Brrr. It's time to prepare the Official State Dish of Texas

It's not this cold in El Paso today,  thankfully.

Yes, the cold front blew in last night, just like the weathercasters predicted. Gone were my hopes for a southwestern Indian summer lasting forever.  With highs predicted today only in the 50's (that translates to "really cold" to a southwesterner), I found myself craving a warm bowl of chile con carne.  (It has been the official Texas state dish since 1977.)

Let's get the nitpicking over with first.  "Chile" or "chili"?  My vote is for the first, but sometimes the automatic spell checker doesn't approve of that choice.  There are also other important decisions to be made before making chile con carne.  Beans or no beans?  And just how much chile should be used in chile con carne?

Which brings up another point.  When I use the word "chile" in culinary discussions with friends who are not from the southwest, I generally mean the green or red vegetable.  We eat "chile" in some form almost every day at our house.  But when people without a chile habit say “chile”, they generally mean “chile con carne.”  So when I go into raptures about stuffed “chiles,” I get some strange looks.  I’ll use the shortened name for the dish here. Now that those important points are settled, let’s explore how to make a great bowl of chile. 

Let me confess that my former attempts to produce a bowl of chile that tastes like the restaurant variety have not succeeded.  I think I have discovered the reason.  A recipe in Texas Home Cooking by Cheryl Alters Jamison and Bill Jamison, listed as “Sam Perdergrast’s Old-Time Texas Restaurant Chili” (pp. 125-126), sheds some light on the topic.  They explain that the unflattering term “greasy spoon” to describe an eatery of dubious quality originated from the chile con carne that was served which had “enough grease to lubricate a Model T.”  What an image!

My goal as a home cook is to prepare healthy dishes that are also tasty.  I chose three Texas cookbooks from the kitchen shelf to research chile recipes. And there are many of them!  They appear to have these ingredients in common:

Ground meat

Onions and garlic

Spices like cumin (comino), oregano, salt and pepper

Something tomatoey – tomato sauce or canned tomatoes

Some kind of hot chile – from dried chile pods reconstituted in hot water and blended to chile powder to Tabasco sauce

Cornmeal or masa flour to thicken

Other suggested additions were cooked beans, red or green bell peppers, and even a bar of milk chocolate candy. I have the impression from reading a variety of recipes that there is much room for innovation and individualization of chile con carne recipes.   

So that’s what I’m going to do - experiment with making a healthy but delectable bowl of chile.  I’ll check the kitchen for supplies (it’s way too cold and windy to venture out to the grocery store) and see what I come up with.  If my chile con carne is a success, I’ll feature it in my next blog post.  If not, well, you can guess the result.