Montezuma Manna

"Lord God, we don't know why in Your wisdom, You been so doggone good to us. The Chinee don't have chili, ever. The Frenchmens is left out. The Rooshians don't know no more about chili than a hog does about a sidesaddle. Even the Meskins don't get a good whiff of it unless they stay around here. Chili eaters is some of Your chosen people..."

--Bones Hooks

One whiff of the stuff can turn contemporary chili aficionados as lyrical as the 19th century chuckwagon cook. To the true believer, a sizzling chile con carne is manna from Montezuma, a concoction of beef, green peppers, herbs and other combustibles with an aroma, as the International Chili Society puts it, that "should generate rapture akin to a lover's kiss." As hot as the dish are the arguments that simmer around its preparation. Should a true chili include beans? Tomatoes? Corn meal? Onions? Is beef the best came? How many hours --or days--should it be cooked?

At two separate "international chili cook-offs" this month--one held in Texas, the other in southern California--the "dish that won the West" inspired more culinary variations and impassioned claims than there are spines on a cactus. Those who cater to chili addicts are as contentious as their customers, but they agree on at least one fact: the growing and packaging of peppers and chili products have become a multimillion-dollar industry.

Folk Foods. One reason for the diversity of recipes is that chili, like most folk foods, started out as an ad hoc combination of ingredients. For the range-riding cooks who invented it, chili consisted of scrawny beef--whose dubious flavor was masked by peppers and spices --and whatever else was around. In any case, it makes a nourishing dish. Roy M. Nakayama, 53, a New Mexico State University horticulturist who has studied peppers for 20 years and eats them three times a day, points out, "Chilis are rich in vitamins A and C. As antioxidants they also help preserve the meat and break down the fibers." Chili buffs claim the peppers can cure anything from fallen arches to falling hair.

At the California jamboree, attended by 15,000 people at the site of an old gold mine 90 miles north of Los Angeles, chili heads, as fanciers call themselves, stirred up chile con possum, rabbit, chicken, pork, rattlesnake, ham hocks, jerky and Portuguese sausage. An Arizona chef used fillet of road runner; the Tennessee champion boasted of his raccoon. The Hawaiian contingent made its stock (it said) from a "tired Samoan fighting cock." Californian and Texan experts used some 40 varieties of chili peppers, ranging from the relatively mild Big Jim to a Tahitian product that would blow the bow off the Bounty. For added flavoring, rival chili heads stirred in dried armadilla blood, tequila, beer and, it was reported, marijuana. Singer Kathryn Grayson's "All-American chili" incorporated meatballs, Italian-style. The ingredients used by Girl Scout Troop 256 from Odessa, Texas, were "tender love and affection and a pinch of paprika."

None of the contestants used beans. "That," sniffed one chili head, "would be like mixing cognac and Dr. Pepper." In fact, the simplest recipe proved best in the view of a panel of judges that included Actors Ernest Borgnine, William Conrad and McCulloch Oil President C.V. Wood, retired, undefeated world chili champ. Joe DeFrates, 67, of Springfield, Ill., winner of the California cookoff, concocted his "horse-and-buggy" chili from lean beef, peppers and his own chili powder. The Texas champion, Susie Watson of Houston, used a similar recipe, plus an arcane spice derived from pine cones. Even in Texas, none of the chili heads used the "greaseless" Pedernales River recipe favored by Lyndon Johnson. "L.B.J.'s stuff," growled an oldtimer, "was just low-torque beef gruel."

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