Chili Origins and History
The straight story on the origin of chili is difficult to determine, as it’s mixed with much conjecture and story-telling.
General consensus dates chili’s beginnings to the mid-1800s, when Texas trail cooks had to feed hungry cowboys on long drives, using whatever ingredients were on hand. That meant beef, buffalo, venison, or rattlesnake, chiles, wild garlic, onion, and herbs.
Inventive cooks discovered they could make nonperishable trail food by pounding together dried beef, fat, chile, and salt. These “chili bricks” could be soaked in water during the day and boiled at dinnertime with garlic and cumin to make a hearty stew.
Other sources claim that chili was invented in San Antonio by “Chili Queens” – Mexican women who sold stew made with dried chiles and beef from open-air stalls and colorful chili wagons in the city’s military plaza. The Chili Queens remained an attraction in San Antonio until the early 1940s.
As chili’s popularity spread, chili parlors began to spring up in Texas trail towns and other places in the West. It is said that Frank and Jesse James refused to rob the bank in the town where their favorite chili parlor was located. By the depression years, chili joints could be found in practically every town in the country.
Chasen’s Restaurant Beverly Hills raised the status of chili in the 1960′s by making its concoction famous. It was reported that Elizabeth Taylor had some shipped to her in Rome while filming the movie Cleopatra.
Chili Quotations
"If you think chili needs meat you don’t know beans!’
– Sid Lerner, founder of Meatless Monday
"Wish I had time for just one more bowl of chili.’
– alleged last words of Kit Carson, frontiersman
"My feeling about chili is this: Along in November, when the first northern strikes, and the skies are gray, along about five o’clock in the afternoon, I get to thinking how good chili would taste for supper. It always lives up to expectations. In fact, you don’t even mind the cold November winds.’
– Lady Bird Johnson, U.S. First Lady
"Chili concocted outside of Texas is usually a weak, apologetic imitation of the real thing. One of the first things I do when I get home to Texas is to have a bowl of red. There is simply nothing better.’
– Lyndon B. Johnson, 36th President of the United States
"Next to jazz music, there is nothing that lifts the spirit and strengthens the soul more than a good bowl of chili. Congress should pass a law making it mandatory for all restaurants serving chili to follow a Texas recipe.’
– Harry James, horn player
"Whenever I meet someone who does not consider chili a favorite dish, then I’ve usually found someone who has never tasted good chili.’
– Jan Butel, author of ‘Chili Madness,’
"Chili is much improved by having had a day to contemplate its fate.’
– John Steele Gordon
"Chili is not so much food as a state of mind. Addictions to it are formed early in life and the victims never recover. On blue days in October, I get this passionate yearning for a bowl of chili, and I nearly lose my mind.’
– Margaret Cousins, novelist
"The aroma of good chili should generate rapture akin to a lover’s kiss.’
– motto of the Chili Appreciation Society International
