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Quick Camp Chili Con Carne
4 SLICES BACON I POUND GROUND BEEF I ONION, CHOPPED I CAN BAKED KIDNEY BEANS SALT AND PEPPER I GARLIC CLOVE I CAN CREAM OF TOMATO SOUP 3 TEASPOONS CHILI POWDER Brown bacon and beef together; add chopped onion and garlic. Empty in the cans, stir in seasonings, and cook 20 minutes.
A one-pot camp chili built entirely from pantry cans, meant to be assembled over a fire in under half an hour. The one thing worth watching is the bottom of the pot: condensed soup scorches fast over direct flame.
- Cream of tomato soupThis is condensed soup straight from the can, undiluted, and it acts as both the sauce and the thickener. Do not add the can of water the label calls for or the chili turns to soup.
- Baked kidney beansCanned kidney beans in a sweetened tomato or molasses sauce, a common product mid-century and now uncommon. A 15-oz can of plain red kidney beans, drained, plus a teaspoon of brown sugar or molasses gets close; plain beans alone give a leaner, less sweet result.
- The garlic cloveThe recipe never says how to prepare it; the method line pairs it with the chopped onion. Mince it and add it with the onion, or crush it and fish it out at the end -- either works, but a whole clove dropped into the pot does almost nothing.
- Bacon fatFour slices of bacon plus a pound of beef leaves a good deal of grease. Pour off all but a tablespoon before the cans go in, or the finished chili breaks into an oily layer.
- Chili powderThree teaspoons is a full tablespoon, which is right for a pound of beef with modern commercial chili powder. Bloom it in the hot fat for thirty seconds before the liquid goes in to take the raw edge off.
- Heat and stirringTwenty minutes is enough to marry the flavours, but over coals it wants a moderate spot rather than a hot one, and a stir every few minutes. On a camp stove, keep it at a bare simmer.
- YieldServes four generously, or five or six alongside bread or crackers.
Chili con carne moved out of Texas and into the national pantry through the can: commercial chili powder was on grocery shelves by the 1890s, and canned kidney beans and condensed tomato soup followed. This version reads as a product of the post-war camping boom, when scout troops, station wagons and portable stoves made a virtue of recipes assembled from tins carried in a cooler or a box. Purists have long argued that beans have no place in chili at all, and a chili built on cream of tomato soup would horrify them -- but the appeal here is not authenticity. It is one pot, a short ingredient list mostly out of tins, and a hot supper twenty minutes after the fire is ready.