The family chili pot
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- April
- 23
Chili-making in our house is a family affair, whether I want it that way or not.
I like my chili spicy, of course, but nothing outrageous. That might be why everybody who walks by the pot adds some Tabasco sauce. 
It’s sort of a test of bravery to take that first bite, once we sit down to dinner.
I’m not sure when the tradition started. The first time I made Cincinnati chili was before I had children—I think it might even have been before I was married—but the recipe has been copied enough times I can’t even remember what the original looks like.
Cincinnati Chili is a specific kind of food, served in chili restaurants in that city, usually on spaghetti and covered with generous dollops of cheese, onions and beans. It includes chocolate in its ingredients, along with whole cloves, allspice, cinnamon, Worchestershire sauce and Tabasco sauce in the version I make.
You cook the thing three hours uncovered, which is how the dish becomes a family project. Some time in the past 15 years or so, once my older children grew tall enough to reach the stove, I noticed that the chili was getting hotter. And as each child reached that magic age where they could reach the Tabasco sauce, the dish got hotter and hotter.
The odd thing is even my least epicurally adventurous youngest (the one who will eat raw carrots but not cooked ones) will scarf down chili no matter how hot it is, while I’m busy wiping my eyes from the unexpected pungency.
I guess that’s a good thing.
Associated Press photo by Larry Crowe
This entry was posted
on Wednesday, April 23rd, 2008 at 3:55 pm by Randi Weiner.
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The key to chili is, you need to really eat it the next day.
also tabasco??? dave’s insanity sauce plus natural hot peppers. whichever kind you like. and maybe some cayenne pepper as well.
Then again whenever I make anything spicy i go for a back burn and not a front burn.