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FACTS & FICTION ABOUT
Chili (from the International Chili Society)
From the time the second person on earth mixed some chile
peppers with meat and cooked them, the great chili debate
was on; more of a war, in fact. The desire to brew up the
best bowl of chili in the world is exactly that old.
Perhaps
it is the effect of Capisicum spices upon man’s mind; for,
in the immortal words of Joe DeFrates, the only man ever to
win the National and World Chili Championships, “Chili
powder makes you crazy.” That may say it all. To keep things
straight, chile refers to the pepper pod, and chili is the
concoction. The e and the i of it all.
The great debate, it seems, is not limited to whose chili is
best. Even more heated is the argument over where the first
bowl was made; and by whom. Estimates range from “somewhere
west of Laramie,” in the early nineteenth century—being a
product of a Texas trail drive—to a grisly tale of enraged
Aztecs, who cut up invading Spanish conquistadors, seasoned
chunks of them with a passel of chile peppers, and ate them.
Never has there been anything mild about chili.
Travels through Texas, New Mexico and California and even
Mexico over the years have failed to turn up the elusive
“best bowl of chili.” Every state lays claim to the title
and certainly no Texan worth his comino (cumin) would think,
even for a moment, that it rests anywhere else but in the
Lone Star State—and probably in his own blackened and
battered chili pot.
There may not be an answer. There are, however, certain
facts that one cannot overlook. The mixture of meat, beans,
peppers and herbs was known to the Incas, Aztecs and Mayan
Indians long before Columbus and the conquistadors.
FACT: Chile peppers were used in Cervantes Spain and show up
in great ancient cuisines of China, India, Indonesia, Italy,
the Caribbean, France and the Arab states.
FACT: Don Juan de Onate entered what is now New Mexico in
1598 and brought with him the green chile pepper. It has
grown there for over four hundred years since.
FACT: Canary Islanders, transplanted in San Antonio as early
as 1723, used local peppers, wild onions, garlic and other
spices to concoct pungent meat dishes improvising upon ones
they had cooked for generations in their native land, where
the chile pepper also grew.
Exit fact, enter conjecture.

There is little doubt that cattle drivers and trail hands
did more to popularize the dish throughout the Southwest
than anybody else and there is a tale about a range cook who
made chili along all the great cattle trails of Texas. He
collected wild oregano, chile peppers, wild garlic and
onions and mixed it all with the fresh killed beef or
buffalo or jackrabbit, armadillo, rattlesnake or whatever he
had on hand—and the cowhands ate it like ambrosia. And to
make sure he had an ample supply of native spices wherever
he went, he planted gardens along the paths of the cattle
drives—mostly in patches of mesquite—to protect them from
the hooves of the marauding cattle. The next time the drive
went by there, he found his garden and harvested the crop,
hanging the peppers and onions and oregano to dry on the
side of the chuck wagon. The cook blazed a trail across
Texas with tiny, spicy gardens.
As cattle trail chili grew in popularity throughout the tiny
Texas trail towns, so too, did its devotees. Frank and Jesse
James fell prey to its taste and are said to have eaten a
few bowls of “red” before pulling many of their bank jobs.
At least one town, it is noted, was spared from their
shooting and looting by the local chili parlor. Fort Worth
had a chili joint just north of town and the James boys rode
in there just for the chili, vowing never to rob their bank
because “anyplace that has a chili joint like this just
oughta’ be treated better.”
And Pat Garrett is supposed to have said of William Bonney—Billy
the Kid: “Anybody that eats chili can’t be all bad.”
The entire chili exercise, at that point in history, was
undoubtedly out of necessity. If you have ever tasted fresh
killed beef, you know how much a lot of spices would help
the flavor. There is no question that spices helped preserve
the meat and often masked the flavor of meat that was near
spoiling; so the trail cook frequently brewed up chile con
carne, which is simply the Spanish way of saying “peppers
and meat.”
How Hot is Hot?
According to NH Sunday News
columnist John Clayton in an article dated 1/27/08 there
is a way to measure the heat of chile peppers. Chemist
Wilbur Scoville invented a scale to determine the heat
of a given chile pepper in 1912.
“For purposes of comparison, a red bell pepper rates
zero on the Scoville Scale. The average Pepperoncini—those
light green peppers that come standard on most Greek
salads—checks in between 100 and 500 and your garden
variety Jalapeno ups the ante to 2,500 – 5,000 Scovilles.
The match gets exponential after that. The predominant
peppers in your high-end, high heat, hot sauces are the
Peri-Peri, Habanero and Scotch Bonnet. Eat one raw and
you’d be flirting with 100,000 to 350,000 on the
Scoville Scale.”
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