Chili for a Blizzard

The National Weather Service, in its infinite wisdom, has decided that the Mid-Hudson Valley has not yet suffered enough. Another nor’easter is inbound. Eight to twelve inches of fresh misery, landing on top of the 24 inches that have been sitting in my yard for two weeks, going nowhere, mocking me daily. The driveway isn’t going to clear itself. Neither is the walk. So I’ll be out there with the snow blower, making passes in the cold, because that’s what you do when you live here and you’re not willing to become a hermit until April. Hard work in serious cold burns calories, kills your patience for anything fussy, and creates a particular kind of hunger. The kind that wants something with heat, depth, and enough substance to remind your body that it did something today. For me, that has always meant chili. Not the apologetic kind that comes out of a can or gets confused about whether it’s a soup. Real chili. The kind that takes time and earns its place on the stove.

Full disclosure before the historians come for me: this version includes both beans and tomatoes. The beans and tomatoes stretch a modest amount of beef across several meals, which matters when you’re cooking for practicality rather than competition points. I am aware this is a formally disqualifying position in certain parts of Texas. My Texas passport may not survive the publication of this post. I have made my peace with that.

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Where This Thing Came From

Early Chili Parlor in San Antonio, Tx, circa 1890.

Chili didn’t start in a restaurant kitchen or a cookbook. It started in the streets of San Antonio, Texas, in the 1880s, with a group of women who history would eventually get around to calling the Chili Queens.

These were working-class Mexican and Mexican-American women who set up open-air stands in Military Plaza and later Market Square, ladling out bowls of chile con carne from large clay pots over open fires, feeding cowboys, soldiers, laborers, and anyone else who showed up with a coin and an appetite. The operation ran on hustle. The food was seasoned hard, priced fair, and made for people who worked for a living.

By the 1890s, the Chili Queens were drawing tourists on purpose. Visitors to San Antonio put eating a bowl of chili in the plaza on the itinerary the same way you’d plan any other landmark. O. Henry wrote about them. Stephen Crane filed a dispatch on them. The stands became famous enough that a replica was eventually set up at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, which is how chili started its migration into the broader American consciousness.

San Antonio, Military Plaza, Chili Parlor. Circa 1902

The Chili Queens operated with periodic interference from the city of San Antonio, which spent decades trying to regulate, restrict, and ultimately shut them down, citing hygiene concerns that conveniently did not apply with equal vigor to white-owned establishments. They were effectively shut down by 1943, the last operations closed under wartime sanitation regulations after decades of harassment. What they left behind was a culinary tradition that had already escaped containment, spread across Texas, and begun its argument with itself about what chili actually is. It has never been resolved and almost certainly never will be.

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What Historical Chili Actually Was

Strip away a hundred years of regional variation, competition circuit rules, and the great kidney bean controversy, and what you find at the core of original Texas chili con carne is three things: meat, dried chiles, and fat. That’s the architecture. Everything else is commentary.

The meat in early chili was not ground beef in the modern sense. It was hand-cut or roughly chopped into coarse, irregular pieces. Tougher cuts, chuck or shank, the kind that survive a long braise without dissolving entirely. Some accounts describe the meat being cut into small cubes; others describe something closer to a coarse chop with a large knife. The goal was texture that held up, meat that would absorb the chile braise over time rather than disappear into it.

The fat was typically beef tallow or lard. Not a concession. A structural choice. Fat carried the fat-soluble compounds in the dried chiles, distributed flavor through the pot, and gave the finished dish the kind of body that a lean modern chili never quite achieves.

The chiles themselves were the real technical element. Dried chiles, anchos, pasillas, guajillos, the deep-bodied paste chiles, were toasted dry in a pan or directly over flame to wake up the oils, then reconstituted in water or broth and ground or mashed into a paste that formed the base of the dish.

This step does not show up in most modern chili recipes. That’s most of the reason modern chili tastes like seasoned tomato sauce with beef in it rather than something with actual depth. Chipotles could come in for heat and smoke, but they were a different instrument. Body and color came from the paste chiles.

The dried chile paste is where the color comes from, where the complexity comes from, where the low background heat that builds across a bowl comes from.

Cumin is the single most consistent throughline in the historical record. Mexican oregano, the citrus-forward variety rather than the Mediterranean kind, appeared alongside it regularly. Garlic. Salt. Some accounts include a small amount of masa, dried corn flour, stirred in near the end, which thickened the pot and added a faint earthiness that tied the whole thing together.

Tomatoes were not a standard ingredient in early Texas chili and remain controversial among traditionalists to this day. Beans were not included. This is the one point of historical chili orthodoxy that is actually documented rather than just tribal mythology.

The dish was meat and chile. The additions came later, regionally, for reasons of economy and preference, and the argument about their legitimacy has been ongoing for roughly a century.

The method and recipe (what this actually looks like in a modern kitchen) we’ll get to that. First, the snow blower.

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How We’re Doing This

The historical purists cooked over open fire in clay pots. We have a slow cooker, and we are not apologizing for it.

Low, slow, moist heat over several hours does exactly what a long braise over a wood fire did. The meat gets time to surrender. The chile paste mellows and integrates. The fat does its work through the pot. The slow cooker is not a compromise. It is the right tool for a day when you are also running a snow blower in shifts.

The fat we’re starting with is bacon. Tallow and lard were the historical choices because rendered animal fat carries flavor in ways that vegetable oil simply does not. Bacon is the same logic, different century, with an added dimension. Rendered slowly in the pan, it releases fat that’s seasoned by the cure, carrying smoke, doing more than tallow ever could. We use that bacon fat to soften the onions slowly, coaxing out their sweetness before the beef goes in. The bacon itself stays in. There is no world in which you render bacon and then discard it. It becomes part of the dish.

The beef is a large grind. Direct line back to the original. A fine grind disappears into the liquid, becomes indistinguishable from the sauce, loses all textural identity by hour three. A large grind holds.

It browns properly in the pan, actual browning with the Maillard reaction doing its work rather than steaming in its own moisture, and it gives the finished chili something to chew. It tastes like meat. Not seasoned protein that used to be meat.

Brown it in the bacon fat before it goes into the slow cooker. Do not skip this step. The fond that builds in that pan is flavor you paid for and cannot get back.