When I was a child in Nebraska, my parents had a lot of parties. Friday. Saturday. Uncles, aunts, cousins, neighbors, my father’s old friends from his job working construction, their wives and kids—thirty, forty people sometimes. They began to wander in around six or so, talking loudly, laughing, carrying coolers full of icy beer and pop. This was when my parents seemed the happiest.
Our house was about ten miles outside of town, a single-story, one-bedroom house that barely contained my family, let alone a party. The adults spread out through the rooms, drinking beer in the living room, playing cards on the porch, while the kids ran out of the house and across the yard to race through the large stubble field across the street. Set out on card tables were relish trays of radishes, green onions, slices of cheese and salami, pickled eggs, and jalapeños. The chili soup, barbecue meat, and tortillas would appear, eventually, after dark. Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson, Crystal Gayle on the record player. Some people dancing in the little space between the couch and the TV.
I was the type of child who would sit alone at the kitchen table during the party—reading, writing, or drawing on a notepad, which I would guard with my forearms as if it were a test and there were cheaters all around me. While the other kids yelled and chased one another outside, while smoking, conversing grownups spilled into the room off the front porch where my bed and books shared space with the washing machine and the water heater, I staked out a little corner for myself, aloof from the action. I liked to be close to other people, observing secretly without really interacting with them, and in this way I was probably very much like my mother, who preferred cooking in the kitchen to dancing in the living room. I remember her lowering her head over the mouth of the pot as if whispering it a secret.
My mother made that Midwestern truck-stop variety of chili, which could be prepared in great quantities without much precision. It required tomato juice, browned hamburger, kidney beans, and yellow onions, chopped and sautéed. Salt, pepper, cumin, and chili powder were added “to taste,” as my mother said. I loved to watch her experiment—sprinkle in a little of some spice into the pot, sample the broth, and then repeat, until it seemed correct to her. I still favor this method, though I have ruined a number of batches because of it, being too zealous with spices in the beginning, lacking my mother’s restraint.
I moved from Nebraska to Chicago for college, and stayed there for a few years after graduation. Chili was one of the first meals I cooked, perhaps because it reminded me of those large family gatherings. But if it began with nostalgia, I soon discovered that chili had several other features that made it attractive to the young bachelor. It was a simple, inexpensive recipe that didn’t require any particular organization or skill to prepare. It could be made by the gallon, and—like pizza and spaghetti—it could be eaten on a regular basis without ever really losing its appeal.
Cooking chili made me feel festive, even though I was alone in my apartment, as if I would soon be surrounded by a large group of happy people. And indeed, in time, making a big pot of chili gave me a reason to call some friends and have them over for beers. If I never managed my parents’ kind of parties, I began to gather together a few other enthusiasts. No doubt, eating chili has male-bonding elements. There’s that cowboy-on-the-range, bandito-in-his-hideout mythology lurking around it. And, of course—adding to its manly grit and ruggedness—chili can be extremely spicy.
And so spiciness, heat, was the first way that I varied from my mother’s basic recipe. Back in Nebraska, we grew jalapeños and cayenne in the garden, which my father, grinning, would eat raw and which my mother pickled or made into salsa or dried and crumbled—very sparingly—into her chili, which was mild by all but the most grandmotherly standards. Now, living on my own, I could play around with the amount of chile pepper I used. In Chicago, I discovered a whole swath of hot peppers previously unknown to me, most notably the Scotch bonnet and habañero, but also the chiltepín and rocoto and Thai chiles, all of which I auditioned over subsequent years—on a few occasions creating monstrous stews of such indescribable heat that I could choke down only a few painful, burning bites.
As I experimented with degrees of heat and my own level of endurance, I also became interested in straying beyond the standard ingredients. In this, I realize that I risk offending some fundamentalists for whom chili has an almost koanlike simplicity: a spicy chile-pepper broth with meat. Cook-off and Chili Society types even eschew beans.
I, however, have never been a purist. The best batches of chili I’ve ever made have had some unknown or incongruous element. In this way, cooking chili for me is not unlike the process of writing fiction, which requires the same openness to inspiration and possibility, as well as the same awareness that the final product may be irrecoverably different from what you’d first imagined.
Here are some of the things that I’ve put into chili over the years: African bird pepper, alligator jerky, artichokes, beer, beets, bourbon, carrots, celery, elk, epazote, fennel, garbanzo beans, green bell pepper, harissa, horseradish, hot dogs, Kahlúa, jicama, lavender, lobster, mango, red wine, spinach, turkey breast, vinegar, yeast, yogurt, zucchini.
When I was twenty-two, my friend B.P. and I had a quasi-mystical experience that involved the consumption of—and subsequent recovery from—several gallons of particularly potent chili.
I had spent the better part of that Friday evening and Saturday afternoon thinking about and working on this batch. The best chili needs to be created in solitude. It requires contemplative shopping and preparation, and perhaps it even requires us to exercise our ancient hunting, gathering, and foraging skills. This particular version involved some homemade spicy black-and-red-pepper deer jerky that my father had sent me for Christmas, which I chopped into pea-sized pieces. Added to the simmering tomato juice, the jerky bits softened but retained just enough of a chewy texture to be intriguing. I stirred in a mixture of chorizo and hamburger, sautéed garlic and onion, a dozen purplish chile peppers (possibly purple habañero) purchased at a local Spanish market, several heaping spoonfuls of bitter Mexican cocoa, chili powder, cumin, oregano, cilantro, sweet corn, dark kidney beans, pintos, black beans, and green bell pepper. Adding item after item, purely by inspiration, was my favorite way to make chili. As items were added, I inevitably needed more broth. Sometimes, the broth became too thin and more meat, vegetables, and beans were then required. It became a complicated cycle—and led to the production of a massive quantity of chili when I had only planned on a meal for two. By the time B.P. arrived, the fifteen-quart stockpot was almost full. The lid clattered as the pot bubbled, and the small kitchen was wafting with the smell of spices that actually made the inside of the nostrils prickle. The chili was almost ready; finally, B.P. added some kind of psilocybin-containing mushrooms.
I have no idea how the two of us managed to eat all that chili, though I have a distinct memory of B.P.’s face, set in an intensity of determination that one sometimes sees in athletes as they push themselves past their breaking point. Dewdrops of sweat glimmered on his forehead. We sat on an ancient, boatlike thrift-store davenport, our bowls resting on old-fashioned TV trays that I found amusing and delightful—relics from the kind of suburban childhood I’d never had. B.P. had been a film major, and we thought of ourselves as bohemian, intellectual. We were watching Alain Resnais’s Last Year at Marienbad, a French art flick, dreamily incomprehensible. A Mobius strip of murmurous Gallic dialogues competed with the noises of the city outside my apartment—sirens, hip-hop blaring from car speakers. The mushrooms kicked in. I was about as far from my mother’s kitchen in Nebraska as I was likely to get.
That particular chili might have been the best I ever made. I imagined that it was an ideal combination of meaty savoriness, chocolate/cumin sweetness, and fiery spice, and I vividly remember the hypnotic mixture of textures—the doughy texture of pinto bean set off against the firmer kidney bean, the chewy jerky bits contrasting with the soft crumbled chorizo and hamburger. All of this was imprinted distinctly in my mind—even though when we groggily woke late the next afternoon, the chili, all three gallons of it, was gone, and (of course) I have found it impossible to re-create. Perhaps, ultimately, for the best.
As the years have passed, my desire to have my head blown off has gradually waned. I’m less impressed by the pure deadly power of a hot pepper, less interested in showing off my own prowess and endurance. I haven’t turned my back on chili, but as I’ve moved further into my adult life—gotten married, had children, and so on—I do find that my relationship with it has become increasingly private.
Secretive, my wife says, and points out that most of the time I make chili when I am spending a weekend alone at home, when she and my sons are gone for one reason or another and I can spend undisturbed hours puttering around in our big three-story suburban house, like some eccentric middle-aged man with an enormous model train set in his basement.
I like to cook in the quiet of a late Saturday afternoon, the time of the weekend when, as a kid, I would sit at the kitchen table with my notepad and colored pencils; when, as a college student, I would laze alone in my dorm room making a collage or a mix tape. There’s the same sort of hypnotic, slowed-time quality at work in stirring up some chili. Soaking the dried beans until they’re soft. Sautéing some garlic and onions. Bisecting some strange new pepper I’ve discovered at the market. Stirring together powders and dried herbs and pastes of various sorts.
More often than not, by the time I’m finished I’ll have once again made far too much for one person. More often than not, my wife and sons will come home from their weekend away and discover rows and rows of quart containers in the basement freezer, stacked and labeled and stored away, just like my parents used to do. I’ve chosen a much milder, more secluded middle age than they did. But I’m stocked up and ready, which I guess is yet another thing that I secretly take pleasure in. If hordes of people ever do show up at my door, I’ll be prepared to feed them.
Dan Chaon’s Chili (Version #116)
1 cup dried dark kidney beans
1 cup dried pinto beans
2 pounds ground chuck
2 pounds hot breakfast sausage, bulk
4 jalapeño peppers, minced with seeds
4 poblano peppers, whole, seeded
1 large yellow onion, chopped
1 head garlic, chopped
46 ounces Spicy Hot V8 or other vegetable juice
2 cups beef broth
5 tablespoons standard dark chili powder
1 tablespoon unsweetened cocoa powder
2 tablespoons cumin
1 teaspoon ground black pepper
2 teaspoons sugar
1/2 teaspoon ground coriander
2 teaspoons chopped oregano leaves
1/4 cup chopped cilantro
1 large red bell pepper, chopped and seeded
1 large tomato, chopped
2 teaspoons all-purpose flour
2 teaspoons cornmeal
2 tablespoons warm water