Mexican Beef
2 chile peppers 1 pint warm water 2 pounds beef.
Butter or drippings Clove of garlic Boiled Mexican beans Remove the seeds from the chile peppers; soak the pods in the warm water until soft; then scrape the pulp from the pods and add it to the water. Cut the beef into small pieces and brown in butter or savory drippings. Add the garlic and chile water and cook until the meat is tender, adding more water if necessary. Thicken with a few crushed beans and serve with Mexican beans, either mixed with the meat or used as a border.
If chile peppers cannot be obtained, water and cayenne may be substituted, and if Mexican beans cannot be obtained, other dried beans may be used.
This is carne con chile in its older form — dried chile pods reconstituted into a sauce, with the meat browned and stewed in it. The ingredient list as printed is fragmentary and partly belongs to a neighbouring recipe, so read the method as the authority.
- The ingredient list is unreliableThe list gives one small round steak, a tablespoon of drippings and two cups of boiling water, but no quantity of chile pods, garlic or beans — and the four tablespoons of boiled rice never appear in the method. The printed list appears to have been misaligned with a neighbouring recipe. Work from the instructions.
- How many chilesFor a pound of beef, six to eight dried mild pods — ancho, guajillo, New Mexico — soaked in about two cups of hot water for 20 to 30 minutes. Scraping the softened pulp from the skins with the back of a knife is the old way; a blender and a sieve does the same job faster.
- Cayenne is a poor substituteThe note about "water and cayenne" is a concession to cooks who could not buy pods. Cayenne supplies heat and nothing else; whole dried chiles supply the body, colour and sweetness that make the dish. Pods are now in most supermarkets.
- Mexican beansPintos, or the pink beans sold as rosados. "Boiled" here means cooked from dry with nothing but water, salt and perhaps a little fat — not tinned in sauce.
- Cut and cooking timeRound steak is lean and will need roughly 1½ to 2 hours of gentle simmering to become tender, topped up with water as it reduces. Chuck cut into ¾-inch cubes does better and is closer to what the dish wants.
- The thickeningCrushing a few of the cooked beans into the sauce is the hinge of the recipe: it binds the chile liquid without flour and keeps the flavour clean. Mash them to a paste first, then stir in and simmer a few minutes.
- SeasoningNo salt is specified anywhere. Salt the beans as they cook and the stew near the end, after the chile water has reduced.
- YieldA pound of beef with beans serves four.
Dishes of this kind entered American cookbooks from Texas and the Southwest in the decades either side of 1900, generally traced to the chili sold in San Antonio's plazas and said, on a story more often repeated than documented, to have been popularised further afield after the 1893 Chicago exposition. What distinguishes the version here is that it calls for no commercial chili powder: the cook is still expected to buy whole dried pods, soak them and scrape the pulp by hand. The fallback offered to readers who could find neither pods nor Mexican beans — cayenne and any dried bean — shows how thinly these ingredients were distributed outside the Southwest at the time, and the plain title "Mexican Beef" places the dish as something faintly exotic for a general household audience rather than everyday food.