By Joel Denker
Part II told the saga of the chili queens, the Mexican women who dished up their specialty in San Antonio’s Plaza Mercado, and of Willy Gebhardt, the German immigrant who first manufactured chili powder in that Texas city.
By the early 1900s, chili cooking was leaving San Antonio’s open air markets for a new home, the chili parlor. The heyday of the chili queens was over. The cafes offered basic food in a spare setting. Cooks, who had often run chuck wagon kitchens, prepared their grub in kitchens hidden behind blankets.
At the counter, customers consumed bowls of Texas red, the traditional chili-laced beef stew, or a bowl of “medium,” with a side of pinto beans. Beans were a staple of cooking out on the range and were regular fare on the ranches. Except for soda crackers and coffee, there was little to accompany the dish. The chili joints built a following. Saturday night excursions to the eateries became a popular pastime.
Texas red got its name from its red chili color, not from tomatoes. Chili purists, then and now, insist that the tomato defiles the true Texas dish. “Adding tomato to a pint of chili is like gouging too deeply with a diaper pin,” chili aficionado Joe E. Cooper insists.
Chili and other Tex-Mex products soon migrated north. The Chicago World’s Fair in 1893 introduced visitors to southwestern food at the San Antonio Chili Stand. In the early 1900s, Chicago’s downtown workers were buying chicken tamales from street vendors. Armour’s and Libby, McNeill, and Libby were canning chili con carne and tamales in their Chicago plants.
Chili caught fire in the midwest, where the most popular variety was chili mac, a relatively bland garlic-free dish served in taverns, diners, and cafes. It was a melange of meat sauce, peppers, tomatoes, and elbow macaroni.
John Isaac, the son of a Lithuanian miner who had emigrated to Pennsylvania, was a midwestern chili pioneer. Isaac ran a saloon in Aurora, Illinois, whose drawing card was a free chicken lunch. When the town voted to ban liquor in 1912, the entrepreneur moved to Green Bay, Wisconsin, where he opened a diner. Isaac expanded on the chili mac by creating a layered dish of pasta, beans, and meat sauce. According to legend, he also conceived the oyster cracker. Dissatisfied with the soda cracker for chili dipping, Isaac, who also sold oysters in season, persuaded a biscuit company to manufacture a smaller item.
Immigrant entrepreneurs in Cincinnati produced more chili incarnations. Tom Keradjieff, a Macedonian who emigrated with other peasant villagers from the Balkans in the early 20th century, learned the hot dog business by working at “coney island” stands in New York City. The vendors named their product after the Brooklyn amusement part, near which early purveyors of hot dogs, like Nathan’s, set up shop.
Keradjieff moved to Cincinnati, where many of his countrymen had settled to work in the rail yards. He found a shop next to the Empress Theatre in 1923 and opened a coney island business on Vine Street. He experimented with recipes to make a tempting chili sauce for his franks. He contrived a spice mix that combined cinnamon, allspice, cloves, nutmeg, chili, and other flavorings.
Keradjieff had a brainstorm. He could ladle his sauce not only on hot dogs, but also serve it with spaghetti. The Empress, as he called the establishment, began by selling separate plates of chili and pasta, which customers mixed together.
Customers suggested that Keradjieff try putting the chili directly on top of the pasta. He added this twist in the 1930s. He dreamed up ideas for more toppings–cheese, onions, beans. Patrons could choose between a bowl of plain chili, a “two way,” chili over spaghetti, a “three way,” chili spaghetti topped with cheddar cheese, and a “four way,”chili, spaghetti with layers of cheese and onions. The piece de resistance, a “five way,” featured the pungent spaghetti with successive layers of kidney beans, onions, and cheddar cheese.
Macedonian and Greek businessmen copied the Empress formula. Nick Sarakatsannis, the founder of the Dixie Chili chain, praised the commercial genius of his competitor, a man he called “an Edison, a Firestone”: “Everybody, in the old days in the regular restaurants, they had roast beef, roast pork, roast lamb. . . . So next day they scrape up all that meat, they grind it and they make chili. They put beans in it, and they call it chili con carne. But in 1923 the Empress, they buy freshly ground beef and they cook it. No roast pork or roast beef or leftovers. They use pure beef, no beans. The idea was to have plain meat chili to prove it wasn’t leftovers. And they add the spaghetti. From then on, we all copied. I had my own chili, but I copied the spaghetti.”
The tiny shop, Sarakatsannis observed, pulled in customers: “The customers on Vine Street, they pass by the place and they smell it and they walk in. It was just a small, tight place–it could seat maybe fifteen, twenty people, but they did good business. It is such a beautiful dish.
“But it was the price that drew them, too. Coney island five cents. Chili spaghetti fifteen cents. With cheese it was twenty-five cents.”
The early shops spawned chains after World War II. Immigrant clans built strings of parlors with names like Goldstar, Skyline, and Acropolis, which provided job opportunities to family and newly arrived kin. Central kitchens began turning out chili, which was trucked to shops where it would be dispensed from steam tables. The server would take the customer’s plate and assemble the necessary combination from line of crocks with onions, cheese, and other fixings.
Cincinnati chili, folklorist Timothy Lloyd pointed out, had a Balkan accent. The spicing, common to Greece, Macedonia, and other parts of the region, highlighted cinnamon, allspice, cloves, and nutmeg, whose sweetness was a foil to sharper flavors like chili, garlic, and cumin. Chili peppers also were not uncommon in Macedonian recipes.
Chili must have reminded Kondratieff of casseroles like moussaka and pastitsio (a Balkan macaroni), which were often made with a sauce of ground beef and tomato. He took a southwestern classic and imbued it with the fragrance of his homeland.
