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Chili Colorad
Take two chickens; cut up as if to stew; when pretty well done, add a little green parsley and a few onions. Take half pound large 1 pepper pods, remove seeds, and pour on boiling water; steam ten or fifteen minutes; pour off water, and rub them in a sieve until all the juice is out; add the juice to the chicken; let it cook for half an hour; add a little butter, flour and salt. Place a border of rice around the dish before setting on table. This dish may also be made of beef, pork or mutton; it is to be eaten in cold weather, and is a favorite dish with all people on the Pacific coast. - Mrs. Gov. Bradley, Nevada.
This is a chile-pod sauce built on a stewed chicken, and nearly all the work is in the peppers. The instructions assume you know what a dried pod looks like when it has given up its pulp.
- What the peppers are"Large 1 pepper pods" is almost certainly a printer's garble; the intended word may have been "long" or "red." Either way it points to dried red chiles of the New Mexico or California type, mild and leathery, sold whole in bags. Half a pound is roughly 25 to 35 pods, which yields a generous amount of purée; a quarter pound is plenty for two chickens by modern taste.
- The hinge: sieve, don't blendAfter steaming, the pods are rubbed through a sieve so the sweet pulp passes and the tough skins and any stray seeds stay behind. Skip this and you get a gritty, bitter sauce. A blender helps loosen the pulp but you still need to strain it.
- Pour off the soaking waterThe recipe discards it rather than using it. The usual explanation is that the first water carries the harsher, more bitter notes from the skins, and that the flavor you want is in the pulp.
- "Cut up as if to stew"Break the birds into eight or ten pieces, bone in. "Pretty well done" is about 30 to 40 minutes at a bare simmer in water or stock to cover, before the chile goes in for its half hour.
- Butter and flour at the endThis is thickening, not enrichment. A couple of tablespoons of each for a potful, cooked together briefly and stirred in near the end, then let the sauce simmer gently a few minutes so the flour does not taste raw.
- Two chickens, then and nowTable birds of the period were generally smaller than today's supermarket chickens. One 4 to 5 lb chicken, or two smaller ones, feeds six to eight with the rice.
- The rice borderPlain long-grain rice, boiled and drained dry, spooned in a ring around the edge of a warmed platter with the chicken and sauce in the center. It is presentation, but it is also the starch the dish needs.
- Other meatsBeef, pork or mutton cut in cubes wants considerably longer than chicken — an hour and a half to two hours of simmering before the chile is added.
Chili colorado is simply "red chile" in Spanish, the name of the sauce rather than of a particular meat, and the dish belongs to the Mexican and Hispano cooking of the Southwest and California that Anglo households on the Pacific coast picked up in the decades after the 1848 annexation. Its appearance in a compilation like The Dixie Cook Book is itself the story: these books gathered contributions from the wives of public men across the country, and this one is credited to the wife of Lewis R. Bradley, governor of Nevada in the 1870s, which is how a chile pur" e thickened with butter and flour and rimmed with boiled rice came to sit in the pages of an Atlanta-published book marketed to the South. The technique he ppods, press out the pulp, throw away the skins — is the genuinely old part, and it is still the basis of red chile sauce today; the flour thickening and the rice border are the nineteenth-century American parlor manners laid over it.