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Chili Con Carni
Clean, singe, and cut in pieces for serving, two young chickens. Season with salt and pepper, and sauté in butter. Remove seeds and veins from eight red peppers, cover with boiling water, and cook until soft; mash, and rub through a sieve. Add one teaspoon salt, one onion finely chopped, two cloves of garlic finely chopped, the chicken, and boiling water to cover. Cook until chicken is tender. Remove to serving dish, and thicken sauce with three tablespoons each butter and flour cooked together; there should be one and one-half cups sauce. Canned pimentoes may be used in place of red peppers.
A New England kitchen's reading of a Southwestern dish, filed under poultry because it is made with chicken and no beef at all. Two things decide whether it works: which peppers you use, and not letting the sauce go pasty.
- The peppers are the whole dishThe peppers decide the dish -- "Eight red peppers" here most likely means dried red chiles of the mild long type (Anaheim, New Mexico, guajillo or ancho) rather than sweet bells, though the recipe does not say so and the pimiento substitution suggests something mild. Seed them, cover with boiling water, simmer until soft, then press through a sieve or blend and strain; the strained puree is the sauce base.
- The pimiento substitution changes the dishCanned pimientos are sweet and almost heatless, so that version is a mild paprika-coloured chicken stew rather than anything a modern cook would call chili. Use it only if you want the colour without the bite.
- "Young chickens"Two young chickens of the period would have been small birds, on the order of 2 to 2 1/2 lb each. One 4 lb chicken cut into eight or ten pieces gives roughly comparable meat and is easier to buy.
- Timing the simmerPieces simmered barely covered are tender in 35 to 45 minutes; pull the breast pieces out at about 25 minutes if you care about them, since they dry long before the thighs give up.
- The rouxCook the 3 tablespoons butter and 3 tablespoons flour together until it smells nutty but stays pale, then whisk in the hot pepper liquid rather than dumping the roux into the pot. That much flour will set about 1 1/2 cups of liquid to a coating sauce, which is exactly the quantity the recipe asks you to end up with; reduce or add water to hit it.
- Seasoning as written is spareThere is salt, onion and garlic and nothing else. If you want the flavour the name suggests, ground cumin and dried oregano added with the garlic are the usual additions, and a spoonful of the strained chile solids stirred back in deepens the colour.
- YieldServes six generously with rice or plain boiled potatoes to take the sauce.
The odd spelling and the absence of beef suggest that when this book was compiled, chili con carne may have been a name familiar to cooks in the East well before the dish itself was. Chili con carne as sold in San Antonio in the late nineteenth century emally remembered as the "chili queens" — was beef with chiles, and it reached the rest of the country largely through chili powder and canned goods around the turn of the century. What survives here is the essential Mexican technique, dried red chiles softened in water and pushed through a sieve to make a smooth sauce for meat, dressed up at the end with a butter-and-flour roux. The note about canned pimientos is a reminder of how the recipe travelled: for a cook in Massachusetts, a tin was likelier to be at hand than a string of dried chiles.