Don’t Corrupt Chili
The core ingredients of chili are “fiery envy, scalding jealousy, scorching contempt, and sizzling scorn,” wrote New York author H. Allen Smith, in a 1967 essay for Holiday magazine. He was mostly right about that (I also like to add a dark lager) but wrong about almost everything else. Smith’s essay, titled “Nobody Knows More About Chili Than I Do,” is an historic example of pitch-perfect food trolling. In it, Smith denounces Texas and all its claims to chili dominance, and his piece culminates in a wildly misguided recipe with a special New York twist. “To create chili without beans, either added to the pot or served on the side,” he writes, “is to flout one of the basic laws of nature.”
Predictably, Smith’s column burned up the Lone Star State, where chili was born, and where it certainly doesn’t contain beans. The great Texas journalist Frank X. Tolbert wrote in his Dallas Morning News column that what Smith called chili was a mere vegetable stew. Another Dallas newspaperman, Wick Fowler, also fired back: “If you know beans about chili, you know that chili has no beans.” (That line was later committed to lyrics by a San Marcos songwriter, in 1976—the year before the Texas Legislature proclaimed chili as the state food.)
Tolbert and Fowler challenged Smith to a ghost-town cook-off. The bean question would be settled in Terlingua, a former mining outpost near the Mexican border, on Oct. 21, 1967. In what came to be known as the Great Chili Confrontation, Fowler represented Texas; Smith spoke for New York and the rest of the wide world. Three judges would decide the outcome: Terlingua Mayor David Witts; San Antonio brewmaster Floyd Schneider; and Hallie Stillwell, a judge from Alpine, Texas—who happened to be Smith’s cousin.
Schneider pulled the lever for Fowler’s Texas chili. Stillwell, who of course knew her cousin’s recipe by its bean-y texture, voted for Smith. The swing vote, Witts, took one bite of Smith’s New York bean “chili” and declared himself poisoned. His taste buds were ruined, he sputtered, according to accounts of those who were present. Witts was unable to try the other chili in good faith. No winner was declared.
Ever since then, beans have been forbidden in the annual Original Terlingua International Championship Chili Cookoff. And yet beans are a feature of nearly every so-called chili served outside Texas. I say so-called because even though beans are unlikely to permanently damage your taste buds, they are anathema to chili. Put plainly, beans do not belong in chili. And non-Texans’—especially New Yorkers’—repeated attempts to add beans to this regional specialty only reveal their own arrogance and ignorance.
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