Chili Day

What the day is

Chili Day is kept on the fourth Thursday of February, so the date moves each year. The dish is chili con carne, and it is Texan rather than Mexican in origin.

Origin and background

Its public history runs through the Chili Queens of San Antonio. From the later nineteenth century, women set up tables in the city's plazas in the evenings, selling bowls of chili by lamplight to locals and visitors, and they became famous enough to be a recognized attraction of the city. They were repeatedly shut down on sanitary grounds through the twentieth century and repeatedly returned. The dish reached a national audience partly through their stalls and partly through the San Antonio chili stand at the 1893 world's fair in Chicago.

Reproducing it at home became possible when a San Antonio manufacturer began producing commercial chili powder in the 1890s, grinding and blending the dried chiles that home cooks had previously had to prepare themselves.

The beans argument is real rather than a joke. Texas orthodoxy holds that chili contains meat and chiles and not beans, and the rules of the major competitive cook-off organizations formally prohibit beans and other fillers in the judged category. Outside Texas beans are entirely normal. It is the official state dish of Texas, which gives the local position some institutional weight.

The technique that most improves a home pot is skipping the powder. Whole dried chiles, briefly toasted in a dry pan and then soaked in hot water and blended, give a depth that pre-ground powder loses on the shelf. Cubed chuck rather than ground beef changes the texture entirely, and a spoonful of masa harina thickens the pot while adding the corn note that belongs with it.

How to take part

• Toast and rehydrate whole dried chiles instead of using powder.
• Cube the beef rather than mincing it, and brown it properly first.
• Thicken with masa harina near the end.
• Make it a day ahead. Chili improves overnight more than most stews.
• Put beans in if you like beans, and be ready to defend it.