Descendants of the Jumano people of the American Southwest remember her as “la Dama de Azul,” the Lady in Blue. In the mid-17th century, Jumano legend runs, the mysterious Lady in Blue would at times appear among them teaching, counseling, consoling, inspiring.
The habit of 17th-century Franciscan nuns was distinctive for its long, blue veil. The Franciscan nun Maria de Jesus de Agreda dwelled until the end of her days in a cloistered abbey in the north of Spain. Maria would at times fall into a trance-like state, often for days, awakening to tell of walking among the people of a bright and distant land.
“Chili went national in 1893 when San Antonio set up a chili stand at the Chicago World’s Fair… ”
It was Maria’s custom to make record of her transcendental experiences, and she included among her writings directions for preparing a stew of venison, onions, tomatoes and chili peppers. Sister Maria’s journals are of interest not only for their metaphysical dimension, but because they contain the oldest known written recipe for chili con carne.
Pre-seasoned with that dash of the divine, chili has done pretty well for itself in the last 350 years. Honest, unpretentious, a little vulgar, that plebeian pot of meat and peppers tastes like cactus, campfires and cattle drives in the American mouth. It’s a piquant collision of traditions, the savory soul of the Southwest, pioneer history in a stoneware crock. And despite its Spanish moniker, it’s purely and proudly rojo, blanco y azul.
Indeed, Mexico doesn’t list chili con carne among any of its ancient and honorable cuisines, and many Mexicans consider the humble slop beneath their dietary dignity. Even so, those steeped in the histories are confident that Mesoamericans must have combined chiles with meat at some point, and that the practice traveled north of the Rio Grande in the saddlebags of Mexican vaqueros early in the 19th century.
“As many as 2,500 chili cook-offs are held in the U.S. every year, each one helping to support a worthy local cause.”
Chili quickly came in off of the range. In the mid-1800s, enterprising women known as “chili queens” set up kitchens around San Antonio’s military plaza and sold hot chow by the heaping bowl. Perfect for taming tougher cuts of meat, chili provided an inexpensive and satisfying meal, and its popularity soon expanded across the Lone Star State. At the time, the recipe for chili con carne (chiles with meat) was simple and immutable: cheap cuts of red meat stewed in some combination of ancho, pasilla, guajilla and chipotle peppers. No beans, no tomatoes, no onions, and no arguments.
Chili went national in 1893 when San Antonio set up a chili stand at the Chicago World’s Fair, and chili parlors began serving Texas Red from coast to coast. Greater exposure bred rebelliousness, and by 1940 the typical Midwestern bowlful included beans and tomatoes, and we’ve never stopped tweaking the formula.
Texas Red, enshrined as the state’s official dish in 1977, is properly made with chunks of beef, not ground, and don’t spare the cumin. Cincinnati chili is seasoned with cinnamon, chocolate and Worcestershire sauce, and served over a bed of spaghetti. Springfield “chilli” is the pride of Illinois, which proclaimed itself the “Chilli Capitol of the World” in 1993, and comes to table thinner than most, encouraging aficionados to thicken with crackers to taste. Order a bowl of red on the West Coast and you might find it buried beneath a fresh garnish of cilantro, avocado and pico de gallo. Nobody loves chili more than the Sooners, but Oklahoma is remarkably lax in regulating its composition, blithely permitting everything from sweet corn to masa to garlic paste to liquid smoke into the pot, giving a pass to uncertified toppings like corn chips, raw onion and sour cream, and as often as not dumping the whole shebang over a grilled frank.
Green chili, aka chili verde, usually features pork with tomatillo accents. White chili contains chicken, white beans and white cheddar to thicken. Anchored by Italian sausage, Italian chili blends chili powder with oregano, basil, green peppers and parmesan. Other questionable ingredients enshrined within chili con carne’s national cookbook include peanut butter, raisins, espresso powder, balsamic vinegar, fish sauce, mango, pine nuts, molasses, beer, root beer, macaroni, prickly pear cactus and chewing tobacco. Seriously. It’s the Wild West out there.
If undisciplined, chili has a heart of gold. As many as 2,500 chili cook-offs are held in the U.S. every year, each one helping to support a worthy local cause. The venerable Chili Appreciation Society International (CASI) proctors more than 500 of them annually, raising up to $1 million by the effort. CASI is a tough nut, requiring that entrants hew closely to the Texas Red model, although finely chopped onion and tomato are grudgingly allowed. The smaller, but no less authoritative, International Chili Society (ICS) accepts recipes in categories ranging from red to green to vegetarian and homestyle. In case you’re wondering, “homestyle” means beans. Stir in the countless unsanctioned events bubbling up from Serrano, California to Chili, New York, and it’s been estimated that chili cook-offs raise nearly $100 million annually. Evergreen’s own Big Chili Cook-off raised a record $70,000 for local fire departments in 2024.
Delicious, nutritious and sustaining, chili con carne holds a unique and permanent place on the All-American menu. Moves have been made in the U.S. House of Representatives to declare chili our national dish, so far without success. But it makes no never mind. Chili con carne neither needs nor asks for validation from our hamburger world. Its numbers speak for themselves.
Spicy, savory, patiently simmered, and with or without a dollop of guacamole, a well-orchestrated bowl of chili is a symphony of satisfaction, and maybe even an out-of-body experience.
“Entering one of these hovels, you will find a long, rough table with wooden benches about it, a single candlestick dimly sending its light in the dark recesses of the unceiled [sic] roof, a hard-earth floor on which the fowls are busy bestowing themselves to sleep; a few dishes arranged on the table and glasses and coffee cups beside them. The fat, tawny Mexican materfamilias will place before you various savory compounds, swimming in fiery pepper which biteth like a serpent; and the tortilla, a smoking hot cake, thin as a shaving, and about as eatable, is the substitute for bread.”
—Scribner’s magazine travel writer Edward King, 1874, describing a San Antonio chili house
