Comments | blitheringpooks: Scenes from the war room...

blitheringpooks

Scenes from the war room...

Aug 04, 2015 10:44

08:27:30 ‹Chrysoula› chili is a form of stew!

08:40:26 ‹pooks› Do NOT call chili stew.

08:40:30 ‹pooks› EVER.

08:40:58 ‹pooks›

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Comments 5

desperance August 4 2015, 22:00:27 UTC

Heh. It would never cross my mind to say "chilli is stew", because they occupy two distinct spaces in my head; but now that the thing has been said, I find absolutely no way of asserting that chilli is not stew. Every box I can think of in a definition of stew, chilli ticks. Whether it wants to or not. Unless this is a religious schism and not a scientific one...?

blitheringpooks August 5 2015, 01:30:27 UTC

Religious, of course.

That said--true chili had no tomatoes or beans. If it's nothing but meat and a thick gravy, is that really stew?

desperance August 5 2015, 01:43:59 UTC

Well, stewed meat it might be, for I suspect any meat cooked slowly in liquid of being stewed by definition - but this is another of those religious assertions, isn't it? "True chili": I am a stranger to these shores, and not at all clear what makes this chili true and others false. (Me, I make a lot of chillies, and many of them have tomatoes and many beans, for I like both these things in a chilli: but see, I know myself to be so inauthentic I even spell it wrong. Is there actually a historical argument to say "Chili started here, with these ingredients and no other"? And if so, is there a counter-argument? I come from England; I have been to Bakewell - for example - which is home to the Bakewell tart; there are three establishments there each claiming to make the original tart to the original recipe, and they are wildly different one from another...)

blitheringpooks August 5 2015, 01:56:10 UTC

"General consensus dates its beginnings to the mid-1800s with Texas trail cooks who had to feed hungry cowboys on long trail drives, using whatever ingredients were on hand. That often meant beef (or buffalo, venison, or rattlesnake), chiles, and wild garlic, onion, and herbs. Inventive cooks discovered they could make nonperishable trail food by pounding together dried beef, fat, chile peppers, and salt. These "chili bricks" could be soaked in water during the day, and by dinnertime they could be boiled in water with garlic and cumin to make a hearty stew ( ... )

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