SOUP, SUDS, AND SPECIALTY ALES

Story and Photos by Vivienne Mackie

13 Chili Cooking Teams, a Chili Eating Contest, and a Hot Chili Pepper Eating Contest

7th Annual International Beer Tasting and Chili Cook-Off
September 27, 2008
Urbana, Illinois, USA

The CHILI:

A Chili Cook-Off (or competition) is a very popular pastime in much of the USA---from the Catskills, to an Indian Reservation in Missouri, to Texas and California. Why? And what is this chili?

First, we have to remember that ‘chili’ with an ‘i’ means a prepared dish, and ‘chile’ with an ‘e’ refers to the vegetable, the pepper.

Most people agree that chili is an “All-American Food” but few can agree on its origins, although most historians do agree that it didn’t originate in Mexico. There are many legends and stories about the origins and here are a few possibilities.

Maybe early Spanish settlers in San Antonio, Texas, made a stew similar to chili in the early 1700s. This dish kept popping up in the San Antonio area and there are records of chili stands at the Alamo. The food was mainly for the military but many people bought it because it was cheap. There were also “Chili Queens”, Latino women selling a similar stew in the Mercado in San Antonio, but after many years their stands were shut down and banned due to poor hygiene. These days, San Antonio has a Chili Queens Festival on Memorial Day, and chili has become the Texas state dish.

There are also records of trail cooks, en route to the west, concocting a kind of stew using a ‘chili brick’ mix (made by pounding together dried beef, fat, pepper, salt and chile) boiled in water and adding more fresh chiles, origano and onions.

In the beginning, chili was usually made by poor people who wanted to stretch the little meat they could afford.

At that point, chili was still a seasonal dish as fresh chiles were needed, but people began to make it year-round when someone in Texas worked out how to make chili powder. Texas chili went national when Texas set up a chili stand at the 1893 Expo in Chicago. Chili parlors started popping up all over the country, offering tasty, cheap food. During the Depression, these parlors fed many people who might have gone hungry otherwise.

Now, different areas in the country have different styles of chili, each proclaiming superiority. Supposedly Will Rogers (1879-1935) judged a town by the quality of its chili, and tasted hundreds in his life. (Did this lead to the idea of competitions?) Some people are so passionate about this that they hold competitions (local and international)---some competitions involving thousands.

There are ‘secret’ ingredients in chili recipes that are handed down through generations, and many people guard their recipes jealously! Generally, chili has ground (minced) beef, but some places use small cubes. Most add chiles, beans, tomatoes, garlic, oregano and perhaps cumin or cinnamon. But, there are versions with and without beans or tomatoes, a white version with chicken, and a vegetarian chili. Some are very spicy, those people believing that if you don’t burn your mouth and tongue then it’s not real chili. Cincinnati Chili is served over spaghetti and then topped with beans and cheese. The Mid-West chili tends to be milder, and always uses tomatoes. In St Louis, people like to put minced onion and grated cheese on top of their chili. Springfield, Illinois, takes its chili very seriously and even spells it differently, as ‘chilli’ (some say a restaurant owner didn’t spell it correctly, others that that ‘illi’ is from the first letters of Illinois).

There’s even an International Chili Society (www.chilicookoff.com ). The web site lists many cook-off venues, showing how popular this dish is.

Our local Tasting and Cook-off is one good example of this.

THE BEER:

After tea, and perhaps coffee, beer is probably the most popular and well-known drink in the world, so needs little introduction. What is different in the USA is that until recently the mainstream beers, like Miller and Budweiser, were the most popular. But now, more people are beginning to drink, and like, the USA microbrewery beers and many imported beers. So, an event such as this gives one a good opportunity to taste many different, new beers.

The Urbana Beer Tasting and Chili Cook-off took place one Saturday afternoon/early evening from 3-8pm at the end of September and luckily the weather was clear and warm. It was held on the main level of the downtown parking deck (for the beer tables) and the adjacent street was blocked off for the chili stands, other food stands, and local musicians. The cost was $5 per person to enter, and then people could buy tickets, each of which represents 50 cents per taste for either chili or beer. It was a real squeeze, as thousands turned up. The chili was so popular that it was all gone after about three hours, and people who tasted said the 13 chili competitors all had delicious chili, and it was hard to declare a winner!! The winners were Dan Stebbins and his team. Stebbins has no written recipe but gave a list of the basic ingredients his team used:

Diced beef chuck, chili powder, cumin, dried habanero peppers, tomato paste, lemon juice, chili beans, fresh cilantro, cocoa, diced onions and green peppers, beef broth, water, sea salt and sugar.

There were 35 tables offering around 200 different beers, so it was a beer-lover’s paradise! Beers from Russia, Poland, Germany, Belgium, Czech Republic, Lithuania, Australia, Sri Lanka, England, and Scotland were among the international beers on offer. US microbrews came from Washington, Colorado, Wisconsin, Illinois, Massachusetts, Maryland and Maine, some with fanciful names such as Tommyknocker Pick Axe Pale, Two Brothers Heavy Handed IPA, or Flying Dog Old Scratch Amber (I confess I didn’t try those!). It was a noisy crowd, but very well-behaved. In fact, there were many young couples with babies in strollers, or people with dogs on leashes, so it wasn’t just for beer lovers.

The local community declared it a great success and look forward to a bigger and better event next year! There are already plans to cook up double the amount of chili.