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Chili Con Carne
1 pint dried lima beans or kidney beans, soaked overnight 2 cups beef chopped 1 teaspoon salt. cup suet, forced through food chopper 1 red pepper, cut in strips onion, sliced 1-81-2 teaspoon pepper teaspoon mustard 1 tablespoon vinegar Tomatoes to cover Arrange ingredients in layers in a bean pot. Cover with water and bake slowly at a temperature of 345° F. 3 or 4 hours. Salads which usually are made from either vegetables or fruits or combinations of both should be more commonly used. They should be cold, crisp, well mixed and attractively served with oil dressing, mayonnaise or a boiled dressing. Salad plants include lettuce, romaine, endive, chickory, escarole, sorrel and water-cress, and vegetables such as onion, cabbage, celery, cucumber and tomatoes. 2 cups freshly boiled potatoes 1 teaspoon salt
The page has come through scanning badly: the ingredient column is broken, quantities have collapsed into strings like "1-81-2", and a paragraph on salads plus the first two lines of a potato salad have run in at the end. What survives is enough to see the method, not enough to cook from without judgment.
- What is missingA chili con carne needs meat and, in this book's era, usually beans and chili powder or dried chiles; none appear in the surviving text. Treat the list as partial and lean on a complete recipe for proportions.
- Where the recipe endsEverything from "Salads which usually are made" onward belongs to a different page. The "2 cups freshly boiled potatoes 1 teaspoon salt" is the opening of a potato salad, not part of the chili.
- The oven temperature345 F is unusually precise for the period, the kind of figure that appears once thermostats were fitted to ranges. Any modern oven set to 325-350 F will do the same work; the point is a long, barely-bubbling bake.
- Bean potA glazed earthenware bean pot with a lid — tall, narrow-mouthed, made for slow oven work. A heavy Dutch oven with the lid on is the direct substitute; the narrow top matters only in that it slows evaporation.
- SuetBeef kidney fat, ground. Butchers still sell it, and it is worth asking for, but rendered beef tallow or the fat rendered from the meat itself gives the same body. The quantity is lost with the numeral; whatever it was, this is a fat-heavy pot.
- "Red pepper, cut in strips"The instruction to cut it in strips points to a fresh sweet red pepper rather than ground cayenne. Nothing in the surviving text supplies heat; a complete version would have done so somewhere.
- The garbled quantities"1-81-2 teaspoon pepper" cannot be resolved with confidence — it may be 1/8 or 1/2. Season toward the end rather than guessing at the start.
- Layering and liquid"Tomatoes to cover" plus water means the contents should be submerged before the lid goes on, and should be checked once or twice over the three or four hours.
Chili con carne reached national American cookbooks by way of San Antonio, where women known as chili queens sold it from open-air stands in the plazas from the 1880s onward; commercial chili powder, sold from the 1890s, is what allowed the dish to travel into kitchens that had never seen a dried ancho. Baked in a bean pot in a long slow oven with suet and whatever meat was to hand, this version is closer in spirit to Boston baked beans than to anything served in Texas.