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Chile Con Carne (Mrs Quinten T butter large)
Mrs. Quinten. 2 T butter 2 large onions, cut fine 1/2 lb. Round steak, ground 2 C strained tomatoes or 1 can tomato soup 1 can red kidney beans Put onions and meat into the butter and brown. Let cook a few minutes. Cover with water and let simmer one-half hour. Then add the tomato soup and kidney beans. Salt to season well, add a little red pepper. This is improved by slow cooking.
Mrs. S. Meaker.
A church-supper chili from the era when the dish had reached the Midwest by way of canned goods. It is straightforward; the notes below mostly concern proportions and seasoning.
- T and CT is a tablespoon, C a cup. So 2 tablespoons butter and 2 cups strained tomatoes.
- Strained tomatoesThis means tomatoes cooked and pushed through a sieve — closest modern equivalent is passata or tomato puree (not the concentrated American tomato paste). The canned tomato soup alternative brings sugar with it and makes a noticeably sweeter, milder dish.
- Round steak, groundRound is lean, generally around 85 percent lean or better. With only 2 tablespoons of butter for fat, the meat will brown but not render much; keep the heat moderate so the onions do not scorch before the beef takes color.
- "A little red pepper"This means cayenne, not chili powder — the recipe has no cumin, oregano or ground chile at all, which is why it tastes more like a seasoned beef-and-bean stew than modern chili. Start with 1/4 teaspoon and go up; a teaspoon or two of chili powder is a reasonable addition if you want the familiar flavor.
- Kidney beansRinse them, and add them only at the end as written.
- The half-hour simmerHalf an hour of covered simmering is the minimum for half a pound of ground round; the note that it "is improved by slow cooking" is the real instruction. An hour to ninety minutes at a bare simmer, uncovered for the last stretch to thicken, gives a much better result.
- YieldHalf a pound of meat and one can of beans serves three to four as a luncheon dish, two to three as a main course. Doubling the meat while keeping the tomato and beans the same gives modern-tasting proportions.
This is chili as it traveled north — a Texas-Mexican border dish, sold from bowls by the chili queens of San Antonio's plazas through the late nineteenth century, arriving in a community cookbook stripped of dried chiles and rebuilt out of grocery cans. The tell is the tomato soup: canned condensed soups and canned kidney beans were the new convenience of the 1900s and 1910s, and community cookbooks adopted them fast, since a recipe that worked from cans worked in any subscriber's kitchen regardless of what her market stocked. Purists in Texas have argued for over a century that beans have no place in chili con carne at all, which is part of why versions like this one, with a can of red kidneys stirred in at the end, mark the dish as a northern adaptation rather than the original. Note too that two names sit near the recipe — submitted by Mrs. Quinten, with a trailing Mrs. S. Meaker that may well belong to the recipe that follows — the sort of small attribution tangle that turns up constantly in compiled cookbooks, where recipes passed hand to hand before they reached print.