Joe Gracey’s Texas Chili (non) Carne

If you were a Native Texan 400 years ago and you had a mess of peppers and onions and beans and garlic and squashes and corn and handful of herbs like oregano and comino (cumin, not to be confused with what the Europeans call “cumin” which is something else), well, your first idea would be to throw them all in a pot and stew them together. All of these things grow wild in Texas and Mexico so the cooks of the bunch developed this soup/stew and when there was any meat to be had, fresh or dried, it was of course added.

Later when the Cattle Culture became paramount in Texas and Northern Mexico, this stew came to be called “chili con carne” since beef was easier to come by, but in fact it could be made with pork or lamb or jackalope or whatever carne you had at hand. It was still a stew of meat and peppers and herbs.

With the modern-day interest in non-carnivorous eating, I figure it is but a short step back to the original intent of this dish and so I present my version to you here.

The only bean that has the correct flavor for this stew is the Texas Pinto Bean. It absolutely cannot be a white bean, or a kidney bean, or a black bean. Please. They all have their place in the pantheon of bean dishes, but only the Pinto (or better still, the Anasazi) will do. Nothing else has the earthy but light assertiveness required. In a pinch, try what we Americans call “red” beans, or the Italian “borlotti” bean.

Again, I am sorry to insist on ingredients which may be esoteric or are hard to locate, but the flavor of the dish depends on the presence of the dried “poblano” pepper, which is called the “ancho” chili in its dried state, or the dried powder of this pepper which makes up most of the “chili powder” sold by commercial suppliers in Texas. Pepper lovers know that each variety has its own unique flavor, and substitutions are usually unsuccessful. If this pepper is impossible to locate, use sweet paprika and cayenne powders to taste.

Please notice that there are no tomatoes of any kind in this dish. The characteristic color and flavor of chili does not rest in any way upon tomatoes, contrary to popular belief.

And so, with those caveats, I give you this dish:

1 pound Pinto Beans, soaked overnight, water discarded

2 yellow onions, chopped and browned in oil

3 cloves garlic, chopped

6 ancho chilis (de-seeded, simmered and blendered or chopped, or 6 tablespoons of Texas chili powder)

kernels from 3 ears of corn

1 tablespoon of cumin powder (or until it tastes good and strong)

salt and pepper

vegetable stock to cover

fine cornmeal

1 teaspoon of strong Mexican Oregano leaves, dried

Drain the beans. Cover with stock, add the vegetables (except the corn) and the cumin and the salt and pepper. Use the chili pepper simmering water as part of the stock. Simmer until the beans are done. Add the oregano and corn and simmer for another half hour or so. Add cornmeal as needed to thicken.

Adjust salt and pepper, and serve it forth!

Food is Life

When I had cancer at 27, part of what I got was a message one day from the doctors. They told me that after my impending surgery, I would never be able to taste food or drink again and to prepare myself for that fact. 

So, I did. It made me sad, of course, because I was a big Texas food man- chicken fried steak, enchiladas, 

Lyon, a plateful of chicken liver salade, and a glass of wine. Happiness!

 

Gulf seafood, barbecue, good Bohemian and German sausage and potato salad, my grandmother’s eye-popping fried chicken and gravy, my mother’s chili that she and her pals swapped recipes on one year and used us as lab rats. I had made a minor career in Austin out of writing and talking about Texas food, Cajun food, Mexican food, cowboy food. But, as I had found already in that long, scary year in the hospital, a human being can do anything, literally, that it has to. That is why you see people in the most horrific, impossible situations continue to live, somehow.

After the surgery to remove my tongue (and half of my neck, but that is another story) I waited a long time before I was recovered enough to actually attempt a meal. Solid food. A group of us, I think it was my family, went out to eat at a Mexican food place. (The word “Tex-Mex” never crossed our lips in those days- it was Mexican food both to the purveyors and to us, because they felt that they were cooking the food of their people and they were Mexican Texans, after all.) I ordered a plate of cheese enchiladas with red chili sauce and rice and beans, the touchstone of Mexican food joints all over Texas. Half way through the first bite I realized that it tasted just like it always had- the complex flavors of comino, chilis, corn tortilla, mild cheese, onion, garlic.* I wish I could say that I got up and danced around the room, because I should have, but I was very, very surprised and very, very happy to have this gift handed to me by fate.

“You don’ miss your water ‘til your well runs dry” will do here. When something you love is taken from you, that’s the time when you find out how much or how little you really cared about that thing. Now take that thing away, mourn its loss by the hour and the days, and then have it restored to you. There are very few days in my life, or moments I should say, when I have been as flabbergasted and happy as the moment I found out I could still taste food.

That was also the moment I vowed- honest, I swear this is not hindsight- that I would never waste another meal or another mouthful or another day, squander another precious second with bad food or wasteful living. People ask me when I learned to cook, or when I learned about wine and food. That was the second it really began, because I understood that I had only begun the voyage into a world of flavor and ingredients and techniques that has carried on to this day. There is no time to waste, and every time you cram some crummy triviality into your craw you are sinning against life just as surely as if you had spent the day watching soap operas. Hie thee to a grocery, grab something real, get out a good cookbook, learn to turn ingredients into art, open an eight-dollar bottle of French wine and sit down to it while you remember how to live again. 

Selfish? Yes, but are we not a hungering self? I’d say we owe ourselves a life lived fully as well as a measure of service and care of others. Even Jesus loved a good meal and a good joke with friends and a glass of wine, regardless of what the fundamentalists absurdly claim. My point here, however, is really about awareness, or what my Buddhist friends call mindfulness. When we become complacent about simple everyday things we are losing something important. In having “food” jerked out of my mouth and then given back to me, I got more than a sense of taste back- I got a jolt of gratitude and awareness of the preciousness of existence that I am still aware of thirty years later. Drink up! We have nothing to fear...

*”Flavor” is almost all aroma, and perceived in the brain as a result of the aroma of food in our mouths and as we swallow. Only sweet, salty, sour and bitter are perceived by taste buds on the tongue. I found that my sense of flavor was undiminished and that I even had residual taste buds in other locations in my mouth besides my much-mourned tongue. God-dammit and thanks God...

Random Thoughts on a cold January day...

This Israeli incursion into the Gaza Strip is just yet another installment of a very difficult situation. I mean difficult for me to sort out; I realize that people on each side of the issue see it as clear-cut but I find that the truth is usually not so neat.

Sometimes I find myself cursing Hamas for their cowardice and violence and willingness to hurt innocent humans. Sometimes I curse the Israelis for their seeming inability to realize that the long term results of these kinds of wars are not positive and that a year from now, nothing concrete will have changed, most likely, except that there will be more embittered Palestinians willing to join Hamas and throw more rockets into Israeli homes as the only way they can feel power and salve their resentment.

But then if you ask “Ok, then what’s the answer?” I find that the more I explore it, the less I seem to understand, or when I do figure something out, the less hopeful I am. Hamas apparently gets most of its funding and weapons and support from Iran and I believe Syria. Ok, then if Iran would stop supporting them this would probably end, more or less. But how to do that? If we pull the plug on Iran via sanctions, won’t Russia and China fill the gaps? Gladly? Gleefully? When I follow this line of thought, what I eventually come to is the thought that a lot of men are in fact evil, that much of humankind is either evil or greedy enough to do evil things, or pissed off enough at least. If this is the case, how can you keep angry putzes from lobbing crude missiles over the fence at some neighbor they profess to hate? I think maybe you can’t, is the answer.

It is very terrible, all of it.

I am not a professing Christian, or anything else for that matter. But having grown up hearing the words of Jesus, the country Rabbi from Nazareth, I cannot help but go back to his admonition to turn the other cheek, else you beastially poke out each other’s eyes for eternity like vicious bobbleheads. I can’t help but think that if aggrieved people, Israel for example, could grit their teeth and curb to their desire for revenge, then eventually the hatred on the other side would run out of gas. Problem is, it would take years and years, maybe a hundred, and we humans are not built that way, most of us. And, when the murder is state-sponsored, as the crummy little rockets of Hamas are, then it becomes more abstract and more revenge-worthy. But who loses? The people. Who wins? Nobody, damn nobody. Except the big-time bastards, the Arafat’s and Cheney’s of this world who enjoy it, who feed off it like gore-besmirched devil hyenas and grin with our blood dripping from their slit-eyed faces while we wail in agony. If anybody needs a rocket up the ass, those kinds of guys do, but they are usually the last to go, sitting in deep insulated bunkers watching the death on a screen. I would mention Bush, but he is so stupid and careless that I don’t even know how to think about him anymore, like you stop worrying about a cyst on your foot after a few years. His evil is the evil of self-absorption. See this week’s Frank Rich in the NYT for some serious thinking about that little butthole.

Meanwhile, the killing continues all around this beautiful planet…