I marvel that for most of my life, except for a few times when I was able to buy good frozen chili back in Texas, I subsisted on canned chili, which is what Texans call chile con carne. In the nineties, I started flying back to Texas with increased frequency to deal with my mother, and when I returned home after those trips I usually had cans of chili in my carry-on, which of course provoked high levels of suspicion in the airports back there even though these trips ended before 9/11.

But then just before New Year's Eve, 2003, I found myself facing about half of an enormous fresh ham that was taking up most of the space in my freezer, so decided I'd use it to make chili. Real chili, something tastier than any canned chili. So I Googled chili recipes. Omigod. There are Texas chili cults and counter cults out there. And then I dug through my own cookbooks and recipe files.

There sure are a lot of opinions about what goes into chili, but the more recipes I read, the clearer it became that I was in the traditionalist camp and wanted an old recipe, one limited to ingredients that were available in frontier Texas. Other limitations to which I subscribe are that tomatoes should not be used and that if chile con carne was intended to have beans in it, it would have been called chile con carne y frijoles.

So what I ended up with was a recipe that is sustained by recipes in Jane Trahey's 1949 treasure house of authenticity, A Taste of Texas. This is a very interesting cookbook, and one of its lesser-known claims to fame is it contains the earliest citation in the OED for the use of the word "nachos."

My recipe is primarily based on Glen Waggoner's "The Seasoned Cook: How to Throw a Chili Festival" in Esquire, January 1983, certainly the most entertaining chili recipe I found. I should add that my recipe is considerably simpler than Mr. Waggoner's, and if you get really obsessive about chili, you may want to look his up.

INGREDIENTS

5 lbs. (2 kilos) meat

The cowboys made their chili out of cows, of course, and beef is still the usual meat in chili. You also find a lot of chili made with venison in Texas, but the real reason for this is that sport hunting was frowned on in traditional Texas culture. Except for pests like, say, rabbits, you didn't shoot animals that you didn't plan to eat. This meant that folks who liked to hunt deer had to find something to do with the meat, and since most of them found venison a bit gamy, much of it got ground up into sausage or put into chili. Me, I think pork makes the best chili, and I use pork shoulder.

½ c. (120 ml.) cooking oil

The old recipes all use rendered suet or lard to brown the meat, and yes, this tastes good. However, out of consideration for your arteries, my doctor made me recommend peanut oil or canola oil ("rapeseed" is the real name, but it sells better in America when called "canola").

1 c. (235 ml.) beef broth

On more than one occasion, I've cheated and used bouillon made with a cube. I've also just used more beer.

1 bottle of beer

This might not be the best use of Stella Artois or Hoegaarden. You will almost certainly need to add more as the chili cooks. Dispose of any remaining beer properly.

¾ c. (175 ml.) chile powder.

First, a note of caution: Beginners may want to use less. Chiles vary widely in piquancy (or hotness, as we'd say in Texas). There are many (hundreds?) of varieties of peppers with a great range of capsaicin content that are ground into powder, and furthermore, individual peppers on the same bush can vary considerably. You don't want the chili so hot you (or your guests) can't eat it. On the other hand, it is supposed to make your forehead sweat.

Second, you can buy generic "chile powder" at supermarkets everywhere I've visited, and you can make good chili with it. (Warning: Some of these generic chile powders are adulterated with ground herbs and things like garlic powder. I strongly prefer to use pure ingredients.) You can make better chili using specific varieties of chile peppers that have been ground, and you can buy these powders at specialty markets, especially where there is a population that uses them a lot. The very best powdered chiles are from growers who specialize in them, like Tierra Vegetables at the Ferry Plaza Farmers' Market in San Francisco. These are also by far the most expensive, but after all, the chiles are what give the dish its name. I like to use a mixture of chile powders to add flavor complexity.

¼ c. (60 ml.) flour

2 fresh jalapeños

Jalapeños are my favorite fresh chile, and chopping a couple into the chili adds flavor. But especially if you're using more than one powdered chile, you can leave these out. After all, the cowboys didn't carry around fresh jalapeños.

1 T. (15 ml.) ground cumin (comino)

2 t. (10 ml.) ground oregano

2 t. (10 ml.) ground coriander (cilantro)

OK, I admit it. Very few traditional chili recipes include coriander, but I like the stuff so much that I usually chop in an entire bunch of fresh coriander leaves instead of using the powder. Unfortunately, many people have a very strong aversion to coriander, and there is evidence that this is not finickiness but rather a genetic trait, poor things.

1 t. (5 ml.) sugar

2 t. (10 ml.) salt

1 head of garlic, the cloves peeled

1 T. (15 ml.) masa harina

This is the flour used to make tortillas. It's made from corn that has been treated with lye, which changes the taste and improves the nutritional qualities. This can be omitted although the masa adds subtle flavor.

TECHNIQUE

1. Trim the excess fat off the meat. Sometimes, especially if my doctor isn't watching, I render the fat scraps and then use this to brown the meat in the next step, supplementing it with oil if there's not enough.

2. Cut the meat into 1 in. (2,5 cm.) chunks or smaller and then, in small batches, pat them dry with towels and brown them in the oil or fat in the bottom of a large, heavy pot, transferring each batch into a large bowl when done.

3. Cook, but do not brown, the garlic in the fat, and transfer it to the bowl.

4. Drain almost all of the fat, leaving the brown bits. You can save the fat for making cornbread.

5. Return the browned meat and cooked garlic to the pot, and mix the combined flour and chile powder into the meat. Stir this mixture over low heat for a few minutes.

6. Pour in the beef broth and beer, and bring the mixture to a simmer. The chunks of meat should be covered by at least an inch (2,5 cm.)

7. Add the herbs, sugar, and salt. Cook over low heat, partially covered, until the meat just begins to fall apart. This will take something like 3 hours but varies a lot with the pork. You should add more beer if needed to keep the meat covered, but you want to end without excess liquid.

8. Toward the end, you can "correct the seasoning." I love that phrase. What it really means is that you can add more chile powder and salt. You sure can't remove any.

9. If you are using the masa harina, make a roux with the masa and ¼ c. of the cooking liquid and stir it into the chili 15 minutes before the chili is done. The masa thickens the chili significantly, so you need to stir very frequently to keep it from sticking to the bottom of the pot and burning.

The best way to reheat the chili, especially if you've thickened it with masa, is to use the microwave. Reheating it in the pot tends to tear it up too much, and there is a significant risk of it sticking and burning.

The traditional way to serve chili is with cornbread (see above recipe), a cooked leafy green (such as spinach or kale or collards or mustard greens or turnip greens), and pinto beans. It is also absolutely delicious atop baked sweet potato. Somehow, the piquancy and richness of the chili offset the sweetness of the potato. If you happen to have it on hand, you could put a spoonful of quark (the Dutch spell this "kwark") on top just as a dollop of sour cream is often served with Tex-Mex foods like enchiladas.

I have got enormous pleasure out of serving this dish to both folks here in California and to friends in Amsterdam. There is really something special about cooking Tex-Mex food for the Dutch.