On Saturday and Sunday evenings, famed Chicago watering hole Butch McGuire’s served hot dogs and chili to patrons who would pay via an honor-system at the bar. As the story goes, one weekend Dad was hanging out and having a drink and a bowl of chili with the usual suspects, among them, Butch himself. He and Mr. McGuire began talking, and according to my father, Butch told him the ‘secret’ recipe to his chili, which Dad wrote on a cocktail napkin. He took it back to his small apartment and cooked up a batch for his roommates. It was a hit.
Sadly, that napkin is lost to history: I think of it as the lost ‘Bartlett for America’ relic of our family culinary past.
Over the next few years, big changes were in store for Dad: He met and married my Mom, they had their first daughter (me), bought a house in Wheaton, and moved out of the city, but the chili remained his signature dish. He made it for every potluck in the suburbs and as a New Year’s Day hangover cure. He made it for Super Bowl parties and birthdays and blizzards. When we moved to Pennsylvania and later to Florida, he kept cooking up big, fragrant pots of the delicious, molten stuff for friends and family. I often served as his sous chef, chopping onions and peppers and occasionally stirring the pot while the chili cooked for hours. I loved hearing the stories he told as we worked. He made many dishes well, but chili remained a specialty. It was also a litmus test of sorts: Can you handle this five-alarm chili? Then you were automatically family. If not, well, you’ll learn.
When I left home for college, I missed cooking with him as much as the food itself. One gloomy Midwest weekend I was grocery shopping and it struck me that I needed to make a batch. Even though I’d assisted for years, I had only the vaguest idea about how to begin. I gathered the ingredients as well as my memory permitted, headed home, and called him immediately. OK, I said. I’m making your chili. What do I do first?
Over the next hour on an expensive long-distance call (remember those?), he walked me through nuances in the recipe: Exactly how long to sauté the onions, how to toast the spices, the perfect size to cut the peppers. As I cooked, he told me how proud he was of me and that I should enjoy every moment of school and being young. I'm sure I didn't follow that advice as closely as I should have over the next few years, but on that day, when the chili was done, it filled me with the warmth of home. Exactly what I needed.
Every fall when the temperature in Chicago drops, I get the same craving. I gather the ingredients with muscle memory after all these years, creating a chili that’s spicy and complex and also simple and comforting and perfect. My sons chop onions and peppers. My husband has become a fan and has built up his tolerance for the spice over the years, officially earning family status. The boys are coming along. They’ll learn.
Butch McGuire passed away in 2006, and over the years I've been tempted to contact his son Bobby, who still runs the establishment, to see if Dad’s story pans out. I’ve been to this bar many times, but I’ve never can bring myself to order the chili, which is still on the menu. There’s something about the inherited memory of this recipe that I never wanted to examine too closely. I like to think of Dad, young and handsome, laughing in his contagious way at the bar, full of the hope and optimism at the energy that was in the air of the 1960s, enjoying a bowl of chili on a dreary Chicago afternoon. He was on the cusp of changes he could never have imagined for his life and the world.
Instead, I choose to believe the story.
My sister won her neighborhood chili cook-off twice with what she called Big Dave’s Chili recipe. As with most family recipes, amounts are approximate and I’m sure my siblings have their own variations, but this one is closest to the way I do it. I present it to you here with the hope you will make it your own and cook it with and for your family, filling them with this warm concoction as well as the story of your life.
That’s the most important ingredient of all.