Home › Luncheon Dishes › Chile Con Carne (Lb hamburger can red kidney)
Chile Con Carne (Lb hamburger can red kidney)
1 lb. hamburger 1 can red kidney beans 3 onions 2 small b. celery 1 small size bottle Snider's Cocktail sauce Brown hamburger with three onions. Cover with water,add the other ingredients and let simmer for 1 hour. 1 C rice 3 onions 1. qt. tomatoes Mrs. Fred Guydam.
A Midwestern church-supper chili, mild by design and built around a bottled sauce. The typed page also carries a stray second ingredient list, which needs sorting out before you start.
- The trailing ingredient listThe "1 C rice, 3 onions, 1 qt. tomatoes" after the instructions belongs to no step here and does not fit the method. It may be the opening of another recipe that ran together on the page. Ignore it.
- Snider's Cocktail sauceT. A. Snider was a Cincinnati preserving company whose bottled sauces were pantry staples. Its cocktail sauce would have been tomato-based and sweet rather than hot; the exact formula, and what counted as a "small size bottle," are not recorded here. Use a modern chili sauce or cocktail sauce, and expect sweet and tangy rather than hot.
- "2 small b. celery"Genuinely ambiguous. Two small bunches of celery is a great deal of celery for a pound of meat; two small branches, meaning stalks, reads more sensibly. Start with three or four stalks, diced.
- The beansOne can is 15 to 16 ounces. Drain and rinse them, and stir them in during the last 15 minutes rather than at the start, or an hour of simmering will collapse them into the sauce.
- "Cover with water"Be sparing. A pound of browned beef plus three onions needs perhaps a cup of liquid, since the onions and celery will release plenty more. Too much and the hour of simmering leaves you with soup.
- SeasoningThere is no chili powder, cumin, salt or pepper in the list. Salt as you go, and add a tablespoon of chili powder and a teaspoon of cumin if you want it to taste like chili to a present-day palate.
- YieldAbout four to six luncheon servings. Good over rice or macaroni.
Chili con carne travelled north from San Antonio, where the open-air "chili queens" sold it from the late nineteenth century well into the twentieth, and is often said to have reached the Midwest largely through commercial chili powder and canned beans rather than through Texas cooks. By the time this collection was compiled in Libertyville, Illinois, the dish had been thoroughly domesticated: ground beef in place of chunked and stewed meat, canned kidney beans, celery, and a bottled tomato sauce doing the work of the spices. The reliance on a named brand is typical of American community cookbooks, where contributors listed the product they actually bought, which is why these pages now double as an inventory of vanished grocery shelves. Snider's, a Cincinnati preserving house known for catsup and chili sauce, is one such ghost; the recipe survives, the bottle does not.