Excerpted from Crescent Dragonwagon’s Bean by Bean.

This was the first chili I ever made, back in 1969 when I was a wild child of sixteen and living in New York with my West Texan now-long-since ex. His best friends, a then-couple named Ray and Genie Reece, were also Texans, and they patiently initiated me into spicy food, chili, and Tex-Mex. Genie taught me how to make her mama’s chili, gifting me with a handwritten recipe, on which I noted then, “Exact quantities of spice cannot be given for it is strictly to taste.” Strange it is to consider how widely accepted these once-exotic flavors have become since those days, and certainly since the ’40s, the days when Genie would have been a little girl. “I remember,” she wrote on the recipe in her rather elegant handwriting, “this used to be an all-day process. We would go to this fantastic spice shop to buy the ingredients for it. ”

In its original version, it was probably pretty close to the earliest chilis; it was centered around beef right down to rendered beef fat, rather than oil, for cooking. Though beanless, it is served with a generous side of what Genie then called “real imported Mexican chili beans:” pinto, cooked with salt pork or bacon.

I still think of Genie every time I make chili of any kind.

Genie’s Mother’s Homegrown Texas Chili

Ingredients

• ¼ cup bacon fat, vegetable oil, or olive oil
• 2 pounds beef chuck or round steak, cut into ¼-inch dice—not ground
• Freshly ground black pepper
• Salt
• 2 cloves garlic
• 1 dried whole pasilla chile
• 1 tablespoon ground cumin, or to taste
• 1 tablespoon ground red chile powder (not chili powder, the spice mix), or to taste
• 1½ teaspoons ground ancho or pasilla chile powder, or to taste
• 1½ teaspoons dried oregano
• 3 cans (6 ounces each) tomato paste
• Genie’s Mother’s Beans for Chili (recipe follows), for serving
• Cornbread, corn tortillas, or cooked brown or white rice, for serving

Instructions

1. Heat the bacon fat in a large, heavy skillet over medium-high heat.
2. Add the beef and cook, stirring frequently to break it up, until it has become grayish brown, 8 to 10 minutes. Stir in the pepper (grind vigorously and “use lots!” as Genie counseled). Salt lightly. Keep stirring and cooking until the beef is grainy and brown, 3 to 5 minutes more. (At this point you can drain off some of the fat if you wish—as much or as little as you like. It’s a matter of taste—Genie and her mother didn’t.) Scoop out the browned meat and set it aside.
3. Add the garlic, whole chile, ground cumin, chile powders, and oregano to the fat in the skillet. Turn the heat to mediumlow and cook, stirring, until the spices are toasty and fragrant and the whole pasilla is slightly darkened, 3 to 5 minutes.
4. Take the reserved browned meat and transfer it to a Dutch oven, along with the spice sauté. Open the cans of tomato paste, and scrape their contents into the pot, too. Fill each can with water, stirring to get any remnants of tomato paste dissolved, and add the 3 cans of water.
5. Bring to a boil, then lower the heat. Simmer, half-covered, for about 45 minutes, giving it a stir now and then. You can serve it right away, let it sit a few hours and then reheat it, or chill it overnight and then reheat it the next day. (If you chill it, you have the option of lifting off and discarding the fat cap that will rise to the top.) Either way, serve the chili hot, with beans and cornbread alongside.

Serves 6 to 8 generously, when served with beans and cornbread or rice

Genie’s Mother’s Beans for Chili

This is a simple, classic bean preparation from the American Southwest (or, if done with navy beans, the South).

Ingredients

• 3 cups dried pink beans, small red beans, or, if unavailable, pinto beans, soaked overnight, drained, and rinsed
• ¼ pound slab bacon or rinsed salt pork, quartered
• Salt and freshly ground black pepper

Instructions

1. In a large, heavy pot, cover the beans with fresh water to a depth of about 1¹/₂ inches and bring to a boil. Remove from the heat and let stand for 1 hour, then drain and rinse again.
2. Cover the beans a second time with water, this time to a depth of ³/₄ inch. Bring to a boil, turn down the heat to a simmer, and let cook until the beans are just barely starting to soften, 45 minutes to an hour.
3. Add the bacon and continue to cook, stirring occasionally, until the beans are fully tender and the ingredients have had a chance to know one another for 45 minutes at least—but a longer, slower simmer, up to an hour and a half, won’t hurt at all. Add salt and pepper to taste.

Serves 6 to 8 

About the Book:

Has there ever been a more generous ingredient than the bean? Down-home, yet haute, soul-satisfyingly hearty, valued, versatile deeply delectable, healthful, and inexpensive to boot, there’s nothing a bean can’t do—and nothing that Crescent Dragonwagon can’t do with beans. From old friends like chickpeas and pintos to rediscovered heirloom beans like rattlesnake beans and teparies, from green beans and fresh shell beans to peanuts, lentils, and peas, Bean by Bean is the definitive cookbook on beans. It’s a 175-plus recipe cornucopia overflowing with information, kitchen wisdom, lore, anecdotes, and a zest for good food and good times.

Consider the lentil, to take one example. Discover it first in a delicious slather, Lentil Tapenade. Then in half a dozen soups, including Sahadi’s Lebanese Lentil Soup with Spinach, Kerala-Style Dahl, and Crescent’s Very, Very Best Lentil, Mushroom & Barley Soup. It then turns up in Marinated Lentils De Puy with Greens, Baked Beets, Oranges & Walnuts. Plus there’s Jamaica Jerk-Style Lentil-Vegetable Patties, Ethiopian Lentil Stew, and Lentil-Celeriac Skillet Sauce. Do the same for black beans—from Tex-Mex Frijoles Dip to Feijoada Vegetariana to Maya’s Magic Black Beans with Eggplant & Royal Rice. Or shell beans—Newly Minted Puree of Fresh Favas, Baked Limas with Rosy Sour Cream, Edamame in a Pod. And on and on—from starters and soups to dozens of entrees. Even desserts: Peanut Butter Cup Brownies and Red Bean Ice Cream.

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