Herb
I TEASPOON CHILI POWDER 1/8 TEASPOON CAYENNE Mix all together; put meat in a deep dish, pour marinade over, and let stand two or more hours. Then take meat out, dry it, rub with salt and after that with oil or fat. What is left of the marinade may be heated and used as a sauce for those who like it, and of course, it can be made much hotter by rubbing with freshly ground black pepper; or if you really enjoy a peppery barbecue and a good cry, just dump an extra cup of chili powder in, as they do down along the border. Then you'll be snacking with tears in your eyes.
What survives here is the handling method rather than a full ingredient list, and the handling is the useful part: a chili-spiked marinade, then a dried, salted, oiled surface before the meat meets the fire.
- Dry the meat, then oil itThis is the hinge. A wet surface steams rather than browns, and a marinade-slick exterior will scorch in patches over coals. Blot thoroughly, salt, then film with oil or fat so the crust forms evenly.
- Marinating temperature"Let stand two or more hours" is written without reference to temperature. Marinate in the refrigerator rather than at room temperature.
- Boil the leftover marinadeIt has been in contact with raw meat. If you want it as a table sauce, bring it to a full boil for at least a minute before serving, not merely "heated."
- Chili powder is a blendIn American cookbooks of this period, chili powder means the ground-chile-plus-cumin-and-oregano blend, not pure cayenne. The separate 1/8 teaspoon of cayenne here is what supplies the sharp heat.
- The extra cup is a jokeAn additional cup of chili powder in a marinade for one dish would be inedible and gritty. Read that line as border-country bragging; if you want more heat, add cayenne or a chopped fresh hot chile by the teaspoon.
- Salt timingSalt goes on after the marinade, not before. The marinade's full ingredient list is missing here, so taste the heated marinade before serving it as a sauce.
- Cut and yieldNo cut, weight or number of servings is given anywhere in the text, so quantity is left to the cook.
Marinade-and-rub barbecue of this sort is associated with American outdoor cooking, in which backyard grilling was sold as a frontier pastime and cookbooks drew on Texas and Southwestern voices for flavor and authority. Commercial chili powder, a blend rather than a single ground pepper, was being sold in the United States by the end of the nineteenth century. The instruction to dry and oil the meat before cooking is older and more durable than the chili fashion: it is the same logic that governs any dry-heat browning, and it is why the recipe bothers to separate the marinade from the surface treatment at all.