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What's in your chili?

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MEDIA GENERAL NEWS SERVICE

The Tampa Tribune

Published: February 1, 2009

From the Texas school of chili-cooking, Simpson naturally is adamantly opposed to beans in chili.

Simpson also is against using chicken or seafood, but even the staunchest "chiliheads" are capable of flexibility. Simpson has modified his dad's recipe to include adding smoked meat, when he has leftover brisket or ribs in the freezer, to the typical cubed round steak.

When football season comes around, Simpson's chili pot comes out.

"Chili and football kind of go together," said Simpson, who is a graduate of the law school at Louisiana State University, where football, as in Texas, borders on religion.

He enjoys spicy food, but he doesn't go crazy with his chili. He'll use jalapenos, but not if his three daughters - Catherine, Lulu and Sydney - will be eating it.

The key to chili is the peppers. Some add flavor, some heat. Some both. It's a matter of taste, so you need to figure out what you like, and it's not as difficult as it used to be for us Easterners. A buddy from Texas and a chili aficionado - who, by the way, prefers using the New Mexican spelling of "chile" - told me the other week that more and more varieties of peppers, formerly only available in the Southwest, are making their way across the country to groceries and specialty stores.

As for how hot you should make your chili, the bottom-line question is this: Do you like to sweat when you eat?

"We think it's important to have a hearty texture and lots of flavor without it being too overpoweringly hot," said Leigha Romig, who, along with husband Ronnie, makes Key West Hurricane Chili, which won the amateur division at the 2005 Chili Cook-Off at Richmond International Raceway.

"You should taste the beef and have some heat to it while maintaining a lot of the other flavors as well, ... but you should be able to enjoy an entire bowl without your taste buds being numbed by the burn."

To many, like Frank Smith and his college buddies, chili is a tradition. The group of University of Virginia graduates has been getting together annually for the past 25 years for a beach trip or some other event, and the menu every year includes chili.

"We love chili because we used to make it a lot when we were students," said Smith, a pastor living in Charlottesville, who said they make their chili with buffalo meat and serve it over white rice, topped with shredded cheese.

I also like serving mine over rice or even spaghetti, as they do in Cincinnati. I grew up in Richmond eating beans in chili, and now I eat mostly beans in the vegetarian chili that is popular at my house. When I make real chili, I used to leave the beans in, but in a nod to my Texas friends, I'm now inclined to enjoy them on the side.

My recipe, which I like to call "High Plains Drifter Chili," is an amalgamation - some might call it an abomination - of about three or four recipes. I use beef and pepper and tomatoes, but I also toss in a little cocoa and a bit of cinnamon (stolen from a Cincinnati recipe) and a bottle of beer. Minus a sip or two for quality assurance.

But my recipe can't hold a jalapeno to W. Park Lemmond Jr.'s.

Lemmond, a retired circuit judge from Prince George County, Va., came up with an intriguing chili recipe for a local cooking contest in the 1980s. Ingredients included venison, Virginia ham, pecans, mushrooms, apples and a jigger or two of Virginia Gentleman bourbon.

"When I was doing it, I just wanted something different," said Lemmond, who acknowledged he's never cooked all that much. Yet, he won two blue ribbons with his recipe, which wound up in a couple of cookbooks. "It tasted pretty good."

The Super Bowl isn't always a good game, but it's always a good excuse to make a pot of chili.

Even if the game is a stinker, you can count on a fine bowl of red or a bowl of green or whatever.

We say "whatever" because chili can take many forms - with chicken, with turkey, with no meat at all - although chili purists chafe at the notion of any dish containing anything other than beef being labeled "chili." And don't get them started on beans, which many sticklers consider a fine side dish but are highly offended if you suggest stirring them into the chili.

Chili can start regional arguments the way barbecue can.

But for the purposes of our discussion (and to maintain peace in the valley), we'll take a broad-minded view and include just about anything anyone wants to call chili.

In fact, much about chili is open to debate.

What's for certain, though, is that mixing meat, beans, peppers and herbs was a method of cooking known to the Incas, Aztecs, and Mayan Indians long before Columbus and the conquistadors showed up in the Western Hemisphere, according to the International Chili Society. Plus, Canary Islanders, transplanted in San Antonio as early as 1723, used local peppers, wild onions, garlic and other spices to concoct zesty meat dishes.

In the 1800s, chili was popularized by chuck-wagon cooks - who used fresh beef or buffalo or made do with jack rabbit, armadillo, rattlesnake, or whatever they had at hand - along the cattle trails of Texas, where in the 1970s it was designated the state dish.

"I was taught from an early age to treat chili with reverence," said Sam Simpson, a criminal defense attorney in the Richmond, Va., area who grew up in Corpus Christi, Texas.

His father's chili recipe was a family treasure, to be savored and handed down from generation to generation but never revealed. To this day, Simpson's "Super Hot Ring-tailed Bobcat Atom-Bomb Texas Chili" is a secret.

But Simpson, who takes his chili but not himself seriously, is happy to talk chili philosophy.

From the Texas school of chili-cooking, Simpson naturally is adamantly opposed to beans in chili.

Simpson also is against using chicken or seafood, but even the staunchest "chiliheads" are capable of flexibility. Simpson has modified his dad's recipe to include adding smoked meat, when he has leftover brisket or ribs in the freezer, to the typical cubed round steak.

When football season comes around, Simpson's chili pot comes out.

"Chili and football kind of go together," said Simpson, who is a graduate of the law school at Louisiana State University, where football, as in Texas, borders on religion.

He enjoys spicy food, but he doesn't go crazy with his chili. He'll use jalapenos, but not if his three daughters - Catherine, Lulu and Sydney -- will be eating it.

The key to chili is the peppers. Some add flavor, some heat. Some both. It's a matter of taste, so you need to figure out what you like, and it's not as difficult as it used to be for us Easterners. A buddy from Texas and a chili aficionado -- who, by the way, prefers using the New Mexican spelling of "chile" - told me the other week that more and more varieties of peppers, formerly only available in the Southwest, are making their way across the country to groceries and specialty stores.

As for how hot you should make your chili, the bottom-line question is this: Do you like to sweat when you eat?

"We think it's important to have a hearty texture and lots of flavor without it being too overpoweringly hot," said Leigha Romig, who, along with husband Ronnie, makes Key West Hurricane Chili, which won the amateur division at the 2005 Chili Cook-Off at Richmond International Raceway.

"You should taste the beef and have some heat to it while maintaining a lot of the other flavors as well, . . . but you should be able to enjoy an entire bowl without your taste buds being numbed by the burn."

To many, like Frank Smith and his college buddies, chili is a tradition. The group of University of Virginia graduates has been getting together annually for the past 25 years for a beach trip or some other event, and the menu every year includes chili.

"We love chili because we used to make it a lot when we were students," said Smith, a pastor living in Charlottesville, who said they make their chili with buffalo meat and serve it over white rice, topped with shredded cheese.

I also like serving mine over rice or even spaghetti, as they do in Cincinnati. I grew up in Richmond eating beans in chili, and now I eat mostly beans in the vegetarian chili that is popular at my house. When I make real chili, I used to leave the beans in, but in a nod to my Texas friends, I'm now inclined to enjoy them on the side.

My recipe, which I like to call "High Plains Drifter Chili," is an amalgamation - some might call it an abomination - of about three or four recipes. I use beef and pepper and tomatoes, but I also toss in a little cocoa and a bit of cinnamon (stolen from a Cincinnati recipe) and a bottle of beer. Minus a sip or two for quality assurance.

But my recipe can't hold a jalapeno to W. Park Lemmond Jr.'s.

Lemmond, a retired circuit judge from Prince George County, Va., came up with an intriguing chili recipe for a local cooking contest in the 1980s. Ingredients included venison, Virginia ham, pecans, mushrooms, apples and a jigger or two of Virginia Gentleman bourbon.

"When I was doing it, I just wanted something different," said Lemmond, who acknowledged he's never cooked all that much. Yet, he won two blue ribbons with his recipe, which wound up in a couple of cookbooks. "It tasted pretty good."

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