Texans call it ?A BOWL OF RED?. They think Chili Con Carne was invented in a jailhouse in San Antonio, Fort Worth, Corsicana or where ever (depends on who?s spinnin? the yarn.) It goes like this:

The jailer?s wife was cooking for the prisoners and skimming the food allowance as best she could. She purchased bull beef that would have otherwise gone into dog food and in order to cover the rancid taste, disguised it with ground, dried chili peppers. Good yarn, but ?taint necessarily true. Cooks have disguised the flavor of bad meat for centuries. The Texans just have their own spin on the recipe..

Linda Stradley, author of I?LL HAVE WHAT THEY?RE HAVING tells this yarn about the origins of chili:

1618 - According to an old Southwestern American Indian legend and tale (several modern writer have documented -or maybe just "passed along") this old story, it is said that the first recipe for chili con carne was put on paper in the 17th century by a beautiful nun, Sister Mary of Agreda of Spain. She was mysteriously known to the Indians of the Southwest United States as "La Dama de Azul," the lady in blue. Sister Mary would go into trances with her body lifeless for days. When she awoke from these trances, she said her spirit had been to a faraway land where she preached Christianity to savages and counseled them to seek out Spanish missionaries.

It is certain that Sister Mary never physically left Spain, yet Spanish missionaries and King Philip IV of Spain believed that she was the ghostly "La Dama de Azul" or "lady in blue," of Indian Legend. It is said that sister Mary wrote down the recipe for chili which called for venison or antelope meat, onions, tomatoes, and chili peppers. No accounts of this were ever recorded, so who knows?

- The first chili cook-off took place in 1967 in a ghost town, Terlingua, Texas, an old mercury mining site. It was a showdown between Homer ?Wick? Fowler, a Dallas News reporter vs. H. Allen Smith. Mr. Smith wrote a piece in Holiday Magazine proclaiming ?No Body Knows More about chili than I do? . A reader suggested that Fowler answer the challenge, he did. The cook off competition ended in a tie vote when the tie-breaker judge allowed someone to ram a spoonful of chili in his mouth. He promptly vomited onto another judges shoes and disqualified himself. A one year moratorium was declared and the first cook-off ended in a tie.

Some Spanish priests were said to be wary of the passion inspired by chile peppers, assuming they were aphrodisiacs. The priest's warning probably contributed to the dish's popularity. - Records were found by Everrette DeGolyer (1886-1956), a Dallas millionaire and a lover of chili, indicating that the first chili mix was concocted around 1850 by Texan adventurers and cowboys as a staple for hard times when traveling to and in the California gold fields and around Texas. Needing hot grub, the trail cooks came up with a sort of Stew. They pounded beef fat, pepper dried beef and chili peppers together. This amounted to brick chile or chili bricks that could be boiled in pots along the trail. He said that chili should be called chili a la Americano because the term chili is generic to Mexico and simply means a hot pepper. He believed that chili con carne began as the "pemmican of the Southwest."

There was another group of Texans known as "Lavanderas," or "Washerwoman," that followed around the 19th-century armies of Texas making a stew of goat meat or venison, wild marjoram and chili peppers.

Residents of the Texas prisons in the mid to late 1800s also lay claim to the creation of chili. They say that the Texas version of bread and water (or gruel) was a stew of the spices that was boiled in water to an edible consistency). The "prisoner's plight" became a status symbol of the Texas prisons and the inmates used to rate jails on the quality of their chili. The Texas prison system made such good chili that freed inmates often wrote for the recipe, saying what they missed most after leaving was a really good bowl of chili.

- San Antonio was a wide-open town (a cattle town, a railroad town, and an army town) and by day a municipal food market and by night a wild and open place. Frank H. Bushick describes the market in his book Glamorous Days as:"an open air bazaar for fakers, peddlers, and every variety of Bedouins of the night. . . The houses and saloon bars in the adobe buildings on the four sides of the square were concealed by thirsty humanity bellied up two rows deep." Mexican women served red chiles and beef from open-air stalls at the Military Plaza Mercado. In those days, the world "chili" referred strictly to the pepper. They served a variation of simple, chile-spiked dishes (tamales, tortillas, chili con carne, and enchiladas). A night was not considered complete without a visit to one of these "chili queens." In 1943 they were put out of business due to their inability to conform to sanitary standards enforced in the town's restaurants.

Some famous quotes by Chili lovers:

Dying statement of Kit Carson ?Wish I had time for just one more bowl of Chili?
1868

Lyndon B. Johnson ?Chili concocted outside of Texas is usually a week apologetic imitation of the real thing. One of the first things I do when I get home to Texas is have a bowl of red.?

Will Rogers ?Chili is a bowl of blessedness.? Rogers also concluded, after years of exhaustive research that the world?s best bowl of chili was found in a small caf? in Coleman, Texas.

Jesse James refused to rob a bank in McKinney, Texas because that was where his favorite chili parlor was located.

As you embark on your noble endeavor at ORC?s Chili Cook Off, my sons, remember this: Making half/assed chili con carne is a capitol crime and violation of a sacred trust. The Grinning Gargoyle (super Texan) will smite you and doom you to the hell of eating Chili Con Carne made of hamburger meat!

Jimmy is the author of "The Grinning Gargoyle Spills The Beans" a book covering 45 years of Jimmy's experience and life living in Baja. Jimmy is a highly respected and coveted friend of many of the Off-Road.com and Baja.net staff, egular readers and contributors.

Jimmy can be reached at jimsmithmx@prodigy.net.mx