Cincinnati chili doesn't suck. Let us count the ways for Super Bowl Sunday
There was a photo going around social media recently showing several Tennessee Titans fans heading into their team's ill-fated playoff game against the Bengals while carrying a sign that read, "Skyline Chili sucks."
There was a New York Mets commentator who recently called it “disgusting chili gravy.”
There was a Cincinnati Enquirer reporter (!) who went out on a very dangerous limb last year and wrote the words, "I hate Cincinnati chili" in this very newspaper. (I forgive you, Dan Horn, but wow. Just wow.)
Even our quarterback hates it.
Now that the Bengals are on the world's stage as Super Bowl contenders, there will be plenty of smack talk about our birthright chili. And, as they say, it's time we work on our D. Here are three ways to defend our most ubiquitous local cuisine against all the haters.
1. Talk about Cincinnati chili history
There are so many things about this dish that people don't understand, among them that it was introduced to Cincinnati by Macedonian and Greek immigrants. Yes, folks, this is immigrant food. And we should be proud of it.
It all started with John Kiradjieff and Ilias Kiradjief, who came to the United States from northern Greece in the 1920s and who, in 1922, opened Empress Chili right next to Downtown's Empress Burlesque Theater (located about where the main branch of the Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County is now).
It's here they started serving their own versions of the "coneys" they saw when they arrived at Ellis Island, in New York, topping them with what can best be described as a Greek Bolognese sauce redolent of spices such as cinnamon, cloves and cardamom. The cheese part came later.
Since they thought of their creation as more of a meat sauce than chili, they served it on pasta, dubbed chili spaghetti, too.
Knowing the immigrant roots of our chili, I figured those who make it must get kind of offended when people bark about how disgusting it is, or how much they dislike it.
“Absolutely, I’m offended,” Maria Papakirk, owner of Camp Washington Chili, told me when I interviewed her for a story I wrote for the online publication the Takeout. “This is my family’s bread and butter. When I hear someone in New York slamming our chili – yes, it really upsets me … I think if people understood its Greek roots, they would think twice.”
Papakirk also told me she was baffled why our trinity of pasta, meat sauce and cheese was so difficult for non-Cincinnatians to understand. “People think it’s just a big glob of Texas-style chili on pasta and covered with cheese,” she told me. “What they don’t know – what they don’t get – is that it’s more like a Bolognese sauce.”
So if anyone shouts you down for putting chili on spaghetti, just tell them to think of Greek Bolognese and it will make a heck of a lot more sense. And if you want to learn more about Cincinnati chili, be sure to buy a copy of local food historian Dann Woellert's 2013 book "The Authentic History of Cincinnati Chili."
2. Talk about the variety of Cincinnati chili
I think the reason many non-Cincinnatians dislike our chili so much is because they've only tried one version of it, usually Skyline (or, in some cases, Gold Star). I love them both, but I suppose I get it when people say the soupy texture of the latter version is off-putting (their loss). What they don't seem to understand is that Cincinnati chili and Skyline chili are not one in the same. They don’t know we have more than 250 chili parlors in this town whose versions range in texture, flavor and style. (And for the noncarnivores among us, several chili parlors offer vegetarian and vegan options, too.)
That's why I always encourage friends to come to town for a chili tour. That way I can take them to Dixie Chili in Newport for a six-way (that sixth ingredient being minced garlic plopped on top) or Camp Washington Chili, where the product they’re selling is anything but soupy. I would also pay a late-night visit with them to Pleasant Ridge Chili as well as the barroom of Price Hill Chili for a beer and a couple of cheese coneys on the side. The thing they’ll come to realize is that Cincinnati chili isn’t just some food we eat when we're nostalgic or drunk. It is part of our cuisine. And chili parlors are part of our culture, as well as a culture unto themselves.
3. Make Cincinnati chili at home
If Cincinnati chili really does scare you, the best way to get over your fear is to cook it at home. That way you'll see that there’s nothing to be scared of at all. This also goes for those of you trying to convince friends and loved ones to change their minds about it. That’s what it takes for people to understand that all Cincinnati chili is is ground beef (or ground lamb, which I occasionally use), onions, tomatoes, cinnamon, allspice, cloves, chili powder, cumin and oregano. I always toss in a bit of chocolate, but according to Woellert's book, few, if any, Cincinnati chili parlors use it in their recipes.
The recipe I use is from "The Joy of Cooking," which has a history steeped in Cincinnati cuisine. That’s because one of the book’s later authors, Marion Rombauer, who was the daughter of the book's original author, Irma S. Rombauer, lived in Cincinnati and included a recipe for Cincinnati chili called Cincinnati Chili Cockaigne, named after her family's Anderson Township estate. Once you let that chili simmer for a couple of hours in your kitchen, and once the aroma of those warming spices permeates the air you breathe, you might just understand what all the hype is about.
I remember the pride I would feel whenever I made Cincinnati chili for parties or gatherings when I lived in New York or New Orleans. How all it took was a group text with the words "Cincinnati chili?" to convince a dozen or so friends to cancel their plans and come over if I was making it.
I remember sitting in the backyard at a party in Brooklyn and watching everyone looking at the chili dip I'd made with a bit of disgust until a guy was finally brave enough to try it. "What the hell is this?" he asked enthusiastically, and when I told him, he said he couldn't believe how good it was.
I remember watching the editor of the New York Times Magazine hover over my chili at a birthday party as if he was guarding it as his own; I remember how, back in the 2010s, the magazine company I worked for held a competitive holiday potluck with about 50 or so entries. Guess who won?
But most of all, I remember how proud I was whenever I taught a naysayer that our chili was nothing to be scared of, nothing to be disgusted by and, by all means, nothing to hate.
This article originally appeared on Cincinnati Enquirer: Cincinnati chili haters: How to defeat them on Super Bowl Sunday