Elana Kehoe > wrote:
>The title of the chili is Real Texas Chili...and it is, I guess. I've
>been having it my whole life. Looks like it's from Good Housekeeping or
>something in the early 70's. No beans, no tomatoes. Just...meat. Yum.

And it looks like it got around a bit. Lots of people seem
to have plagiarized it:

http://www.souprecipe.com/az/rltxschl.asp
http://www.foodnetwork.com/food/reci..._16941,00.html

Including, allegedly, one NY Times food editor Craig
Claiborne:

http://www.recipegoldmine.com/chili/chili12.html

although his name is more reasonably tied to this
one:

http://existentialmoo.com/yum/archives/004143.php

which looks like something an NYT food editor would
cook ("masa harina? suet! get otta mah kitchen, yew
carpet-baggin' varmint!" the camp cook called after the
NYT food editor's rapidly retreating backside).

So I don't suppose he's the original source of your recipe.

Good Housekeeping sounds about reasonable, considering
the wide dispersion.

The Food Network one is the most interesting of the
plagiarisms, because it seems like it may have been
modified by careful experience, yet it retains many of the
common quirks, oddly specifying the size and number of the
cans of beef broth or the stilted worry about coating the
meat (just before dumping in all that broth and stewing
and stirring for two hours...)

And yet, curiously, Claiborne's recipe includes that
similar blurb about letting the spices sit on the meat
for too few minutes early in the process. Can't make a
bit of difference to the result.

It's like looking at an x-ray of someone's nose and
finding an appendigial elephant's trunk under the skin.
Sets you to wondering at the taxonomy prior to him, and
how far back you'll find the common ancestry among all
of them.

There are lots of recipes online for "Real Texas Chili",
and most of them are unique and not even Texas chili,
much less real Texas chili. But this one certainly has
become something of a theme, and I would bet that you've
posted about as close to a canonical version as there is.

--Blair
"Hope it tastes good."