The Devil's Soup
The Great McKinney Chili War
Good chili has been described as a preview of heaven. At its extreme, it can provide a foretaste of the alternative. In that light, it is akin to a sermon.
Elmer Kelton
Texans are known braggarts and tall tale tellers. By our calculation, there’s not a story that isn’t made better by tugging the truth a little here and there. We’re lovers of legends, even if the legend doesn’t square with the absolute historical facts. One of my favorite legends is about the notorious outlaws and chiliheads Frank and Jesse James. As the story goes, they refused to rob banks in McKinney, Texas because their favorite chili parlor was located on the town square. I guess they figured a heaping bowl of authentic Texas chili is worth a fat bank any day. I agree. Don’t bother me with little things like historical peccadillos, telling me Jesse died eight years before chili arrived in McKinney. That chili was introduced to the good citizens of McKinney in 1890 is neither here nor there. As was said by Maxwell Scott, the editor of the Shinbone Star in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance: “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”
All this is in good fun. But chili was no laughing matter in McKinney in 1890. I’m not stretching the blanket in saying the reaction of some citizens to chili con carne being served on the town square was nothing short of damnation. Those who partook of a bowl of red and enjoyed it were deemed no better than Esau, who sold his birthright for a bowl of “red stuff” (Genesis 25:30–34).
The story was told local historian Roy F. Hall and recounted in Frank X. Tolbert’s A Bowl of Red.* Hall, himself, has an interesting history. An army captain, he fought in the Philippine-American War and World War I. He also served as a bodyguard for President Theodore Roosevelt and played professional baseball with the Cincinnati Red Legs. Born in 1884, Hall was six-years-old when the McKinney chili war broke out.
During the early 1890s, outside of San Antonio where the Chili Queen reigned supreme, chili was a relatively new dish throughout Texas and virtually unknown beyond the borders of the Red River and Sabine River. It reached the hamlet of McKinney, thirty miles north of Dallas, in 1890 when a black cook by the name of Myers (his Christian name is lost to history) returned to McKinney after a recent trip to San Antonio.† Mr. Myers had a cafe on the square where for twenty years he served his famous “special beef stew.”
But tastes were about to change.
As a six-year-old sprout, Hall claims to have been in Mr. Myers’s cafe with an adult relative when the old cook made his first pot “from the chilly receipt [he] got from Santone.” Hall, and presumably his adult relatives, had their first bowl of chili from that first batch. “I dearly loved my first bowl of red,” Hall later said, “although it was . . . hot enough with peppers to boil on a cold stove.” And it was that heat that “Old Myers’ chili started trouble in our town.”
A sort of civil war began to rage in McKinney, as residents took sides. Hall said, “Most folks relished the new dish.” But, “There were some . . . who maintained that it would ruin your insides.” The anti-chili faction solicited testimony from physicians swearing to the gastronomical damage a bowl of chili would cause—that it would in fact eat a hole in the gut of the eater. Editorials and letters to the editor of the local newspaper claimed chili would stunt the growth of children, cause disfigurement, and render them idiots. As a result, according to Hall, “Heads of families forbade their children to eat the stuff.”
Of course, telling a rambunctious boy not to do something is a recipe for him to do exactly what you told him not to do. And so it was among McKinney’s youth.
“The chili con carne dispute got so warm,” Hall reported, “a few ministers preached sermons against indulgence in a food which they said was almost as hot as hell’s brimstone.” These preachers argued the town’s youth had been inflamed into rebellion by the fiery dish. Food, as the anti-chiliheads argued, was for sustenance not pleasure. For the youth of McKinney to enjoy a bowl of chili was an evil that could and would lead to greater sin. And since preachers are in the business of sin, at least in the business of preaching against it, the clergy of the town condemning chili from their pulpits as the “sinful indulgence in a food . . . prepared by Satan himself.” One such minister dubbed chili as the “Soup of the Devil.”
Not all preachers were all that pious when it came to Mr. Myers’s chili—some were downright hypocritical. It was reported that many of the clergy who condemned chili were spotted in Myers’s cafe digging out the requisite twelve cents from their pockets to purchase their own steaming bowl of red. And once the clergy converted, Myers’s chili “was soon outselling his special beef stew. And the chili furor gradually died down.”
* I believe the original story was published by Tolbert in the Dallas Morning News, “Chili Started a ‘War’ in McKinney, April 4, 1965, section 1, page 25.
† In 1893 the wider world got their first taste of chili con carne at the Chicago World’s Fair when a “San Antonio Chilley stand” was erected.
W. C. Jameson, Chili from the Southwest: Fixin’s, Flavors, and Folklore (Lanham, MD: Taylor Trade Publishing, 2005), ix, xiii–xiv.
Frank X. Tolbert, A Bowl of Red (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1994), 31–32.
Texan spoken here, y’all.
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I always enjoy reading Derrick's history and humor. Even if his faulty chili recipe does not include beans!
I love this stuff. Terlingua is a Texas requirement. I remember reading a book about black cowboys. One of them became well known in the town and was in charge of cooking the chili during festivals and holidays. For the life of me I can't remember the names.