Redheaded Sooner

The official state dish of Texas is a stew of beef cooked in beef fat. By the rules of the people who invented it, adding beans is an offence. Chili began on the cattle trails and in the plazas of San Antonio. From the 1860s women known as the chili queens set up tables in the square at dusk and sold it by the bowl to soldiers, cowhands and anyone passing. It was the first street food in America to become famous. Their recipe had three things in it. Beef, cut small with a knife. Dried red chillies. And suet, the hard fat from round the kidneys, rendered down in the pot before anything else went in. The meat was fried in it and then simmered for hours until the fat rose in a red layer on top. That layer was the mark of a good one. On the trail, cooks pounded dried beef, suet and chillies together into bricks that would keep for months and only needed boiling water. One Texas historian called it the pemmican of the Southwest. There were no beans. There were no tomatoes. Texans have a saying about anyone who puts beans in, and it questions whether he knows anything at all. In 1977 the Texas legislature made it the official state dish. The best known recipe in the country belonged to President Lyndon Johnson. After his heart attack, his doctors had him take out the suet. So the dish has gone the way of everything else. The tin on the shelf today is mostly beans and tomato, thickened with starch, with the fat skimmed off. The cowboys who drove ten million cattle north would not have fed it to the dog.