This is because I was thinking about the dumbass that asked me in an appalled tone of voice why the EPA permitted the old trains to emit such a cloud of smoke back in the 1800s.
Then I thought about chili because I am hungry and a bowl of Piccolo's finest would hit the spot right about now.
Now chili is not really a Mexican dish. For that matter, chop suey is not a Chinese dish. Chop suey was a San Fancisco Chinese restaurant creation of back in the day when a customer would walk into a restaurant (probably when he was trashed) and want something to eat. The cook would chop up a bunch of leftovers and cook them up. Hence the 'chop' in chop suey.
There is and was no real recipe for it. It varied with every cooking because of it's very nature and ingredients, chopped up leftovers. Hence CHOP suey.
Chili really isn't Mexican in origin, either. Ask any Mexican and they'll tell you. Chili is a Tex-Mex concoction from Texas that in this day and age a lot of people ruin by using expensive meat. It's origin was steer beef from a stringy old longhorn.
Many a Delmonico steak has been wasted and foolishly ground up by people that do not understand the origins or spirit of this fine dish.
Chili was kind of a saddle tramp dish made of meat and whatever you had in your saddlebags. Dried peppers were common along with maybe an onion or two. Occasionally some spices were added.
Meat was a real treat on the trail back then. Refrigeration was rare. Seldom could a cowboy afford a second horse to pack a freezer on (powered with solar panels,of course. Electricity as we know it now was non-existant) Needless to say if a cowboy did pack a freezer on his pack horse he had no room for a microwave.
Those scenes in the movies about cowboys sitting next to a fire eating elk or venison steaks are a bunch of hooey. It was a rare occurence and would only last a night or two before the meat spoiled unless it was the dead of winter. In winter the meat lasted longer. Call it natural refrigeration if you will.
Cowboys and saddle tramps lived for weeks on end on beans and rice or maybe occasionally small game or whatever they could scare up.
Without refrigeration meat could only be preserved by smoking although sometimes by canning but the can opener was not invented until 1858 and it didn't really open cans for sour apples. The P-38 wasn't invented until 1942 so opening cans was dangerous and required tools the average cowboy didn't carry with him.
Anyway, they made do with what they could get their hands on.
There are two things I am pretty much Old School on. Chili and bourbon. Chili is made out of beef that is purchased strictly by price. The cheaper the price the more desirable it becomes for chili.
Bourbon to me is bought pretty much the same way. If you give me a bottle of Knob Creek or Maker's Mark I will mix it with Coke or something. The Erza Brooks, Evan Williams and Jim Beam white are to be taken neat. While I respect what distillers have done to bourbon by making is so smooth, Old School bourbon has a touch of roughness about it. Smoothing it out takes the authority of it away in my opinion.
Back to chili. The one new and improved modern piece of equipment that had been a great step forward to chili makers (and spaghetti sauce makers) is the freezer. I generally don't even eat more than a spoonful of two after I make it until it's been frozen first. I batch it up in plastic containers and freeze it and even if it's the next day take it out and thaw it.
Putting a pot in the refrigerator works pretty good, too. It's delicious on the third or fourth reheat. Back in the Old West they used to use snowbanks in the winter to do this.
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