Lifestyles
John E. Phillips
Chili Nation
“Can I have a bowl of your chili?” I asked Jim Brownlee at my hunting club. Brownlee replied, “You’ve got to have a pint of Häagen-Dazs ice cream to eat and coat your stomach lining with first to keep my chili from eating through it.”
As I looked around the table, I saw grown men with sweat on their brows, tears in their eyes and smiles on their faces eating this camp house grub. The secret to Brownlee’s heart-stopping chili included a combination of red, black and white pepper. Chowing down this stuff tested the manhood of the hunting club’s members more than it tempted their culinary taste buds.
You don’t have to make scalding-hot chili. Many fine chefs prepare chili that’s sweet, sour, hot or mild and made from goose, hot dog, hamburger, pork, beef, buffalo, venison and even squirrel. You can make chili with or without a wide variety of meats, spices and beans. Chili’s a popular stew from Alaska to Mexico and countries around the world. If you’re wondering how to define chili and learn its origins, and why this country has gone chili-cookin’ and chili-eatin’ crazy, here’s the scoop.
The History Of Chili
Library of Congress
There’s no real proof as to who first invented chili. The native peoples of South Texas, Mexico and Latin American countries raised chilies before the Spanish slipped across the Atlantic and wreaked havoc on the New World.
Many chili aficionados believe that when the Spanish explorers moved into what’s now California, Mexico and other parts of the Americas in the 1500s and 1600s, they might have substituted spices from the Old World with some of the chili peppers found in the New.
Mariano Rosales/ICS
The San Antonio Chili Queens, a chili organization, challenged others by saying they’d cooked the first pot of chili in the 1800s. But cattle drive chuck wagon cooks considered themselves the first chili mavens, whipping up their mess for hungry cowboys. Because the preserved meat often tasted tough and foul, the chuck wagon chefs added enough chili peppers to the stew to hide its true flavor. Also, prison cooks in Texas, who generally had the oldest, worst cuts of meat to work with, staked their first-to-cook chili claims, arguing that they added beans and spices, like chilies, to the stew they fed the prisoners to disguise the meat flavor and provide prisoners with protein—essential stuff to power the chain gangs.
The nationwide chili craze probably started when Texas entrepreneur and racing legend Carroll Shelby from Dallas, and his attorney partner, David Whitt, tried to sell 150,000 acres of rocks and rattlesnakes. A public-relations expert recommended they, “Have a chili cook-off to bring people to the property to taste the chili.” At that time, no one had ever heard of a chili cook-off, but everyone knew at least ten people who thought they had the world’s greatest chili recipes. After this success in 1967, Shelby decided to prove who made the best chili by holding the first national chili cook-off.
Chili Equals Millions For Charity
Mariano Rosales/ICS
Chili cook-offs held throughout the country today fall under the auspices of the International Chili Society (ICS) to raise money for civic and non-profit organizations. This is done by ranking the quality of the chili entries. They also provide fun competitions for people who love to cook. In the championships, most cooks use fairly conservative recipes of meats and spices, however, in local chili cook-offs you’ll find some really strange ingredients in the mixtures.
“We’ve had contestants who swear that rattlesnake meat makes the best chili; others who claim you can’t beat alligator-meat chili, and still other chefs who report wild game chili prepared from seven different wild animals tops the taste test,” says Carol Hancock, the owner and CEO of ICS. “Someone even has made calamari chili with the squid tentacles visible.”
Library of Congress
Hancock has owned ICS since 2000, after purchasing it from Carroll Shelby. Over the last 41 years, the ICS’s 200 sanctioned cook-offs, held from Canada to Mexico each year, have raised over $81 million for charity.
Jerry Buma won the 2007 World Championship Chili Cook-off (WCCC), which featured 400 chili cooks from state and regional qualifying events across the United States and several foreign countries. Buma took home $30,000 in prize money in Omaha, Nebraska, for his team, with other teams winning smaller cash prizes. The WCCC included red chili, chili verde (green chili), salsa and restaurant competitions, a daily People’s Choice Chili contest, live stage entertainment, craft and food vendors and the crowning of Miss Chili Pepper and Mister Hot Sauce.
According to Hancock, “The contestants hand us the winning recipe, which becomes public domain, before we give them the winning check, and then we put the recipe on the ICS website.”
My Chili’s Better Than Your Chili
Have you ever heard the term “too many cooks in the kitchen”? It’s a problem particularly affecting chili cook-offs. Few individuals compete in chili cook-offs, and generally a team of people works together to produce the best pot of chili they can muster. Sometimes, however, the chili-cooking team members want to tell others how to cook, and every member of a chili cook-off team has a specific set of taste buds that appreciates different flavors. Managing a team to produce the world’s best chili requires the wisdom of Solomon, the patience of Job and the bulldog tenacity and leadership skills of the famous World War II general George S. Patton. Every chili cooking team names one person as head chef to oversee the cooking, the seasoning, the tasting and the development of the recipe.
courtesy The Exceptional Foundation of Alabama
Also, how to split up the prize money among members of a winning team can spell problems. A chili cook-off has more bubbling and stewing cooking than what you see in the pots. Blending the personalities, the taste buds, the dispositions and the disbursement of the money makes for a complicated task, and requires much more blending than the ingredients in the team’s chili.
“My husband Dave and I competed in chili cook-offs with him as the head chef from 1979 to 1983,” Hancock comments. “After our team came in near the top several times, Dave told me, after we’d argued, ‘Well, if we’re going to win one of these chili cook-offs, I guess you’ll just have to do it yourself.’”
Carol Hancock took the team’s lead in 1983 and explains, “We kept working and won first place in 1985. Dave was supportive, which is the same story you’ll hear about many of our husband/wife teams.”
But competitive chili cook-offs probably have caused more husband-and-wife arguments than what to name the baby. When a wife’s chili wins, her husband always believes he can create a better-tasting chili. Many husbands compete in chili cook-offs after their wives win championships. Four wives have won the WCCC with their husbands following them to the winners’ circle in later years.
A Lifetime Sport
J.R. Knudson of Granite Bay, California, the 2006 champion, won at the age of 90. He didn’t start cooking chili until he was 65 years old.
Prior to 1976, winners received only a trophy and bragging rights. To award prize money, the WCCC needed sponsors, but the sponsors didn’t want to travel to the Tropico Goldmine in the middle of nowhere. Since then, the ICS Championship has moved from city to city, including Reno and Las Vegas, Nevada, and Rawhide, Arizona.
“J.R. always brought a team of 30 people with him from his and his wife’s square-dancing club,” Hancock recalls. “He outfitted them in white and red outfits and cowboy hats, and they square danced at the cook-off. I attended his 90th birthday celebration in 2006, and asked J.R., ‘Why don’t you bring all the people back to the cook-off and square dance anymore?’ He smiled and said, ‘Carol, they’re all dead.’”
Mariano Rosales/ICS
Anyone can enjoy competitive chili cooking regardless of age, strength or sex. As long as your taste buds hold up, and you can come up with new ideas, you can have a career as a competitive chili chef. Whether you like to cook chili for fun, raise money for charity, compete for thousands of dollars or provide a great-tasting meal for your family and friends, chili cooking’s fun and a creative way to spice up a steaming hot bowl of grub.