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Mexican Chile con Carne
Cut into dice sufficient cold lamb, beef, or veal to make 2 1/2 cupfuls. Season with a tablespoonful of onion juice and a teaspoonful of grated nutmeg and sweet marjoram, mixed. Heat a large, heaping tablespoonful of butter in a frying-pan, and when it bubbles stir in 1 1/2 tablespoonfuls of flour. Stir until smooth and thick; then pour in a cupful of soup stock or good gravy, add a teaspoonful of salt. Put the meat with the seasonings into this sauce and add a small, sweet red pepper cut in rings. Simmer together five or ten minutes and serve very hot on squares of hot buttered toast.
A late-Victorian American kitchen's idea of chile con carne: a flour-thickened hash of leftover roast meat, bound in gravy and served on toast. Read it as a creamed-meat entree rather than anything from Mexico, and it works well.
- The hinge: it is a leftovers dishThe meat is already cooked and only needs warming through in the sauce. Five to ten minutes of simmering is right; longer will dry out diced roast lamb or veal and turn it stringy.
- 2 1/2 cupfuls of meatRoughly 12 to 14 oz of cold cooked meat cut in 1/2-inch dice. That is about the yield of a modest Sunday roast's remains, and it feeds three or four on toast.
- Onion juiceA period shortcut: onion was grated and the liquid pressed out, so the flavour went in without visible pieces. Grate half a small onion on the fine side of a box grater and squeeze it through a sieve, or substitute a scant tablespoon of very finely grated onion.
- The seasoning is not chile seasoningA teaspoonful of nutmeg and marjoram mixed, with a single sweet red pepper, gives a mild, faintly sweet sauce. If you want actual heat you are writing a different recipe; note that the teaspoonful covers both spices together, so nutmeg amounts to perhaps half a teaspoon, which is already assertive in this quantity.
- Sweet red pepperA small red bell pepper or a mild red frying pepper, cored and sliced into thin rings. Sliced raw and simmered ten minutes it will still be firm; if you prefer it soft, soften the rings in the butter before adding the flour.
- Butter and flourA heaping tablespoon of butter is close to 1 1/2 tablespoons, near enough to balance the 1 1/2 tablespoons of flour. Cook the roux a minute before adding liquid so the sauce does not taste pasty.
- Soup stock or good gravyA cup of unsalted or lightly salted stock. With modern commercial stock, hold back the teaspoon of salt until you have tasted the finished sauce.
- ServingThick-cut white bread, toasted and buttered, cut into squares or triangles. Have the toast ready before the sauce finishes, since it goes soft quickly under a hot sauce.
Chile con carne reached the English-language cookbooks of the 1890s and 1900s largely by reputation, and compilers who had never eaten it often filled in the blanks with the sauces they already knew. What survives here is the outline of the name and almost nothing of the dish: no chiles in any quantity, no cumin, no long-simmered tough cut, but a butter-and-flour sauce, nutmeg, marjoram, and toast points, all standard equipment for turning cold roast meat into a hot entree. Books of this type ran on that problem, since a household without reliable refrigeration had to use up a joint within a day or two, and "entrees" sections are full of creamed and curried and deviled leftovers dressed in a foreign name. The genuine article, generally traced to the cooking of Texas and northern Mexico and popularised through San Antonio's chile stands in the same decades, is a much plainer thing built on dried red chiles and beef.