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I think we need a WW2F recipe sub-forum.

 

Originally, chili didn't have beans - and still shouldn't according to many, including me.

Chili is purely a tex-mex vaquero/cowboy invention. When out on the trail the only practical food you could carry was beef jerky, dried corn and dried peppers, and perhaps some well-cured bacon if you were lucky. The bacon was for breakfast, as it should be! In the evening you'd break up some jerky and peppers and boil them until they were soft. Then you'd crush some corn into a rough flour and throw it in the pot to thicken it into "chili."
Beans have to soak for 24 hours or be boiled for 3-4 hours to be edible. Nobody carried beans in their saddlebags because it was not a practical trail food.

And take note also. Beef jerky then, was not what we'd call beef jerky in the US today. In Mexico you can still find the old variety of air dried beef in street stalls in small towns. They call it carne seca. If you've been to Mexico and walked past a meat stand where something smelled bad - that was carne seca! It smelled just like that in the US 125 years ago because they didn't have a chemical soup of preservatives to keep the fat in the meat from going rancid. So, you needed those peppers to cover the rancid taste of the meat. That's why chili became popular - because it was the only way to choke down air dried beef.

They still do the same thing in Mexico today. That carne seca is not purchased and chewed like beef jerky here. They crush it, boil it and call it machaca, which can be used in a number of dishes, chili being just one of them.

The other necessity was coffee. Most of the water in the Texas, Oklahoma, New Mexico and adjacent parts of old Mexico is not drinkable unless boiled. It's flat country with few springs or fast water so you're left with stagnant. muddy creeks and sloughs, and not many of them. Some of that water was alkaline, but it was all you had so you drank it. You could boil it and drink it, but it still tastes like shiitte, so your best bet was strong coffee to mask the taste.

Culinary history. The whole northern Mexico/Tex-Mex cuisine that Americans and Mexicans love today was created to make rancid food tolerable.

 

When my wife and I were down in Cancun almost two decades ago I got a beef dish that was incredibly good and incredibly salty. It was a shreded beef very possibly based on the "carne seca" you mentioned. Felt like downing a beer with every bite and eating not leaving any of the left overs.

On the other hand when I was in Boy Scouts a few decades previously one of the parrents donated homemade elk or moose jerkey for our summer expeditions. Had to cut it off the stick rather then bite it off most of the time and took a fair amount of chewing to get to the point where you could swallow it but again very good.

 

Wild meat doesn't have fat within the meat (the fat is between the muscle groups, so can be removed during butchering), whereas beef is marbled with fat right inside the meat itself, so it will go rancid. Too, if you jerk your own venison or even beef, you do it on a small scale in a screened enclosure, and maybe with some heat, smoke and salt. In the old days they just whacked up a whole cow or several cows and hung it outside in strips. It would be covered with flies and other insects, birds would land on it and shit on it - it wasn't pretty.

I've smoked my own meat and fish for years. I wouldn't waste good venison by turning it into jerky, but I've often taken the miscellaneous "parts" and made sausage to be smoked.

 

Chili made anywhere east of the Mississippi is like getting your Salsa from New York City!

[Everybody around the campfire]: NEW YORK CITY? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mgHtAtq8vsQ

 

See the history of chili now, but my history has kidney beans, sometimes navy beans. My chili should be thick not runny- viscous? Like a really heavy motor oil grade. ..Also wonder about the term "carne". Because, was going to ask about "chili con carne" which is on the shelves here- what's the difference? Looks like chili.

 

Oh sweet mother of Christmas can we please get the neg reps back? It's nother personal Jeff; it's just business.

 

Food can be contentious. I hit my sister with a wooden spoon ma was making chili with. ..Yeah, I was 37 at the time- but damn, she ATE OFF THE SPOON AND PUT IT BACK.

 

Quiche..food of the...well I hardly ever wear the pink t shirt I was bought..

 

Quiche? Well, the tex-mex version is called huevos rancheros and it has eggs, peppers and... Oh,never mind.

 

Dear oh dear oh dear...get some man food down ye, you lot!

 

" The whole northern Mexico/Tex-Mex cuisine that Americans and Mexicans love today was created to make rancid food tolerable."

Thats what McDonalds still does.

 

I fail to see how McDonalds have made their food tolerable!

 

According to the increasing amount of fat people they somehow manage to do this, but it beats me too how McRancid does it.....

 

McRancid - Now I have had my chuckle for the day. I like that!

 

I am not quite sure what that is but I want some!

 

Looks awfully like battered deep fried mars bars...