Cookbook author Jane Butel has campaigned for years to have chili declared America's national dish. She failed only by degree.
Chili, lovingly known as the "bowl of red," is certainly the national dish of winter.
"What's not to like?" asked Butel, author of the new Chili Madness: A Passionate Cookbook, which updates her best-seller of 30 years ago.
"It is easy to make. It comes in one pot. It improves with time and reheating. It makes enough for a crowd. And it is exciting to the human taste buds."
According to Butel's research, chili either originated on the long cattle drives out of beef-rich Texas, or it was inspired in the 1600s by a beautiful nun who recited the recipe after emerging from a trance. She never left her convent in Spain, but magically knew of the chile plants of the American Southwest.
Chili was popularized in San Antonio in the 1800s when, in the evenings, townspeople would stroll the plazas and sample the different recipes offered from carts by the chili queens.
Soon enough, there were chili parlors and chili societies and chili cook-offs and chefs who swear their chili recipes will die with them.
Stephanie Anderson, who set out to collect the best restaurant chili recipes for her cookbook, Killer Chili, was rebuffed by every chef she asked in Cincinnati, home of the famous "Cincinnati Chili," which is served over pasta and layered with cheese, beans and onions.
"Some of them just laughed and hung up on me," she said. "Others told me they would tell me, but then they'd have to kill me. Others said that no one at the restaurant knows the whole recipe because each cook goes into the kitchen alone and adds just two ingredients."
One of the charms of chili is that it can be made with just about any meat - short ribs, sausage, wild game or seafood - just about anything from your spice cabinet and just about anything from the vegetable bin of your refrigerator. Marion Cunningham writes in The Fanny Farmer Cookbook, "There are probably more chili recipes than chocolate chip cookie recipes."
Nancy Longo, chef of Baltimore's Pierpoint restaurant, makes a traditional chili, but she serves it over pasta in a tip of the hat to a Cincinnati chef who has become a close friend.
"I am a purist, I guess," she said, while ladling up a steaming bowl of her chili. "There are certain things you should not completely dismantle for the sake of being modern. We should not completely discard the traditional."
