Texas Chili Makes a Welcome Guest

If you like to make chili and don’t live in Texas, consider yourself lucky.

Passions run high in that state over such pressing issues as what brand of canned tomatoes to use (if any), how much cumin is too much and whether browning the meat is authentic. Don’t get them started on garnishes.

It is liberating to note that chili was in no way invented by Texans, and therefore they do not have a lock on authenticity. That said, there is a certain alchemical balance to great Texas chili, which, like all great beef stews, combines the fragrant spices of a tagine, the succulent beefiness of pot roast and the slurpy heat of a goulash.

This recipe, handed to me by a native of Austin and refined over decades, is ideal for potlucks, Super Bowl parties and stormy days. It includes at least four different incarnations of chile and can be customized — not only for heat, but for taste, as some cooks prefer the tanginess of guajillo chile to the raisin notes of ancho. The beer, chocolate and masa harina add to the depth of the sauce, but in these quantities, they don’t push their own flavors forward.

Chili at its most basic is a stew of protein and chiles. The Aztecs were making it long before the 16th century, when the Spanish friar Bernardino de Sahagún recorded the offerings at urban markets in his book “Historia General de las Cosas de la Nueva España”: chili made with lobster, fish, frogs and dozens of varieties of green, red, yellow, pickled, smoked and dried chiles.

Later, but long before Texas statehood, Nueva España embraced all of the American Southwest and most of Central America. The cowboys who worked the Spanish-owned cattle ranches near the Rio Grande spent months away from home in the dry borderlands, living mostly on tough Longhorn meat, water and as many dried chiles as it took to make the meat palatable.