"regional cooking" news and stories

North Carolinan chili. Photo: Zen, Flickr

If Texans weren't too tough to cry, the latest news out of the International Chili Society might set them to sobbing.

The cookoff-sanctioning organization has announced that the World's Championship Chili Cookoff will be held east of the Mississippi River for the first time in its 42-year history. The October event in Charleston, W. Va., represents the final slippage of the Southwest's grip on what was once a thoroughly regional foodstuff: A "bowl of red" has officially become an all-American dish.

"People have really latched on to it," ICS Executive Director Carol Hancock says of chili's pervasive popularity. "They just enjoy something they can do that's relatively inexpensive."

While there are nearly as many origin stories for chili as there are top-secret recipes for it, most agree it got its start in Texas (where, according to "The Food Lovers Companion," it is considered "a crime" to add beans to the meaty dish). The Lone Star State creation, whether pioneered by hungry vaqueros or indiscriminating jailhouse cooks, found its way to Southern California, where more than a dozen devotees gathered for a chili throwdown in 1967.

The New York Times Heritage Cookbook is one of those cooking tomes that you may have had on your shelf while you were growing up. Originally printed in 1972 (my copy is from the 1984 printing), it is heavy and imposing, with a dark dust jacket and red page underneath. Written by long time New York Times food writer Jean Hewitt, this volume contains more than 2,100 recipes, has five long pages of acknowledgments (in order to thank all the women from across the country who contributed their family recipes) and is organized by region, making it easy to find dishes indigenous to the different areas of the country.

It's an austere cookbook, with none of the slick photographs or high quality paper that we've come to expect from the editions published these days. However, the thing it has going for it is its devotion to authenticity and its exhaustively thorough nature (there are three pages of chili recipes, included to ensure that no chili method was left behind). The other interesting thing I've discovered as I've flipped through the book is that it really did a good job of capturing the changing face of regional food that was present in this country at the time it was written. The recipes in the Northwest section of the book (which oddly includes Nevada and Hawaii) look very different from the ones in the Southern section, including recipes for Sukiyaki, Depot Bay Broiled Salmon Steaks and some very whole grain-y (I'm guessing hippie influenced) bread recipes.

If you search around on the internet, you'll find that there are still a lot of copies of this cookbook to be had for pretty low prices (if you are so inclined). It appears to have been re-released sometime in the 1990's under a different cover, but I imagine that the recipes are all still present and accounted for (and that is what truly matters).

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