By Joel Denker
The first part of this series told the story of chili peppers in the New World. The tale now turns to San Antonio, Texas, the birthplace of chili con carne.
“Martha has raven hair and sparkling eyes with a smile and toss of the head that makes you think of Carmen. She is out in all her glory and peacock feathers tonight.” Martha, pictured by the Texas writer Frank Bushick, was one of the “chili queens,” who hosted the chili stands in San Antonio’s Military Plaza during the 1880’s. The women, commonly of Mexican background, smiled, joked, flirted, and bantered with customers and passersby.
At dusk pots of chili were wheeled in wagons to the square. The gaily dressed ladies served up pungent chili con carne brewing in cauldrons heated over mesquite or charcoal fires. Aromas of oregano and cumin wafted over the grounds. They also sold tortillas, tamales, coffee, and cinnamon scented atole, a popular Mexican drink. The price for chili, a side of frijoles (beans), and a tortilla—a dime.
Luminous from the cooking fires and the red, yellow, and orange lanterns that swung over the dining patches, they beckoned to strollers in the plaza. Chili eaters sat down on benches around wobbly tables covered by oil skins with checkerboard patterns. Musicians serenaded them with songs. The festivities brought together a varied assortment of diners. ..”A Mexican bootblack and a silk hatted tourist would line up and eat side by side,” Bushick wrote. “Cowboys, merchants, and hack drivers touched elbows. It was the genuine democracy of Bohemia.”
The Plaza Mercado, known for its closely guarded presido, jail, and drill grounds, where prisoners were executed, now had the bustle of a “veritable midway,” observed San Antonio historian Donald Everett. “Mustangs, mules, donkeys, ox teams, wagons, lumber, hides, cotton, whites, blacks, half breeds..and Mexicans,” jammed the market, one visitor reported. In addition to the chili queens, the plaza draws scores of vendors. Mexicans traded chili peppers and hawkers showed off their song birds-mockingbirds and cardinals-in wicker cages.
The vibrancy attracted writers who romanticized the plaza. Martha, the chili queen, wooed Stephen Crane with her charms and her wares. She plucked a rose from her corsage and pinned it to his jacket.
O Henry, who frequently traveled to San Antonio from Austin, was entranced by the plaza spectacle of “travelers, rancheros, family parties, gay gasconading rounders, sightseers and prowlers of the polygot.” In the short story, “The Enchanted Kiss,” he warmed to the “delectable meats minced with aromatic herbs and poignant chile colorado” of the chili stands.
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Churches, plazas, presidios, and fiestas gave this former Spanish mission town a Latin flavor. “The sauntering Mexicans prevail on the pavements,” Frederic Law Olmsted recalls. The Laredito, San Antonio’s Mexican quarter, was a demi monde of saloons, honky tonks, and crowded dwellings. Anglos in search of the exotic visited cottages that had been converted into makeshift eateries.
Writing in Scribners in 1894, Edward King recounts a visit to one such “hovel”: “The fat, swarthy Mexican mater-familias will place before you savory compounds, swimming in fiery pepper, which biteth like a serpent; and the tortilla, a smoking hot cake, thin as a shaving and about as eatable, is the substitute for bread. This meal, with bitterest of coffee to wash it down.., will be an event in your gastronomic experience.”
The.chili dispensed on the Plaza had an unmistakable Mexican taste. The street market dish, a variation on chili colorado (red chili), was an unadorned stew made from cheap cuts of meat covered with a blazing sauce. It was akin to an inexpensive and filling meal enjoyed by poor Mexican families. “When they have to pay for meat in market a very little is made to suffice a family; it is generally cut into a kind of hash with nearly as many peppers as there are pieces of meat,” observed J.C. Clopper, an early Texas colonist, in 1828 after a visit to San Antonio.
Chili, a popular story suggests, came to Texas with the washerwomen who accompanied the Mexican armies during the period 1830-1840. When the soldiers retreated, the lavandera went to work for the American militia. During the day they boiled their clothes in large iron pots which they converted to chili cooking at night. The stew might be beef, deer, or goat, livened up with red pepper and oregano.
Others trace this most written and puzzled about American dish to the southwestern range. Inegenious chuckwagon cooks, “campuks.” concocted it for hungry cowboys on traildrives. They simmered beef or buffalo, sometimes armadillo or jackrabbit, which they had flavored with cumin, chili pepper, garlic, and onions picked on the trail. The chilis were tiny, wild berries which turned from green to cherry red. These “little scorchers, the size of buck shot,” as writer Joe E. Cooper called them, were loved by wolves, coyotes, and, of course, birds. To keep a ready supply of spices, the cooks planted gardens of their spices in mesquite patches along their route.
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Chili’s appeal was limited to Mexicans and daring Anglos. An improbable figure, German cafe owner William Gebhardt, took it from the margins to a wider audience.
Gebhardt, who arrived during the 1840’s in New Braunfels, a town near San Antonio, was part of a large immigrant wave who brought beer gardens to the river banks of the area. He opened a cafe in the back of a saloon in 1892. After sampling Mexican food in San Antonio, he bought some herbs and spices and began making chili for his German clientele. They soon became devotees of the dish.
He faced a serious obstacle-chili in Texas was seasonal, dependent om the spring pepper harvest. Determined to offer it year round, he started experimenting. He figured out how to dry peppers in his motherinlaw’s oven. The avid tinkerer put bits of pepper through a small meat grinder. He blended the chili powder with oregano, cumin, and garlic and stored it in air tight bottles.
He set up a factory in San Antonio to manufacture the spice he affectionately called “Tampico dust” (after a Mexican town.) In the early days, the plant turned out 5 cases of powder a week, which Gebhardt carried in a wagon and peddled throughout the city. The celebrated “powderman” kept improving his production methods, ulitmately inventing 37 machines for the factory.
He sold the Gebhardt Mexican Food Company in 1911 to his brothers in law who added cans of chile con carne and tamales to its line. San Antonio boosters cheered the success of the enterprise and its most famous item. “It is the only product of its kind having that real Mexican tang,” one publication said.
The company, which became the world’s largest importer of Mexican spices, enticed housewives with their product. A 1923 ad promoted Eagle Brand chili powder as a “delightful seasoning for all kinds of meats, fish, soups, salads, and salad dressings, but healthful in every way.” A cookbook published by the company to “capture the glamour and romance of old Mexico,” popularized chili- based recipes.
More shrewd marketing followed. The company offered shoppers in 1924 a “Mexican dinner package” which assembled one can of chili con carne, one can of “Mexican style” beans, one can of shuck-wrapped tamales, two cans of Deviled Chili Meat, and one bottle of chili powder.”
