A Tale of Two Chillis
Jamie Oliver and the intricacies of cross-cultural chilli consumption
Jamie Oliver is making headlines again because his most recent recipe calls for putting grapes on pizza. Something I am overwhelmingly neutral over but want to bring up just so I can say what I’ve been wanting to say for a long time. I don’t really like Jamie Oliver.
I can see where he’s coming from, following the lines of pineapple or apple on pizza. A sweet and savoury combo never gets old. And I have on occasion been known to make his sausage pasta which I do thoroughly enjoy. However, my suspicions of dislike were finally confirmed whilst researching for an article on chilli con carne, (which has now turned into this article).
One thing about moving to the U.K. in a pandemic is I am surely behind where I should be when it comes to understanding British culture. I’ve been locked in a house with my half-British (American raised) boyfriend for months along with a cat who doesn’t comprehend anything past play time, food time, or snuggle time, and who definitely does not have a grasp on the public perception of famous television chefs, so I’m not sure how well my statement is going to fair on the wilds of the internet. However a friend told me that Oliver “took chips out of our school meals” and then tried to make kids hate chicken nuggets, so I can’t imagine he’s in good standing with anyone affected by this era of British history.
One thing I have become aware of, in my few interactions with actual Brits, is the (to me) odd and almost overwhelming presence of Chilli Con Carne in the British meal lexicon. As a person who grew up in the southwest of the United States, and whose extended family is from Texas. Different kinds of chilli are something I grew up with and loved. Finding it alive and well in the UK is something I never could’ve expected. And then finding Jamie Oliver’s recipe is something I expected even less, and soon began to despise.
BBC good food lists its chilli con carne recipe as the third most popular recipe of all time on its site. Other classic British TV chefs such as Nigella Lawson, Heston Blumenthal, and the Hairy Bikers have all written recipes for chilli con carne, all with varying ingredients, but with the name nonetheless. The telegraph has ‘beef chilli’ on its “30 recipes you should master by the age of 30” list and Allrecipes UK includes it on their “family favourite dinners” list. It’s clear that chilli con carne is not something that’s recently come to the UK, but rather seems to be a “classic” meal for a lot of Brits. Which is why I find Jamie’s chilli con carne recipe to be so odd.
Jamie Oliver calls his recipe “good old chilli con carne” which I assumed to mean ‘classic’ ‘simple’ ‘nothing unexpected chilli con carne.’ However, upon further glance it appears that Mr. Oliver calls for putting chickpeas into his chilli con carne. Which to me and many other Americans, is a criminal offense.
That word confused me as a kid, chilli. Where I’m from, red chili, green chili, and just chili, are completely separate entities. These are all very very different and eaten in very different contexts. Then we have jalapeño chiles, and poblano chiles, and green chiles, and all other types of peppers that make it into these stews and into other dishes.
The spelling of chilli versus chili versus chile is also very confusing. However, in modern day Brits use chilli with two Ls, Americans say chili with one L for the stew, and sometimes use chile with an e for the peppers itself, however in older texts, chile is often the dominant spelling for all forms of the word.
Some of you are probably asking, ‘I thought chilli con carne was Mexican? It’s in Spanish, after all, and even Tesco’s tagline on their brand of canned chilli says “a taste of Mexico”’ Well, I hate to break it to you, but Chili is Texas’ state food, and Mexico refuses to claim it. In 1959 the Diccionario de Mejicanismos says that chili con carne (roughly translated) is “a detestable food passing itself off as Mexican, sold in the U.S. from Texas to New York.”
The purest form of chili con carne sees its origins in Texas during the late 1800s. The specific origins themselves are highly debated, but the ingredients of the original chile con carne (spelled with an e) are not. A true Texan chile con carne does NOT have beans in it, let alone any other leftfield legumes (…ahem), and looks extremely similar to a traditional Mexican chile colorado or any other Mexican style chile stew.
Chili con carne became popularized in America through the presence of the “Chili Queens,” Mexican-American women who would set up stands in the plazas of San Antonio, Texas, and serve chili to anyone passing by. The Chili Queens gained national popularity after they occupied a booth at the 1893 World’s Fair, and operated up until health code restrictions tightened and shut them down in the 1930s.
After the World’s Fair, the whole country started opening Chili parlours so that people could have access to this new, exotic food of the south. This is where we see chili begin to morph into what we know it as today. The addition of beans to chili came about through beans being served alongside the chili, and people ended up mixing the two together.
Nowadays in the US, there are multiple kinds of chili, most commonly made the non-Texan way with beans. Different meats, different spices, different ways of serving chili have all been adopted, to the point where now simply calling something chili has an entirely different meaning from one state to the next. However, differences and debates didn’t stop American’s from building a huge culture around chili. Cook-off competitions are common all around the United States. The biggest of them being the International Chili Society’s World Championship Chili Cookoff that happens every year at the beginning of September. The winner getting a grand prize of $25,000 (£18,000). For these competitions, the two main categories are “traditional” (no beans) and “homestyle” (with beans), to play to everyone’s tastes. The ICS website publishes the winning recipes each year.
I am probably being unfair to Jamie, as we see with beans becoming the chilli norm, recipes shift and mould to new times, palettes and ideas. Jamie has two other chilli con carne recipes I could find. One seems to be more of a traditional homestyle, with beans being the only legumes in a sea of veggies and meat. And his brisket chilli con carne, which looks nice and has a fun picture of a cast iron pot over a fire. Plus, England is an entirely different culture, which he has to accommodate for.
From my research, the earliest mention of chilli con carne as a recipe in the U.K. dates back to 1898 in the Dundee Courrier Newspaper of Scotland. The recipe states simply to “take a pint of cold cooked meat, any kind, or odds and ends of several kinds can be used in making this dish; cut it into bits a little larger than the ends of a finger, add them to a chopped onion, a half-pint of leftover gravy and cover it with a cupful of tomato. Stew it gently half an hour, and five minutes before taking it off stir in a saltspoonful of salt (the meat and the gravy have been previously seasoned) and a dessertspoonful of ground Chile pepper. The only difference between it and the famous Mexican dish of the name is the substitution of onion for garlic. On a warm day it will start the perspiration and cool one like a bath, and on a cold day it will warm one through.”
When I was doing research for this piece, I looked for hours on end to find something that would’ve signaled how ‘chile con carne’ became a “famous” dish in the U.K. I never found the true reason. From what could only be assumed based on timelines, chile con carne likely came over after the world’s fair in 1893. This recipe interestingly does not have beans, which would’ve been how the Chili Queens at the fair served it. However, the next example of a recipe for chile con carne in a British newspaper was in a 1913 copy of the Daily Mirror, which by then had changed the spelling to ‘chili’ and did include kidney beans. The first example of chilli with two Ls doesn’t appear until 1952, and by that time it was considered one of England’s “favourite dishes” according to the paper’s mention of it. I did not find any historical mentions of chickpeas in a chilli con carne.
Just as I was ready to forgive Mr. Oliver for the chickpeas, another google research spree brings me to his recipe for green chilli. The tagline reads “Fresh and light, this American-style green chilli wakes up your taste buds with bold, brave flavours.” The recipe looks like some kind of hash, with clear peppers and onions, and mint and yoghurt for garnish, which is wholly not anything close to green chili.
Green Chili is a regional dish coming from New Mexico and Colorado in the southwestern United States. It’s a stew, mainly consisting of pork, tomatillos, and roasted green chilis either of the Hatch or Pueblo variety. The Hatch green chili is grown in the Hatch Valley of New Mexico and the Pueblo Green Chili (not to be confused with the Mexican pueblo chili) is grown in Pueblo, in Southeast Colorado. There is a bit of a rivalry between New Mexico and Colorado as to who has the better green chilis (and therefore green chili), which came to a head in 2019 when Colorado’s governor threw some coals in the fire by tweeting that Whole Foods in Colorado will be stocking Pueblo green chilis rather than Hatch green chilis, and stated that New Mexican chilis are “inferior.” Which led to Colorado getting roasted (pun intended) by clever New Mexicans on Twitter.
Because of this hyper specificity of chili pepper in this stew, it’s extremely difficult to recreate green chili in the U.K. On the odd occasion that I do find a large Anaheim or Poblano like chili at a U.K. grocery store, I’ll snap it up and try, but it’s often a losing battle, that I don’t even try to win.
I was born in Colorado, just south of the capital, Denver. There, green chili isn’t just easy to find, it’s everywhere. We smother our burritos in it, we make chili cheese fries (chips… sorry) out of it, or we’ll eat it as soup with a fresh flour tortilla on the side. The most common question at Colorado or New Mexican style restaurant is “hot, mild, or half and half?” To which the answer should always be half and half (actual spice level varies). My grandfather’s recipe for green chili is famous in our friend group. Everyone makes “Dave’s green chili” for cold days or large gatherings, and at Christmas, we eat green chili dip as an appetizer. Which is just melted cheese in a huge bowl of green chili that you eat with corn chips. Some of my fondest memories are in late summer when the roadside stands would pop up advertising that they were selling Hatches or Pueblos, roasted or unroasted. Some of them even had a giant roasting drum, that you could see turning more peppers than one could ever need in. The bright peppery smell stinging your nostrils with smoke and spice simultaneously.
Not to mention that green chili, while American, was created and is still sold, made, and grown by predominately non-white people. Often people of Mexican American or Indigenous Descent, who created and innovated this dish into what it is today. Which is a common problem of bringing a dish out of the context of its culture, and changing it to fit another culture’s standards. How much of a dish is tied to the culture surrounding it? How much of a dish is the ingredients, how much of it is the method, how much of it is the name itself?
Chili is a good world to explore questions of culture, regionality, and influence in the end product of a dish. A general word, that could mean almost anything, but what determines what ‘kind’ of chili it is is where it comes from, what ingredients are being used, and most importantly the culture behind it. Texas chili, homestyle chili, green chili, chilli con carne, all have different meanings and are mainly defined by the ingredients that are or are not there, and the ways in which those people consume and interact with those dishes.
So, when I see Jamie Oliver say that whatever he has come up with to put on that page is “American Style Green Chilli”? I was stunned. That’s a green chili of someone who has either never been to eat real green chili or didn’t care to try and replicate it the way it should be replicated. Because it is hard to replicate in the U.K., but certainly not impossible, and it definitely would have been easy to get closer than he did. Or a chilli con carne with chickpeas, something that never would’ve shown up in a Mexican American version of this recipe, and therefore shouldn’t be insinuated as ‘classic.’ A very influential white guy coming in and changing these recipes just seems in poor taste. With most foods from places that aren’t your own, the ingredients matter, the method matters, the culture matters.
At least to me, they do.
So, Jamie can have his grapes on his pizza, his weird hatred of chicken nuggets, and his chickpeas. And meanwhile, I’ll have his name blacklisted in my chrome extension,
and some chili in my belly.
