Chili con carne Period BOrigin theory CVerified

Chili con carne is a stew in which cubed or ground beef is simmered slowly with dried chiles and cumin. It came into its own as a popular dish in the late nineteenth century, in San Antonio, Texas.

The chile at its heart is a New World native, long rooted in this land. Beef, too, spread into Texas by way of northern Mexico through the stock-raising of the eighteenth-century Spanish missions, and beans and cumin were within reach as well. The ingredients had been at hand from early on.

Those ingredients reached people's tables as a single stew in the public plazas of San Antonio in the later nineteenth century. Stalls serving cheap food filled the plazas, and among them appeared the open-air stands run by Tejana and Mexican women, known as the Chili Queens. In the 1880s their stands enlivened the plazas, and there chili con carne settled in as an inexpensive food of the crowd.

When a San Antonio chili stand set up at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893, the dish came to be known across the country. In 1896 the Gebhardt company of San Antonio began manufacturing chili powder, and it spread as a product as well. A plain stew of meat and chiles climbed to national fame by way of the bustle of the stalls and the grand stage of the fair, and in 1977 it was named the official dish of the State of Texas.

A stubborn image of chili con carne as "Mexican food" clings to it. Seen from the side of food history, though, the chili con carne of today is a Tex-Mex dish, born in Texas and made popular by San Antonio's Chili Queens. Accounts from Texas Monthly, Atlas Obscura, and Robb Walsh's The Tex-Mex Cookbook take the view that this is "not a dish of Mexico proper," and it is now treated as a settled line.

Yet to say it was "invented from nothing in Texas" would go too far as well. Stewing meat with chiles has earlier examples in northern Mexico, scattered through travelers' accounts. Similar stews appear in the records of visitors in 1826, 1831, 1843, and 1849, and the phrase chile con carne first shows up in print in the 1857 memoir of S. Compton Smith, who served in the Mexican-American War: Chile con Carne; or, The Camp and the Field. The book is set in Mexico, and what that first appearance points to is not a Texan invention but a Mexican stew of meat and chiles.

Alongside this, a lineage has long been told in which Canary Islander women who settled San Antonio in 1731 brought with them a copper-pot stew of cumin, garlic, and chiles. This one, however, is thinly supported. According to the food historian Jameson, not a single observer who passed through the area between 1767 and 1882 mentions chili, and chili first appears in print in Texas only in Gould's Guide to San Antonio of 1882. Before 1880, documentary evidence for chili in Texas is nowhere to be found.

So chili con carne is best described as a dish that inherited the northern Mexican tradition of stewing meat and chiles, and crystallized into its present form at the stalls of San Antonio. Not "Mexico or Texas" as an either-or, but grown across both -- that is where the sources come to rest.