So I was doing a book signing the other
day and somebody came up to me and said you got to do a video on the
chili Queens of San Antonio and I was so intrigued by that phrase
alone the Chili Queens of San Antonio that I decided yeah I do need to
do a video on that so here it is, and with that I am making a Texas
style chili using a recipe from 1910. So thank you to Babbel for sponsoring this video
as I talk about chili and it's Texas Queens this time on Tasting History. The immensely quotable Will Rogers once called
chili con carne a "bowl of blessedness", and while I agree I wonder exactly what
type of chili Will Rogers was talking about because there are so
many variations on this dish and everyone seems to think that their
variation is the right one but nobody is so vehement as the Texans when it comes
to their chili being the right version so I am making a Texas style chili. This recipe comes from the first producer of
chili powder, the Gebhardt Chili Powder Company. "Cut two pounds of beef into
one-half inch squares, add about two ounces chopped tallow, then
salt it... heat two tablespoons of lard; add to this a small sized chopped onion; when the onion is about half done add the meat;
stir well until the meat is separated and white, then let steam... over a rather hot fire, stirring frequently until the
juice of the meat is boiled down, and when it starts to fry add about
one and one-half pints of hot water, three tablespoons full of Gebhardt's Eagle Chili
Powder and a few buttons of chopped garlic; stir well and let simmer until meat is tender." So this recipe is pretty basic which
is how most old recipes for chili are, and again since I don't want a bunch
of angry Texans I have opted for one that does not include beans actually in the chili because Texans do not
put beans in their chili today though if you look back through history
most of the recipes from the 19th and early 20th century, at least a good deal of them, actually include the beans in the
chili even when they are from Texas. Let the fighting commence in the comments. Another fight-inducing thing about chili is
exactly where it came from. Is it American or is it Mexican and I actually tend to fall on
the side of it being Mexican because it probably got its form as it is today in Texas
but probably when it was still Mexico, but don't tell that to the author of the 1959
edition of the 'Dicionario de Mejicanismos' who claimed that chili was a "Detestable
food passing itself off as Mexican, sold in the U.S. from Texas to New York."
A dictionary with some very strong opinions though you wouldn't need such a
biased dictionary if you learn Spanish for yourself with a little
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guarantee. Now back to this chili, all in English, what you'll need is: two pounds or one kilogram of
beef chopped into small cubes. I used boneless chuck because it can
withstand a nice long cooking process, but it's not specific so really use whatever
you want but boneless chuck works really well. Two teaspoons of salt, and then two types of fat. You got your quarter cup or 55 grams
of tallow, that's rendered beef fat and two tablespoons or about 30 grams
of lard and that's rendered pork fat. Then a cup of minced onion, three
tablespoons of Gebhardt's Eagle Chili Powder. You can use any chili powder
but this is Gebhardt's, it's still around and they say
it's the the same as it was. I'm going to guess that there are some some little additives but overall the
flavor should be the same. And two tablespoons of minced garlic. So
first mix the beef and the tallow together, then season with the salt and then melt
the lard in a pot and add in the onions. Now this is a lot more fat than one
usually uses to fry onions and frankly you'll notice that this entire
chili is rather fat laden but you know it's from Texas so go big or go home. Let the onions fry for about five minutes moving them around so they don't
burn and then add in the meat. You want to keep turning the meat over to let most
of it get a little sear on the bottom of the pot and then once everything has some color just
leave it be stirring it only every few minutes. The tallow and all of the fat from the
beef itself will melt and you will marvel at the amount of fat in
the pot but it reduces down and finally you're left with just enough fat
that it barely covers the bottom of the pot. Once it's there you can add three
cups or 700 milliliters of hot water and make sure it's hot almost
boiling. Then add in the garlic and finally the chili powder and stir
until everything is well mixed in. Then let the pot come to a boil and lower
the heat and simmer with the lid off for about an hour to an hour
and a half. It really depends on the heat and and exactly what meat you're using. Mine took about an hour to get the meat nice and tender and you shouldn't
have to add any more water. It does reduce down but you also
don't want all of the water to to evaporate because then you'll just burn it. So keep an eye on it and while you do let me tell you about the history of
chili and it's Texas Queens. Now when it comes to the origins of chili there
are just as many stories as there are versions of chili but there are some stories which if not
more credible are at least more entertaining like the one about the Spanish teleporting nun. Yes it was the 17th century and
Sister Mary of Ágreda in Spain kept falling into catatonic
trances for days at a time, and whenever she would wake
up she would claim that she had sent her soul to some far-off distant lands similar to the way that Luke Skywalker did that
Force projection thing in the Last Jedi but instead of fighting with Kylo Ren she was spreading the good word. It was only later that Spanish missionaries
came to believe that Sister Mary was actually the Lady in Blue or La Dama de Azul. This was a blue woman who often appeared in the
folk tales of the Native Americans of the area, and the Spanish when they came in contact
and heard these tales just assumed it was Mary, and it seems that Mary didn't just spread the
good word but she also spread different recipes like one for a stew made with antelope,
or venison, tomato, and chili peppers. Sure Jan. Now a somewhat more credible story is that of the 56 immigrants from
the Spanish Canary Islands who in 1731 settled in the small Texas town of
San Fernando de Béxar, modern day San Antonio. And it's said that these Spanish
settlers brought with them a dish of Moroccan descent because many of the people in the Canary Islands were of
Moroccan descent and it was a stew that had cumin in it and that
eventually became chili con carne. Then maybe that's true except that cumin doesn't
really appear in any of the earlier versions of chili con carne not really until the 20th
century so it doesn't make a lot of sense, and cumin or no chili was
already a thing in the Americas. Stewing meat with chili peppers had kind of been
a thing for hundreds if not thousands of years. In fact at the same time as those 56 Canary Island immigrants came there was
a Swiss Jesuit missionary named Philipp Segesser who wrote that he saw the
native people of Southern Arizona, my home turf, roasting chili peppers and then
grinding them up into a powder and using them to flavor a stew of
meat that had been fried in fat. That's chil,i it just wasn't called chili
that wouldn't happen until the late 19th century. In 1857 there was a book published called 'Chile Con Carne or The Camp and
the Field' by S. Compton Smith It followed his experiences during
the Mexican-American war in 1847 and 48 and it seems that chili was an extremely popular dish amongst both the American and
the Mexican armies at the time. He describes it as a popular Mexican
dish - literally red pepper and meat. Pretty simple. And he has a wonderful
story about this time that the Americans snuck up on an encampment of Mexican soldiers and they did so so fast that
the Mexicans fled and hid, and left their entire camp behind. "But what was most interesting
to our hungry fellows, of all the camp equipage they left behind, were their steaming pots of
chile con carne which, carne which in their hurry to "vamos"
they had left upon the embers." So of course the American
troops start chowing down on the chili but then a group of women who had
been with the Mexican Army also hiding but who had been the ones
doing most of the cooking well when they saw the Americans
eating up all of their hard work, the enemy sitting down to the meal that they
had just prepared they came back into camp, grabbed the chili pots and took it back! And the Americans a little upset that
their chili was now gone which wasn't theirs, they said that you know the
fact that these women did that it was so entertaining to them that it
almost made up for the lack of chili. And that was only the start of the
U.S. military's involvement with chili because in 1882 it was announced that "The secretary of war ordered the
inspector general of the army to place on the supply list for the use of the army the Americanized Mexican food 'chili con carne.' It has been recommended by officers of the army as a most valuable diet and for
its anti-scorubic properties." And it's true that chili can ward off
scurvy because the vitamin C content in a chili pepper is actually more
than in the same amount of an orange which is probably also why the
cowboys of the American West were eating chili because they didn't
have a lot of access to fresh fruit. As far back as the 1850s there are stories of
cowboys all over the American Southwest creating a sort of portable chili. They would take dried meat, fat, and chili peppers, and kind of press them into bricks similar to the pemmican that I made last fall. And it was just spicier, but then they could take it and put it into hot water, and rehydrate it to make a fresh pot of chili. Ingenious! Then in 1881 William Gerard Tobin a former Texas Ranger improved the dried chili brick by creating the first canned chili which he sold on mass to the U.S. Army and Navy. And in 1884 he opened a factory that was going to make a lot of chili using goat meat but he died soon after and the whole thing kind of fell apart. It turns out that people weren't really into goat meat chili. It's almost as bad as the turkey chili that my mom used to pass off to us, it just needs to be beef. And it was beef that became the de facto meat used in San Antonio by the Chili Queens. So the Chili Queens were the name given to the women who sold all manner of chili flavored foods in the plazas of San Antonio during the late 19th and early 20th century. "The fat, tawny Mexican materfamilias were placed before you various savory compounds, swimming in fiery pepper which biteth like a serpent..." That quote from 1874 was actually describing a bowl
of chili and other chili flavored foods that were served in the houses of these women but it was
the same food also prepared in those houses that then they would take out and serve in the plazas. When visiting San Antonio in 1895 Stephen Crane author of 'The Red Badge of Courage' wrote "Upon one of the plazas, Mexican vendors with open-air stands sell food that tastes exactly likepounded firebird brick from Hades - chili con carne, tamales, enchiladas, chile verde, frijoles." He dubbed these plazas the social shrines of the people of San Antonio, and while he describes the frijoles or
beans as kind of being a separate thing from the chili, an Alabama reporter from 1881 described
San Antonio chili "As composed of small bits of beef, beans, and cayenne pepper." Which sounds like the beans were in the chili, a cardinal sin in Texas today. Now these Chili Queens became a sort of tourist attraction for people visiting the city in the early 20th century, and there are descriptions of hundreds of tables being set up as the women came into the plaza with brightly
painted wagons full of chili that they had made at home. They'd build mesquite fires to keep the chili
warm as they dished it up for their customers and sometimes along with the Chili Queens themselves dancers and musicians would come in to entertain people as they ate their chili but as most of the population appreciated the Chili Queens and kind of saw them as a staple of the city the upper crust of San Antonio thought of them more as a nuisance and slowly pushed them out of different plazas until finally they were relegated to Haymarket Square. Then in September of 1937 "Recent action of the City Health Department in ordering removal from Haymarket Square of the Chili Queens and their stands brought an end to a 200-year-old tradition... With the disappearance from the plaza of the chili stands, the troubadours who roamed the plaza for years also have disappeared into the night". There was a public outcry and a couple of years later that chili queens were allowed to come back but only for about a year before again the City Health Department shut them down and they never returned. But the legacy of the Chili Queens did carry on because the famous "Bowl o' red" as some have called it became widely popular all over the United States. Some had become familiar with the dish via military service but it gained mainstream popularity when bowls of chili con carne were served to visitors of the world's Colombian Exposition in Chicago in 1893, and a couple years later a German immigrant Willie Gebhardt invented a shelf-stable chili powder when he ran the Phoenix Cafe in a small town outside of San Antonio. This cafe was actually a rough and tumble saloon that featured an alligator pit, and a place to host badger fights. He had also had a parrot on a perch near the door which he had taught to say "have you paid your bill" but in German which is
definitely more intimidating than if it had been in English. But while the parrot and Badger fights are long gone the chili powder still persists. It made making chili so much easier that it ended
up becoming the flavor associated with most chili in most of the US but while Gebhardt's chili powder may have become the identifiable flavor of most chili everything else about the recipe just kind of went off the rails and people started adding things like tomatoes and corn, potatoes, and sometimes even sweet chilies, and in Cincinnati a version of the dish that is more reminiscent of a Mediterranean meat sauce is served atop spaghetti with cheddar cheese but there are so many types of chili around today that I really can't go through them all but that's also what
makes things like a chili cook-off so much fun, hundreds of different recipes all coming together
to vye for the top chili spot, sometimes trying to out hot each other and some people are really proud to be able to eat those hot chilis like Homer attempting to eat Chief Wiggum's chili which
featured "The Merciless Peppers of Quetzalacatenango!" But I personally have have never been too
partial to anything extremely spicy so let's just see if I can withstand this
chili recipe from 1910. And here we are, Gebhardt's San Antonio style chili. Now usually I like to eat my chili with some cornbread but most of the descriptions from the late 19th and early 20th centuries say that at least in Texas it was served with beans and tortillas so I got some corn tortillas to eat it with but first let me try it just a piece itself. It smells really, really good. Can really smell that chili powder though
and it is quite fatty but here we go. Hm! Wow! That's really good. All right
there's a little kick at the end. Takes a second, but it's not super hot. I thought it would
be because the amount of chili powder in it is like 50% more than the Gebhardt's
recipe from today so I kind of figured but- I don't know. It's not THAT hot. There is some-
there's definitely spice to it but it's not like overwhelming, but yeah this would make actually
like really good soft tacos. Maybe that's what I'll have to eat tonight. I also think that this is going to taste even better tomorrow because like so many stews or things like that it just- it just gets better with with a day in the fridge and then reheat it. The flavors the flavors all really come together. So yeah. Make sure that you have checked out the Tasting History cookbook if you haven't yet, and yeah that's all I got. I will see you next time on Tasting History. I'm gonna eat more of this right now because that's good.
Finally! Been hoping Max would do this. Great history portion, loved the background on Gebhardt’s. Texan raised and I do put beans in my chili. Need more fiber in my life, and when cooked right they thicken the chili and absorb the flavors from around them. Now he just needs to do a Chili Verde or another chili variant…just not that Ohio made skyline business.
Add a book signing in DFW!
I'm in San Antonio, and from what I see this city puts a lot of stock in chili, tamales, and--above all--breakfast tacos. As a native Michigander, I used to think I didn't like Mexican food. Turns out I just don't like BAD Mexican food.
(Although the coney dog with its famous chili-adjacent topping? Not actually invented at Coney Island, but in the good old Mitten State.)
Do more on San Antonio cuisine. We have a wealth of food and history here.