Beans Or No Beans??? Early 1900s Chili Recipes - Old Cookbook Show

welcome friends welcome back to the kitchen as you can see i've got a pile of cookbooks out on the counter top sort of a representative of of of the collection and different variations on the recipe that we're going to do today we're going to do chili or chili con carne or as some of the recipes in these books call it mexican stew and i want to talk through the history of of this recipe a little bit and how it appears in these books and how time and geography change your recipe so i've got the dutch oven here on the on the cooktop medium heat i'm going to put in maybe three tablespoons of bacon fat i want to melt that down now the recipe i'm using says to use lard which is great but i also have bacon fat so i'm going to use that because bacon fat is is better and i know that in this time period a lot of the instructions in these books or the ingredients in the ingredient lists if there is even an ingredient list isn't about being exact but just give you an idea so it would say lard but it could mean any fat that you have in your kitchen it wasn't fully prescriptive it was more descriptive so i've got that we'll just let that come up to temperature now chili chili con carne uh historians generally accept that the first chili recipe published in a cookbook doesn't appear until the mrs owens cookbook in 1880 now this is the third printing from 1883 and by 1883 the recipe's gone they've taken it out um it wasn't deemed to be a very important recipe so it's taken out completely it's not in here and i'd still love to get a copy of the original 1880 so that i could look at it most people say that it's called chili it has elements of chili but it's got a white sauce that's mixed in and the white sauce isn't necessarily something that you usually find in a chili so next in i've got some beef and i've got it cubed up and that goes in and we're just going to start frying that off pan could have been hotter but it's starting to sizzle so leave that to brown now since there's probably already people in the comment section from texas typing in their comment let's address the elephant in the room let's start with origin story none of the origin stories that i hear most loudly and most often do i believe i believe sincerely believe that roasted meat or or cooked meat stewed meat with chili peppers um goes back millennia and that this idea that it was uh european settlers who came and started making this out on the open range while they were you know chasing cattle ignores thousands of years of history of what was happening on this continent before europeans arrived sure beef beef would be a new addition but other forms of meat that were already here would have been stewed with chilis long before westerners or europeans arrive the next thing that i'm probably going to have to discuss is the texas connection because chile texas texas chili i have two cookbooks here from texas first one is from gebhard's and gebhard's is a company that makes chili powder it was in this time period in the 1800s early 1900s one of the most famous companies for making chili powder and they've got a they've got a homemade chili chili con carne recipe that is very sparse not a whole lot of ingredients which makes me you know think that it's pretty close to real then we get to this cookbook um and i'm gonna duck it's from marshall texas last time i checked marshall texas was in texas the chili con carne recipe in this book has tomatoes beans pimiento and kitchen bouquet there's no mention of chili actually in it um paprika i guess is what they're calling pimiento paprika so not doesn't fit with the theory or what the you know contemporary texas chili beanless chili is but when you get into these other cookbooks 1800s early 1900s the farther north you get the more you're going to see beans and part of that i believe is there's two there's a bunch of things going on in texas people i i've spoken to say that you serve beans on the side at some point some cook is going to say why am i serving the beans on the side why am i not just cooking them in since everybody's just mixing everything together on their plate anyway they're mixing the beans and everything together why am i not just putting the beans in the pot another part of it is there would probably be a lot of bean stews with chili peppers where someone had a meagre amount of meat and they put the meat into that and so there's this sort of confluence of two different ideas or two different dishes that become something else and that idea of beans when you get into the 1930s in the depression years beans are something in this dish that extend the protein a cheap readily available protein source that extends the meat or in most cases maybe even replaces the meat and i think that's an important distinction and i'm okay with beans in my chili i really am a great recipe that we come to that i want to talk about is from this cookbook right here it's called recipes compiled from contributed by the women's of circle number one of the presbyterian auxiliary and others cotton plant arkansas 1927 and it's got a couple of recipes in here there's one called mexican stew and it contains potatoes it is essentially the recipe we're making today but it contains potatoes and i think potatoes are a very interesting um very interesting addition to a chili recipe in that contemporary 2022 three weeks ago when i was in mexico in mexico city i saw lots of what i would consider a chili beef chili a couple of other spices and potatoes and so from a contemporary lens what's happening in that cookbook from arkansas in 1927 i think is something that is not out of place in today's uh today's marketplace okay that beef is looking good and brown so now in go some onions so i guess that brings us next to tomatoes the recipe we're making today does contain tomatoes and most of these recipes do the one here from gebhard's there is no tomato this one from arkansas let me just check it again just to make sure because they're getting confused in my brain no tomatoes it's just water and and the chili pepper and the onions and the beef and a clove of garlic but the farther away you get you do start to see tomatoes in it these two are interesting to me these two books i'm going to bring them a little bit closer it's so many books on the go um so the recipe that i'm doing today i'm not going to tell you about it until we get a little closer to the end put the onions in and i'm supposed to fry it down a little bit and i think i've reached the point where we now add in it says a half a cup of water or stock put that in i'm going to scrape up off the bottom and put a lid on and i'm going to turn that down and it says that we stew till meat is tender so these two books one is from illinois and this one is the congressional cookbook recipes submitted by congress people from across the united states uh recipes that they think are representative of where they're from and so this recipe is from wisconsin so i don't know but both of these recipes have chili chili con carne with spaghetti as an ingredient and that kind of that kind of brings me to a crossover with cincinnati chili different animal altogether but it is spaghetti with a spiced meat sort of chili type base which comes back to this book from gebhardt's in texas in the 1920s gebhardt's was selling canned chili so ready-made just heated up chili they also had spaghetti in chile in a can so this idea of serving chili over spaghetti um can be linked right back to the 1920s or the early 1900s in texas and so what i've got here is the tennessee cookbook this is published in 1912. it has a recipe for chili con carne and the instructions are make the scotch stew which is the recipe previous add one quart can of tomatoes run through a sieve add three tablespoons of chili powder cook until juice of tomatoes is absorbed that's their chili concarne recipe and if you go back a page though there's another recipe here called mexican stew and that is much closer to what we're making today and it's even rounded out a little bit better because it has oregano and camino as well as the chili powder so you've got that sort of thing this is the mississippi cookbook this is from 1922. and in here it's got four five it's got five chili concarne recipes and they sort of look like all of the major variations are happening here in these recipes it's not one thing it's not one thing at all you get to this cookbook this is the mixing bowl this is from well in ontario welland is just sort of sort of southwest of us here close to the american border close to buffalo closer to buffalo than i am to buffalo anyway and this is from the 1930s and this is an example of the recipe in here is an example and i'm not making fun of this person at all but the recipe is an example of how an idea travels and traveling with that idea is sort of a name but none of it works and it's called chili kilcarny so they've sort of got the idea um and you're putting in rice onion butter pepper salt and a dash of cayenne along with the hamburger steak and tomato and so they've sort of got the idea but they haven't quite got the idea yet okay let's check the pot oh look at that that's looking really good got some really deep brown flavors happening in the bottom of that pot okay so lid back on let it go and so that brings us to the recipe that we're actually cooking today it is from this cookbook the toronto queen city of canada cookbook this was published here in toronto in 1915 and it has two chili recipes it has a chili con carne beef chili can carne which is not again it's this is not quite right they use sweet chili peppers instead of hot chili peppers they're using fresh chili peppers so fresh like bell peppers i would imagine not quite right but there is you put in a little bit of a little garlic salt and pepper so not spicy not spicy at all this is i'm in the time period 1915 in toronto this would probably be you know really good and if you put in red sweet bell peppers people would think it was hot because it had red bits in it just because my family grew up here i kind of know what's going on a couple pages over though they have this recipe for chili con carne and it's beef kidney or mutton four large dried red chili peppers they don't say which ones to use but you know if you're getting the dried ones they're probably hot they're from mexico or from the south large onion small can of tomatoes and a couple of sections of garlic that's it so there's no there's no oregano there's no cumin things that i would think that would go really well in this dish but and it talks about the history of the dish and this recipe in this cookbook in 1915 really surprises me surprises me a lot and i i think of it as one of those aspirational recipes you know if you if you bought a cookbook today and you saw this really wild exotic recipe in the cookbook and you had to go out and had to order special ingredients in order to make it that's kind of what's going on here in toronto in 1915 i imagine dried hot chili peppers were relatively difficult to get so i'm just gonna i need to soak these in hot water so i'm just going to get those ready okay so what i did was took the seeds and the stems out just cut them up with a pair of scissors and now i'm going to pour some hot water over them just to soften them up then after they're softened put them into a blender along with a little bit of the water that we use to soften them okay that beef is looking good looking fantastic that's simmering away nicely now we add in the tomatoes the garlic and the chili now the recipe itself says that i was supposed to pass the tomato and the chili through a sieve um because in 1919 they didn't have the technology that we have today but i am pretty sure that mrs powell who wrote this cookbook would have if she had it available to her been using this blendtec blender um blends anything and she would have been very happy to use it why stay in the past if you don't have to so i'm just going to stir this together now it just tells me to stew it all together for a short time and just before service i'm supposed to season it with salt put the lid back on and let it stew away some beans and some of that chili look at that hey jules hey glenn hey friends i don't know a fork spoon fork spoon maybe spoon i will try smooth so instead of beans i'm having refried beans because i really wanted refried beans tonight and i wanted to open a conversation about refried beans when we were in mexico with on the glen and friends trip yes people were talking about which beans you refry yes black versus pinto yeah and so when we were in oaxaca it was always black beans wasn't it or if i got that reversed no i think we only had black beans i only had black beans most the time i was okay so pinto beans or black beans what do you refry and where do you live let us know down in the comments so this is chili or chili con carne mm-hmm that's really good it's quite good now i'm going to have some with beans just because so it's not it's really flavorful it's not overly hot no and it's not just chili chili spice flavor like i don't actually like chili that's just julie doesn't like chili powder chili a little bit of rice some beans that's good i'm in okay so what have we learned um make it however you want well exactly i mean it appears it appears it appears in a bunch of books there's mexican stew which is essentially this but has adds potatoes i think potatoes would be good it'd be really good in that sometimes mexican stew had tomatoes and sometimes it didn't have tomatoes but it always had potatoes then you move on to chili or chili con carne and sometimes it was like this with or without tomatoes depending on the recipe with or without some other spices depending on the recipe and then you move a little bit farther north where it was usually ground beef tomatoes beans chili powder what we grew up is green chili and then you move to like wisconsin where they put in spaghetti and i think spaghetti would be really good in it it would be good once you be really good in it so anyway again um no judging no judging it's being my stern face it doesn't matter down through history this is a recipe that has changed from where it began you know thousands of years ago to where it is today and all of the in-between just make it how you like it but that's really good and i'm surprised it came from a cookbook in toronto in 1915. they talk about she goes on in the story to talk about mole and how you should get a molcajete in order to make this correctly and it just blows my mind that it's in that that it's in that cookbook it sometimes amazes me the things that were available during different eras that are may or may not be available to me today yes um i just it always just blows my mind but i'm gonna sit down and have supper so give this one a shot i think it's really good it's a great starting point for all kinds of other things but it's really good just the way it is thanks for stopping by see you again soon you

Channel: Glen And Friends Cooking

Views: 93,065

Keywords: Glen And Friends Cooking, historical cooking, old cookbook show, glen cook, beans in chili, texas chili recipe, community cookbook recipes, community cookbook recipe, old cookbook recipes, chili con carne history, original chili recipe, traditional chili recipe, glen cooks, culinary history, 100 year old recipes, chili recipe, texas chili, chili con carne, gebhardt's chili powder recipe, mexican stew, chili con carne recipe, texas style chili recipe, food history

Id: 1a5ti6iElOE

Length: 19min 58sec (1198 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 04 2022