Chili: Part the First
Every now and then, you make something good. And then you want to tell someone.
Well, when I make something good like a poem or a few pages of prose, I don’t want to tell anyone. I like to enjoy it in a solitary, alienated kind of way, for as long as the joy will last, and I can tell you it doesn’t last long. But when I make a dish and it’s just beyond expectations, I think: Someone needs to know about this.
So, last week we got a flyer saying there was going to be a block party in the neighborhood: a chili cookout. Lu said: “Make some chili, Paul.” I said, “The flyer doesn’t say it’s a chili cook-off, or a chili fest. They say bring something, but they don’t say you have to bring chili.”
“Make the chili, Paul,” said Lu. And that was pretty much all there was to it.
So I let the whole idea ferment, or fester rather, for a while. After a few days, there was an email in my inbox. “Are you on track to make the chili? It’s this Sunday.” Lu and I communicate by email, even though we’re often in the same house. Sometimes it’s better not to have a face-to-face. Anyway, I emailed her back and told her I hadn’t decided what I wanted to make yet, but I was on it. I didn’t hear anything back.
So, on the Thursday before the block party, I suddenly experienced an empty echoey cavern where frantic busy-ness had been, and the whole chili thing popped into my head. Shit, I thought. I’d better get on it.
Truth is, I don’t know much about chili. Oh, I’ve made the usual bowl of slop that we’ve all made at one time or another: hamburger meat and canned kidney beans, garlic, onion, chili powder, maybe some canned tomatoes and cumin. Cook that mess about an hour, stick some in a bowl and throw some sour cream or shredded cheese or onions on it; add Tabasco as warranted. Nothing to write home about, but it more or less gives you the same greasy experience every time. It’s reliable.
This time, however, I was resentful. I resented having to make the chili in the first place. I resented the type casting: “Oh, Paul will make the chili. We don’t have to worry about it. We’ll take credit for it later, but for now, he’s the food guy – let him make it.”
It’s true, maybe no one really thought this. But resentment is a seductive thing; sometimes just an idea is enough to get you riled up. And riled up I was.
When I get resentful, there’s a good chance I’m going to get obsessive. Put a Paul obsessed in the kitchen and weird shit can happen.
Anyway, I decided against burger, and then I decided against beans. Somewhere along the line I’d heard that chili con carne in its most pristine form has no truck with beans. If you can use the word “pristine” to refer to chili. You’ve heard about this too, I reckon, and I don’t know if you’ve done something about it, but I was resentful, so I thought I would. You’re not going to get one fucking bean out of me, I thought, with bitter satisfaction.
Then I decided against tomatoes. And I decided against chili powder. They don’t call it “burger with powder”; they call it chili con carne. Gotta figure the chili pepper part was important to the Mexicans whose special province chili con carne seems to be. Well, maybe it’s not, who knows. Maybe it’s really the Guatemalans who dreamed it up, or some prehistoric Incan fool who got lost on the way to the virgin sacrifice and wound up in Mexico. Maybe it was this Inca, let’s call him Pedro Inca, who in a melancholic cloud brought on him by his unintentional visit north, thought he would, by way of therapy, do something completely unexpected. He would eat meat and chili peppers at the same time. And he did so; and he found that it was good. And maybe, just maybe, Pedro Inca was lionized by the local Aztec food critics for this sly gambit or maybe he was robbed of the glory of his invention by Pedro Aztec, who assassinated him with a fossilized rattlesnake to the heart and then impersonated him at the annual awards ceremony. And this is why we associate chili con carne with the Mexicans. It’s possible. We can’t really know for sure. And it doesn’t really matter.
It wasn’t the provenance of the dish, but its gestalt. I was determined to aim for authenticity of spirit rather than geography. So I started with peppers. I knew chili peppers were the central players in this drama. But which peppers? Of all the peppers with which our modern world is blessed, which peppers would be the right peppers for my chili con carne?
I got in my car and I drove over to the local Whole Foods. And I saw they had fresh chili peppers, and these peppers looked good. This is what they had:
Anaheim
Serrano
Habanero
Poblano
Cubanelle
Jalapeño
The usual suspects. This wouldn’t do. This wouldn’t do at all. This was not the way to my authentic chili con carne.
I made a bee line for the Best Way a few blocks from my house, a supermarket catering to the Hispanic community here. I looked in their chili pepper section, and this is what I found:
Anaheim
Serrano
Habanero
Poblano
Cubanelle
Jalapeño
The usual suspects. O false and traitorous hope! O strumpet Best Way, luring in the innocent seeker with the hope of authenticity, and leaving him bloody and battered on the floor of your commonness!
Even the supermarket known for catering to the Hispanic community had sold its soul to the white man. The gringo. But was I to be defeated by a passel of honky peppers? I tracked down the manager.
“Where are your authentic Latino chili peppers?” I demanded.
“In the authentic Latino produce section,” he replied, laconically. “Next to the authentic Latino yucca.”
“You call those gringo peppers authentic?” I cried.
He rolled his eyes and walked away.
And as my eyes followed his turncoat ass waddling down the aisle, I saw a wall that beckoned to me. As I approached, I could see it was a huge wall of dried chili peppers. My heart sank. Surely the most authentic pepper would be a fresh one, not a dried one. But wait! I reasoned thusly: If dried peppers are fresh peppers with the water taken out, could not dried peppers be made something like fresh by returning the moisture to them?
I eyed the bags of peppers with a fevered lust. I picked my peppers. Not pickled, and not a peck certainly, but peppers nonetheless were picked. I picked the mild New Mexico chilies and a bag of fiery Arbols; I picked some fruity Anchos and some smoky Chipotles. I was no longer conscious of my actions; my hand reached out as though guided by an unseen force. This was the combination I sought: New Mexico, Arbol, Ancho and Chipotle. These would be the rock on which I would build my church of chili con carne. These would be my Four Musketeers.
End of Part the First