Chile Peppers

by Dave Dewitt

  Another Cajun favorite is alligator, and I learned how to prepare it when I visited the beautifully restored Acadian Village near Lafayette where we did a shoot for Heat Up Your Life. I met up with chef Scott Landry, who hails from Lake Charles. He agreed to cook some of his favorite native dishes—outside, just to show us how easy it is. He made crawfish étouffée, chicken and sausage jambalaya, and one of his favorite foods from a nearby bayou. Using a skillet on a gas grill and some homemade hot sauce and a few vegetables, here’s how he did it.

  SCOTT: What we are going to do right now is we are going to season this alligator up that we caught and we are going to put that Byron seasoning on there. Remember, you have got to season that. It doesn’t have to be long that you season that—10 minutes, 15 minutes, that is all. Byron seasoning, some habaneros and cayenne peppers, it is a little bit of everything. It’s a brand-new bottle, so if you don’t mind, I am going to—not, I didn’t have to use my teeth. You know, God gave you can openers, you just open your mouth like that.

  A dinner of fried alligator in New Orleans. iStock.

  Anyway, I am going to put that in there. You can’t put that in there like that—you have to put that in there like this. Put you a lot, boy that smells good. Then I am going to sprinkle this all around in there. I am going to use my knife to move that all around. This is going to be hot for you people up north, but not too hot for us down here. Then I am going to put some parsley and some onion, then I am going to use these red and yellow bell peppers. Do you know what the difference is? One is riper than the other.

  The most important thing to remember in alligator is to cut all that fat off, because that fat is oh man that is nasty. I’m going to tell you that if you don’t have no alligator at your grocery store, I don’t think you might get that, but in Lake Charles we get that. If you don’t, use some chicken. What I want to tell you about this dish is, alligator, if you cook it too long, it is like rubber on your feet. You don’t have to do that if you want. My wife—you know that I used to have a wife, but she left me one time. She is the best housekeeper that I have ever met. I married her and when I left, she kept the house. It is just one of those things, you just can’t understand that.

  You know alligator, everyone wants to know what it tastes like. I told some men the other day when I was in Florida that it tastes a little bit like manatee or eagle, but don’t cook that. Oh, they will get on your case, but it makes a pretty good gumbo. And you stir all that up and you have the colors in there. If you want, you can put your hand in there and tear it up before it gets too hot. If it is too hot, the sauce that I am cooking with is pretty hot, you just add a little water.

  As you can see, it don’t take long to cook this. You don’t want to overcook this because it will be too chewy, and you don’t want any fat because it will be rancid. I got this dish all done here. Get these onions cooked down a little bit, it would be fine.

  DAVE: It smells great.

  SCOTT: Let’s try a little of this alligator now.

  DAVE: Do alligators eat crawfish?

  SCOTT: They eat anything that don’t eat them first.

  DAVE: That’s good, that’s spicy.

  SCOTT: It’ll make you grow up big and strong.

  DAVE: Alligator’s kinda hard to find in New Mexico, but I guess it’s good here.

  SCOTT: You can make it with anything you want.

  We do have alligators in the markets in New Mexico—alligator pears, that is, or avocados.

  CHILES IN SOUTHWESTERN CUISINES

  When I wrote the book The Southwest Table (Lyons Press, 2011), the first thing I had to do was define the term Southwest. Since everyone agrees that New Mexico and Arizona are in the Southwest, I started there, but eliminated California (Far West) and Oklahoma (Midwest). But what about Texas? I finally decided that Southwest Texas, including the cities of Austin, San Antonio, and El Paso, was in the Southwest, but the rest of the state was not. I also eliminated Colorado from the Southwest in that book, but for the purposes of this book, considering the growing popularity of ‘Pueblo’ chiles, I am including southern Colorado in the Southwest. So, the term Southwest consists of New Mexico, Arizona, southwest Texas, and southern Colorado. Let’s move east to west when discussing these chile-based cuisines.

  THE “NATIONAL DISH” OF TEXAS

  Perhaps the most famous Tex-Mex creation is that bowl o’ red, chili con carne, a dish that most writers on the subject say did not originate in Mexico. Even Mexico disclaims chili; the Diccionario de mejicanismos, a Mexican dictionary published in 1959, defines it as “A detestable food passing itself off as Mexican and sold from Texas to New York City.”

  Despite such protestations, the combination of meat and chile peppers in stew-like concoctions is not uncommon in Mexican cooking. Mexican caldillos (thick soups or stews) and adobos (thick sauces) often resemble chili con carne in both appearance and taste because they all use similar ingredients: various types of chiles combined with meat (usually beef), onions, garlic, cumin, and occasionally tomatoes.

  E. De Grolyer, a scholar and chili aficionado, believes that Texas chili con carne had its origins as the “pemmican of the Southwest” in the late 1840s. According to De Grolyer, Texans pounded together dried beef, beef fat, chile peppers, and salt to make trail food for the long ride out to San Francisco and the gold fields. The concentrated, dried mixture was then boiled in pots along the trail as sort of an “instant chili.”

  Chili con carne. Photograph by Wes Naman. Work for hire.

  A variation on this theory holds that cowboys invented chili while driving cattle along the lengthy and lonely trails. Supposedly, range cooks planted oregano, chiles, and onions among patches of mesquite to protect them from foraging cattle. The next time they passed along the same trail, they would collect the spices, combine them with beef (what else?), and make a dish called “trail drive chili.” Undoubtedly, the chiles used with the earliest incarnations of chili con carne were the chiltepíns, called chilipiquins in Texas, which grow wild on bushes—particularly in the southern part of the state.

  Probably the most likely explanation for the origin of chili con carne in Texas comes from the heritage of Mexican food combined with the rigors of life on the Texas frontier. Most historians agree that the earliest written description of chili came from J. C. Clopper, who lived near Houston. He wrote of visiting San Antonio in 1828: “When they [poor families of San Antonio] have to pay for their meat in the market, a very little is made to suffice for the family; it is generally cut into a kind of hash with nearly as many peppers as there are pieces of meat—this is all stewed together.”

  Except for this one quote, which does not mention the dish by name, historians of heat can find no documented evidence of chili in Texas before 1880. Around that time in San Antonio, a municipal market—El Mercado—was operating in Military Plaza. Historian Charles Ramsdell notes that “the first rickety chili stands were set up in this marketplace, with the bowls of red sold by women who were called ‘chili queens.’”

  The fame of chili con carne began to spread, and the dish soon became a major tourist attraction, making its appearance in Mexican restaurants all over Texas—and elsewhere. The first known recipe appeared in 1880 in Mrs. Owens’ Cook Book. She got it all wrong, of course, referring to the bowl o’ red as “the national dish of Mexico,” and added ham, carrots, celery, and cloves to it.

  At the World’s Fair in Chicago in 1893, a bowl o’ red was available at the San Antonio Chili Stand, and in 1896, the first US Army recipe appeared in The Manual for Army Cooks. Incidentally, Army chili contained both rice and onions. Given the popularity of the dish, some commercialization of it was inevitable. In 1898, William Gebhardt of New Braunfels, Texas, produced the first chili powder and began canning his chili con carne, Gebhardt Eagle. By 1918, Walker Austex was producing 45,000 cans a day of Walker’s Red Hot Chile Con Carne and 15,000 cans a day of Mexene Chili Powder.

  The chili queens were banned from San Antonio in 1937
for health reasons—public officials objected to flies and poorly washed dishes. They were restored by Mayor Maury Maverick (a real name) in 1939, but their stands were closed again shortly after the start of World War II. Texans, however, have never forgotten their culinary heritage, and in 1977 the Texas legislature proclaimed chili con carne to be the “Official Texas State Dish.” Incidentally, in 1993, the Illinois State Senate passed a resolution proclaiming that Illinois was to be the “Chilli [sic] Capital of the Civilized World,” a move that outraged Texans.

  Today there is a movement afoot by the International Chili Society (in California, of all places!) to have Congress name chili as the official national dish, but the idea isn’t new. In the mid-1970s, Craig Claiborne wrote, “We thought for years that if there’s such a thing as a national American dish, it isn’t apple pie, it’s chili con carne. . . . In one form or another, chili in America knows no regional boundaries. North, South, East, and West, almost every man, woman, and child has a favorite recipe.”

  Chili con carne is still enormously popular in Texas and other states, and huge chili cookoffs are held. Teams of cooks use highly guarded secret recipes to compete for thousands of dollars in prizes while having a good ol’ time partying. Some traditionalists, however, scorn the cookoff-style chili con carne as too elaborate and are promoting a return to the classic “keep it simple, stupid” café-style chili.

  Sam Pendergrast of Abilene is such a purist, and in his landmark article, “Requiem for Texas Chili,” which appeared in Chile Pepper magazine in 1989, he notes: “I have a theory that real chili is such a basic, functional dish that anyone can make it from the basic ingredients—rough meat, chile peppers, and a few common spices available to hungry individuals—and they’ll come up with pretty much the same kind of recipe that was for most of a century a staple of Texas tables. So all we have to do to get back to real chili is to get rid of the elitist nonsense.”

  THE ADVENT OF TEX-MEX

  Throughout the Southwest, each state has its own version of what is called Mexican cooking. With a few exceptions, the same basic dishes—enchiladas, tacos, and the like—have become very popular, but they do not truly represent the cooking of Mexico. Rather, they have become Mexican American versions of cooking borrowed from the northern states of Mexico—versions that developed when our states were a part of Mexico—but these dishes evolved in their own directions, based on regional ingredients and cooking styles.

  The first Mexican restaurant to open in Texas was the Old Borunda Café in Marfa in 1887, closely followed by the Original Mexican Restaurant in San Antonio in 1900. Restaurants had a great influence on the development of Tex-Mex cooking. As Texas food writer Richard West explains, “The standard Tex-Mex foods (tacos, enchiladas, rice, refried beans, and tamales)—and newer editions, like chiles rellenos, burritos, flautas, and chalupas—existed in Mexico before they came here. What Texas restaurant cooks did was to throw them together and label them Combination Dinner, Señorita Dinner, and the hallowed Number One. In so doing, they took a few ethnic liberties and time-saving short cuts. For example: Tex-Mex tacos as we know them contain ground, instead of shredded, meat. And chile gravy is most often out of the can, instead of being made fresh with chiles anchos and special spices.”

  The chile peppers most commonly used in homemade Tex-Mex cuisine are the poblanos from Mexico (and their dried version, anchos), which are tasty and mild, the fresh ones usually served relleno-style; the serranos for fresh salsas; the chilipiquins (chiltepíns) for soups and stews; and, of course, the ubiquitous jalapeño. This fat and fiery pepper is popular everywhere and is served raw, pickled, stuffed, or chopped up in salsas, and is even utilized in cooked sauces for topping enchiladas and huevos rancheros, which are served with fried eggs and salsa ranchera over corn or wheat tortillas.

  However, the Texans’ love of jalapeños has waned in recent years and the cause rests with chile breeders from Texas A&M University. The ‘TAM Mild Jalapeño I’ pepper plant is a mild cultivar of the jalapeño pepper developed at Texas A&M University in the early 2000s. It was much milder and larger than the traditional jalapeños, and genes of this mild pepper entered the general jalapeño pool. Cross-breeding caused the gene pool to become overall larger and milder, with some individual pods reaching six inches long. Food expert Sharon Hudgins reports that, 15 to 20 years ago, she spoke with Texas chefs who had given up on using these mild jalapeños and had switched to serrano chiles.

  New Mexican chiles are now making an appearance in Tex-Mex cooking, especially in the dried red form. For example, Chuy’s restaurant chain in Austin now brings in more than 10,000 pounds of fresh green New Mexican chiles from Hatch, New Mexico, and has a roasting and peeling fiesta; and the Central Market locations in Dallas, Ft. Worth, Austin, and Houston have Hatch Chile Fiestas where they sell and roast Hatch chiles, and hire cooks like me to give cooking demonstrations.

  No discussion of Texas food would be complete without mentioning beans. They are cooked in many different ways and are served with all the major Texas food groups: barbecue, chili, and Tex-Mex. One of the greatest celebrators of Texas beans was the famous author, professor, and naturalist, J. Frank Dobie. “A lot of people want chili with their beans,” he wrote in the 1949 Niemann-Marcus book, The Flavor of Texas. “Chili disguises the bean just as too much barbecue sauce destroys the delectability of good meat. For me, chili simply ruins good beans, although I do like a few chilipiquins cooked with them. I believe, however, that the chilipiquins make a better addition after the beans are cooked. I add about three to a plate of beans and mash them up in the plate along with a suitable amount of fresh onion. A meat eater could live on beans and never miss meat. When a Mexican laborer is unable to lift a heavy weight, his companions say he ‘lacks frijoles.’ As you may deduce, I am a kind of frijole man. On the oldtime ranches of the border country, where I grew up, frijoles were about as regular as bread and in some households they still are.”

  Hatch chiles in the Central Market, Austin. Photograph by Dave DeWitt.

  Today, Texas cuisine is somewhat of a melting pot, a tossed-salad kind of cooking, with many different influences vying for top honors. In addition to the cooking styles covered above, Texas is influenced greatly by Gulf Coast and Louisiana cooking, Southern cooking (particularly in eastern Texas), Midwestern styles, and even New Mexican cuisine in West Texas. One of the great things about traveling through Texas is the opportunity to sample a wide variety of Southwestern cooking.

  NEW MEXICO AND THE UBIQUITOUS CHILE

  According to many accounts, chile peppers were introduced into what is now the US by Capitán General Juan de Oñate, the founder of Santa Fe, in 1598. However, they may have been introduced to the Pueblo Indians of New Mexico by the Antonio Espejo expedition of 1582–1583. Baltasar Obregón, one of the members of the expedition, claimed: “They have no chile, but the natives were given some seed to plant.” By 1601, chiles were not on the list of Indian crops, according to colonist Francisco de Valverde, who also complained that mice were a pest who ate chile pods off the plants in the field.

  After the Spanish began settlement, the cultivation of chile peppers exploded, and they were grown all over New Mexico. It is likely that many different varieties were cultivated, including early forms of jalapeños, serranos, anchos, and pasillas. But one variety that adapted particularly well to New Mexico was a long green chile that turned red in the fall. Formerly called Anaheim because of its transfer to California around 1900, the New Mexican chile was cultivated for hundreds of years in the region with such dedication that several landraces developed. These landraces, called Chimayo and Española, are varieties that adapted to particular environments and are still planted today in the same fields they were grown in centuries ago; they constitute a small but distinct part of tons of pods produced each year in New Mexico.

  In 1846, William Emory, chief engineer of the Army’s Topographic Unit, was surveying the New Mexico landscape and its customs. He described a meal eaten
by people in Bernalillo, just north of Albuquerque: “Roast chicken, stuffed with onions; then mutton, boiled with onions; then followed various other dishes, all dressed with the everlasting onion; and the whole terminated by chile, the glory of New Mexico.”

  Chile field and mesa, Doña Ana County. Photograph by Paul W. Bosland. Used with permission.

  Emory went on to relate his experience with chiles: “Chile the Mexicans consider the chef-d’oeuvre of the cuisine, and seem really to revel in it; but the first mouthful brought the tears trickling down my cheeks, very much to the amusement of the spectators with their leather-lined throats. It was red pepper, stuffed with minced meat.”

  All of the primary dishes in New Mexico cuisine contain chile peppers: sauces, stews, carne adovada, enchiladas, posole, tamales, huevos rancheros, and many combination vegetable dishes. The intense use of chiles as a food rather than just as a spice or condiment is what differentiates New Mexican cuisine from that of Texas or Arizona. In neighboring states, chile powders are used as a seasoning for beef or chicken broth-based “chili gravies,” which are thickened with flour or cornstarch before they are added to, say, enchiladas. In New Mexico, the sauces are made from pure chiles and are thickened by reducing the crushed or pureed pods.

  New Mexico chile sauces are cooked and pureed, while salsas utilize fresh ingredients and are uncooked. Debates rage over whether tomatoes are used in cooked sauces such as red chile sauce for enchiladas. Despite the recipes in numerous cookbooks (none of whose authors live in New Mexico), traditional cooked red sauces do not contain tomatoes, though uncooked salsas do.

  Carne adovada, pork marinated in red chiles and then baked, is one of the most popular New Mexican entrées. Another is enchiladas; in fact, there are so many variations on enchiladas that cooks soon determine their favorites through experimentation.