Mexican dish, Carne en Salsa de Chili Colorado-meat in red chili
sauce-is much the same as the chili con carne of Texas. “It is a famous
Mexican dish,” says Señora Zelayeta, “that’s been taken and made famous by
the Lone Star State.” This lady, one of the most respected of contemporary
authorities on Mexican cuisine, then proceeds to destroy every shred of her
authority by suggesting that a can of hominy goes well in a pot of chili. On
the other hand, if there is any doubt about what the generality of Mexicans
think about chili, the Diccionario de Mejicanismos, published in
1959, defines chili con carne as “detestable food passing itself off as
Mexican, sold in the U.S. from Texas to New York.” The Mexicans in turn get
told off in a 14th Century English Herball, or General Historie
of Plantes, in which is written of the chili pepper: “It killeth dogs.”
I am a frequent visitor in Mexico, and once, in a sportive mood, I decided
to introduce chili into Mexico, get the Mexicans to making it in their homes
and setting up chili joints along the highways. I have a good friend, once a
novice bullfighter that failed at that trade, who is maitre d’ hotel of a
large restaurant. When he found out what I was doing, he spoke to me in soft
and liquid accents: “If I ever hear you spick the words of chili con carne
one more time in our beloved raypooblica, pues, I am not in the custom of
spitting in the eye of gringos, but I will spit in your eye with glory and
speed and hardness.” He didn’t make it with the bulls but I felt that he
would make it with me, and so I gave up the chili-con-carnization of Mexico.
One present-day dabbler in chili lore has come up with a shocking discovery
which he believes is proof that chili con carne had its origin in Mexico.
Cited as the classic work by Denal Diaz del Castillo, which chronicles the
invasion of Mexico by Cortez and his conquistadors in the 16th
Century. Diaz reports that he witnessed a ceremony in which some of his
Spanish compadres were sacrificed by Aztec priests, and then butchered;
chunks of conquistadore meat were thrown to the populace and these people
rushed home and cooked them with peppers, wild tomatoes, and a herb that
apparently was set down as the true origin of chili. I dislike having to way
it, but if you are going to adopt this recipe, it must begin, “First, catch
yourself a lean Spaniard.”
I know of only one Texan who has the facts straight on the origin of chili –
Charles Ramsdell, author of an excellent history of San Antonio. It is clear
from the delving, as well as my own, that chili con carne had its happenings
in San Antonio. Was it a dish contrived by Mexican of old San Antonio de
Bejar? No. Was it put together by white Texans? Not at all. You’d never
guess in eight centuries. Chili was invented by Canary Islanders. In the
1720’s the Spanish were in command of the town, which they had founded, but
the French were pushing in from the East and an appeal went out to the King
of Spain to send some settlers. The king obliged half heartedly, shipping
sixteen families out from the Canary Islands. They established themselves in
rude huts on the spot now known as the Main Plaza. In their homeland, these
people were accustomed to food made pungent with spices. They liked hot
peppers and lots of garlic and they were acquainted with oregano. So they
looked around to see what was available in foodstuffs in their new home and
they came up with a stew of beef and hot peppers and oregano and garlic and,
I make bold to believe, tomatoes and onions and beans. It is my guess, too
that they managed to get hold of some cumin seed, which comes chiefly from
North Africa. That’s the way it happened and any Texas historians who
dispute me can go soak their heads.
There are friends incarnate, mostly in Texas, who put chopped celery in
their chili, and the Dallas journalist Frank X. Tolbert, who has been touted
as the Glorious State’s leading authority on chili, throws in corn meal.
Heaven help us one and all! You might as well throw some puffed rice, or a
handful of shredded alfalfa, or a few maraschino cherries.
Let it be understood that I am well disposed toward Texans and enjoy
visiting their state; I’m tolerant of all their idiotic posturing, of every
one of their failings, save only this arrant acclaim of superiority in the
composing of chili. Mr. Tolbert of Dallas, who appears to be spokesman for
the group called the International Chili Appreciation Society, declares that
acceptable chili should contain no tomatoes, no onions, and no beans. This
is a thing that passeth all understanding, going full speed. It offends my
sensibility and violates my mind. Mr. Tolbert criticizes Lyndon Johnson’s
chili recipe because it leaves out beef suet and includes tomatoes and
onions. Yet the President’s chili contains no beans. To create chili without
beans, either added to the pot or served on the side, is to flout one of the
basic laws of nature. I’ve been told that when I was a baby and it came time
to wean me, I was fed Eagle Brand Milk with navy beans frapped into it.
Thereafter, all through childhood and adolescence, I ate beans three for
four times a week. If Chili Bill, back there in Illinois, had served his
chili without beans, I would surely have deserted him and bought chocolate
sodas for my lunch.
Texas has at least one chile scholar owning a glimmer of intelligence: Maury
Maverick, Jr., son of the former Mayor of San Antonio and Rooseveltian
Congressman. The younger Maury is a lawyer and a true chili man in one
respect – he speaks out against other chili cooks saying, for example, of
California chili: “With all that goddamn sweet stuff in it, it’s like a
strawberry sundae.”
As for Southern California, my friend Fred Beck, a gourmet and
semi-professional wine taster, adduces evidence to suggest that Los Angeles
is the chili capital of the world. (The title, by the way, is claimed by San
Antonio and by the little town of Terlingua in the Big Bend country, and
lately by Dallas.)
Mr. Beck tells me that chili was once called “size” in the town known to him
as Lil-ole-ell-ay. “Size” came into usage by way of one Ptomaine Tommy, once
proprietor of the largest and best known chili parlor in the city. Ptomaine
Tommy served straight chili and an epical Southwestern variation, a
hamburger smothered with chili. He had two ladles, a large and a small. When
a customer ordered straight chili, he got out the large ladle. When he
wanted the other, he usually said “Hamburger size.” So Ptomaine Tommy put up
one sign that read HAMBURGER SIZE 15¢, and another that read CHILI SIZE 20¢.
Other chili joints followed suit and before long chili was know throughout
Los Angeles as “size”. They’d say, “Just gimme a bowl of size.”
Mr. Beck speaks, too, of the era when the architecture went kooky in Los
Angeles and commercial structures were designed to suggest the nature of
trade conducted within. There was a building on Pico shaped like a
coffeepot, with steam issuing from its spout. A weenie stand on La Cienaga
was a large hideous representation of a frankfurter. Then came the chain of
Chili Bowls. It was quickly noted by the always perceptive Angelenos that
these structures were shaped like giant chamberpots, san handles, so it
became customary to say, “Let’s drive over to the pot for a bowl of chili.”
During my probings into the story of chili, I stumbled on a fact that made
my heart leap. There is a town in called Chili in my state, New York, Texans
pay not even lip service to their chili, for they have no town of that name.
As for the New York community, just west of Rochester (there is also a North
Chili nearby), I was soon disillusioned.
I telephoned my friend Judge Ray Fowler of Rochester, “Why did they call the
town of Chili by that name?” I asked him. “Never heard of it,” he replied.
“How do you spell it?” I spelled it. “Oh,” he exclaimed, “ you mean Chy-lye.
The early settlers named it in honor of Chile’s breaking away from Spanish
rule.”“So,” I said, “they misspelled it and then mispronounced it. And it
has nothing whatever to do with chy-lye con carne?” “Nothing at all.”
Just writing about this makes me disconsolate, so let us pass on to the chy-lye
that comes in a bowl. The secret of making superior chili lies first in the
ingredients and second in the genius of the cook. Nothing should ever be
measured. Experimentation is the thing. Those blessed Canary Islanders in
San Antonio wouldn’t have known a measuring spoon from an electric carving
knife. Spanish cookbooks never issue peremptory orders, for that would not
be polite. They speak of “maybe fifteen centavos’ worth” of parsley, a
handful of so-and-so, and maybe a bunch of butter and a few “teeth” of
garlic if you have some in the house.
My daughter follows my haphazard methods and turns out chili that is the
sensation of her set. She says she passes my recipe along to her
chili-loving friends and converts the ignorant to it, and all hands proclaim
it to be the best of all possible chilis. That’s what she tells me. Whenever
I hear those heartwarming reports I feel so bucked up that I give her a trip
to Mexico or Puerto Rico. Much the same thing happens in the case of my son,
though he tells me he composes my chili with the doors locked and the shades
drawn. He lives in Texas. For a time, I wanted to establish that lovely
tradition, the old family recipe, a secret that wild horses couldn’t drag
out of my descendants. A family is not a true entity unless it has in its
archives a fabulous secret recipe. But, my formula is out and rapidly
spreading, so I give it to the world…..
|
