The regional table / Texas
Texas Chili con Carne, No Beans
Ten dried chiles, three pounds of chuck cut by hand and a spoonful of browned flour — the whole of it, near enough as the army printed it in 1896.
Chronicling America carries the San Antonio papers for these years, and the chili stands run all through them — not as cooking, but as a municipal argument. On 4 January 1890 the San Antonio Daily Light answered an editorial in the Express that had defended the stands as a distinctive feature of the squares and a curious attraction for visiting strangers; the Light called them an unlicensed nuisance and an out-door restaurant of the rudest and most unsightly character, open all night, with old rickety tables, hard benches and smoking fires. In May 1893 the same paper reported that a petition of citizens asking permission for chili stands on Military Plaza had been read to the council, referred, and never acted on. A sketch that ran in the Express and was reprinted in papers from Rhode Island to Wyoming through the autumn of 1897 counted six chili queens on the plaza in 1888 and let slip that only four of them were Mexican: one was of German descent and one was born in Ireland. In that account the women take the orders and work the front, and the pots and kettles are tended behind the stand.
None of those columns print a recipe, but the dish is in print earlier than any of them, in an odd place. The Evening Light of San Antonio for 29 May 1882 gave most of a column to army and navy testimonials for a canned chili con carne made in Chicago to the recipe of Capt. W. G. Tobin of San Antonio; the paymaster of the receiving ship Colorado reported that the men pronounced it a very good article but thought that if it was not cut up in such small pieces it would be preferable. The earliest recipe under the name I could actually open is federal: the Manual for Army Cooks, War Department Document No. 18, Government Printing Office, 1896, which gives Chile con Carne on page 190 and, three pages earlier, a Spanish steak that is the same dish under another name. Round steak cut in small pieces, hot dripping, a browned spoonful of flour, garlic, and large dried red peppers seeded, deveined, covered with boiling water, left to stand until cool and then squeezed in the hand until the water is thick and red. No beans. No tomato. The powder comes afterward and you can watch it come: through August and September 1899 the Daily Light carried a line every day reading that a child who can read can prepare all the latest Mexican dishes with Eagle Chile Powder.
Why this version works
No beans, no tomato. Neither is in the printed recipes this one comes from. The chile pulp already supplies what tomato is usually added for — sweetness, a little acid, body — and beans are what you reach for when the sauce is too thin to stand on its own. Cook one pot this way and leaving them out stops looking like a rule and starts looking like arithmetic.
Whole pods, not powder. The 1896 manual makes its sauce by seeding dried red peppers, soaking them in boiling water and squeezing the pulp out by hand. That pulp is the body of the dish as much as its flavor — it thickens, sweetens and colors in one move. Powder gives you color and heat and nothing to chew, which is the real reason powder chili needs beans and a can of tomatoes to have any substance.
Flour browned in the fat. The manual browns a spoonful of flour in the dripping before the chile water goes in. It is a roux, and it holds the rendered beef fat and the chile together in one sauce instead of letting a slick collect on top. Masa harina does the same job later and tastes of corn; flour tastes of nothing and is what the document says.
Beef cut by hand, half an inch. Both 1896 recipes say to cut the steak in small pieces, and the sailors who ate the canned version in 1882 said the pieces were too small. Half-inch cubes are the settlement: small enough to go tender in two hours, big enough that a spoonful is still meat and not just sauce.