The chilli controversy

"Anybody that eats chilli can't be all bad." Pat Garrett

“Chili is one of the great peasant foods. It is one of the few contributions America has made to world cuisine. Eaten with corn bread, sweet onion, sour cream, it contains all five of the elements deemed essential by the sages of the Orient: sweet, sour, salty, pungent, and bitter.” Rex Stout

Last night we were watching one of the endless repeats of the Big Bang Theory, when Mr. know-it-all Sheldon Cooper decreed that the bowl of chilli he had been handed to eat was not real chilli because it had beans in it. Real chilli did not have beans - as the picture above would imply. I was intrigued, because, I have to admit, whenever I have made it (not very often) I have made it with beans - usually red kidney beans. So I looked it up - and it seems the controversy has been going on for at least a hundred years and is still basically unresolved. I will give a summary of what I found, but for a fuller and more interesting history go to the International Chilli Society website. Yes there is an International Chilli Society - and chilli means the dish not the small hot pepper - that is chille.

Chilli, it seems, is the state dish of Texas - from whence Sheldon Cooper comes.

And in Texas they do not put beans in their chilli. There are a few stories on the International Chilli Society website, but a really nice one claims that it originated from cattle drovers. They ate beef - freshly killed - or actually anything else that was available - and there is a fairly alarming list of possibles - and apparently freshly killed beef, really needs spices to disguise the taste. Hence the spices - chilli, oregano, cumin, which they found growing along the cattle trails. The man credited with the dish's invention, used to plant herb gardens along the trails, so that when they passed that way they would have some for the chilli. I must admit that I thought that the recipe I used was Robert Carrier's, who was originally American, so I looked it up, and actually he does not put beans into the dish, though he does serve them with it. When I first made it I followed it faithfully - 1 tablespoon of chilli it said. David and I had to lie down with heart palpitations and much coughing and sweating. How stupid I was. Nowadays I would know that 1 tablespoon was far too much for me. Robert Carrier obviously regards it as a classic dish though, because it features in his New Great Dishes of the World - still with the beans as a side. He describes it as Mexican.

And Mexico - well South and Central America generally is the second origin story. It is well documented that the natives of these countries had dishes contrived from meat, chillies, other spices, capsicum and beans, long before the Conquistadores. So it really can't be said to be a completely original Texan invention can it? And then there is also the theory that it comes from the Canary Islands.

Most likely it is just one of those dishes that has evolved over time in countries that have and use the same ingredients. No doubt there is an Indian curry that is similar.

Nowadays we tend to think of it as American, and specifically what they call Tex-Mex rather than South American, even though the Spanish name, chilli con carne is sometimes used. Chilli con carne though is more specific - it means chilli with meat and chilli, I think, is a more general term and can be applied to more or less anything. Go to Jamie Oliver's website and if you type chilli into the search field you will get 147 recipes. Most of them probably just use chilli, but, at least on the first page, there are several dishes called 'chilli', some of them vegetarian. And he has at least three versions of chill con carne.

So I think that chilli is one of those basic peasant dishes that has evolved over time into a huge number of variations. Scratch the surface of any 'classic dish' and the same thing occurs. This little drawing though probably sums up its generally accepted characteristics.

I doubt I shall be making it any time soon because my husband has developed an aversion to spicy, hot dishes and you really can't have a mild chilli - or can you?

"The beauty of chili to me is that it's really a state of mind. It's what you want when you make it. You can put anything in there you want, make it hot or mild, any blend of spices you feel like at the time. You make it up to suit your mood." Carroll Shelby

That's creative cooking for you in a nutshell.