49 Fun Facts About Chili

What does 'con carne' literally mean in Spanish?

With meat: in Spanish, 'chile' on its own just means the pepper, so the stew needed the extra words; English later dropped them and let plain 'chili' mean the dish.

Which animal appears on every bottle of Huy Fong's sriracha, the chili sauce with the green cap?

A rooster marks the sauce David Tran began making in Los Angeles after fleeing Vietnam; he named his company Huy Fong after the freighter that carried him out.

The 'chili queens' who sold bowls of chili from open-air stands were famous in which Texas city?

San Antonio's chili queens served plaza crowds from dusk until dawn for decades, until the city health department ordered the stands out in 1937 and closed them for good in the early 1940s.

A Texas chili stand introduced the dish to visitors from across America at which 1893 event?

Chicago's Columbian Exposition is where chili historians date the dish's leap from Texas speciality to national craze, thanks to the bowls sold at that one stand.

Which New Braunfels café owner began selling his own chili powder in 1894, after running dried peppers through a meat grinder?

William Gebhardt could get fresh chilies only part of the year, so he dried and ground them to keep chili on his menu; Fort Worth grocer D. C. Pendery was selling a rival powder by then.

Besides ground chilies, which spices typically go into an American 'chili seasoning' blend?

Cumin, garlic and onion come ready-mixed because the powder was built for one dish: the first commercial blends were sold in 1890s Texas to season pots of chili con carne.

Kitchen lore blames the seeds, but which part of a chili pepper actually makes its capsaicin?

The white pith that holds the seeds makes the capsaicin; the seeds themselves produce none and merely soak some up from the tissue they hang on.

Which car maker was among the founders of the first Terlingua, Texas chili cook-off in 1967?

Carroll Shelby co-owned the ghost town and the ranch land around it; by his own account he and his partner wanted to sell, and the cook-off was their publicist's idea.

Terlingua, the Texas ghost town that hosts chili championships, grew up around mines digging cinnabar for which metal?

Mercury, or quicksilver, kept Terlingua busy until the Chisos Mining Company went bankrupt in 1942 and the miners drifted away; the chili cook-offs later brought the crowds back.

Cincinnati chili was developed in 1922 by immigrant brothers from which region?

Macedonia was home to the Kiradjieff brothers, who are said to have found few takers for Balkan cooking in Cincinnati and so recast a spiced stew as 'chili' to widen their trade.

Over what is Cincinnati chili traditionally served?

Spaghetti under the chili is treated like a casserole in Cincinnati: locals cut each bite with the side of the fork, and twirling the noodles is frowned upon.

Original Tabasco sauce is made from just three ingredients: tabasco peppers, salt and what?

Vinegar goes in last: the salted pepper mash first spends up to three years in old bourbon barrels, then is blended with vinegar for about a month before bottling.

Which ingredient is Cincinnati chili widely rumoured to contain, a myth the city's chili parlors deny?

Chocolate turns up in many copycat recipes, but the historian of the dish found no Cincinnati chili parlor that uses it, and the biggest chain says its recipe has none.

Which Cincinnati chili chain did Greek immigrant Nicholas Lambrinides and his sons open in 1949?

Skyline Chili was named, the company says, for the city view from its first restaurant; its Greek-born founder built the sauce on his mother's recipes.

Which eatery is one claimed birthplace of Frito pie?

A Woolworth's in Santa Fe is where Teresa Hernandez is said to have dished it up in the 1960s; a rival Texas story credits the mother of Fritos' founder instead.

Wilbur Scoville devised his chili heat test in 1912 while working for a Detroit drug company in which profession?

Pharmacist Scoville had no instrument sensitive enough to measure a pepper's bite, so at Parke-Davis he relied on the tongues of a panel of tasters instead.

Scoville's original heat test diluted pepper extract in what?

Sugar water was added until three of five tasters felt nothing; the amount of dilution became the rating, so a 5,000-unit pepper needed diluting 5,000 times.

Which of these scores zero on the Scoville heat scale?

Bell pepper belongs to the same species as the jalapeño and cayenne, Capsicum annuum, yet has no heat at all for the scale to measure.

How hot is pure capsaicin on the Scoville scale?

16 million is the score of the pure compound, about six times the hottest chili on record, because a Scoville number counts how far a sample must be diluted before the burn fades.

Which chili took Guinness's 'hottest' title from the Carolina Reaper in 2023, rated about 2.69 million Scoville units?

Pepper X was grown in secret for a decade by the same South Carolina breeder who created the Reaper, and its pods and seeds are not sold.

Who bred the Carolina Reaper, Guinness's hottest chili from 2013 until 2023?

Ed Currie tested hundreds of hybrids over about 12 years before crossing a fiercely hot pepper from the Caribbean island of St. Vincent with a superhot from South Asia.

Which chili was the first certified above 1,000,000 Scoville units, in 2007?

The ghost pepper is hot enough that conservationists in Assam smear it on fences to turn back wild elephants, and Indian defence scientists have packed it into hand grenades.

A poblano pepper that has been dried is sold under which name?

Ancho means 'wide' in Spanish: the poblano dries into a broad, flat, heart-shaped pod, which is often ground into chili powder.

Why did Columbus's crew call the Capsicum fruits 'peppers'?

They were pungent like black pepper, the spice the voyage had hoped to reach, so the name was reused, which is why English has one word for two unrelated plants.

The word 'chili' reached English through Spanish from which indigenous American language?

Nahuatl, the Aztecs' language, called the pepper 'chilli', the very spelling British English still uses; Spanish trimmed it to 'chile' and American English to 'chili'.

Why can birds happily eat the hottest chilies?

Their heat receptors ignore capsaicin, which suits the plant: birds swallow the fruit and scatter the seeds unharmed, while the burn keeps seed-destroying mammals away.

Why does milk soothe a chili burn better than water?

Its casein binds capsaicin; in a Penn State trial skim milk soothed the burn as well as whole milk, so the fat is not what does the work.

Which medical product uses capsaicin?

A pain-relief skin patch carries so much capsaicin that putting it on burns: only clinicians may apply it, and they can numb the skin with an anaesthetic first.

What is a chipotle?

A smoke-dried ripe jalapeno starts as a pod left on the plant until it is deep red and losing moisture; smoking, an old way of preserving peppers, finishes the job.

The jalapeno is named after which city, the capital of Veracruz?

Xalapa, also spelled Jalapa, gave the pepper its name but not its harvest: jalapeños are no longer grown commercially around the city, and the crop now comes from other regions.

In the 1930s, Nobel laureate Albert Szent-Györgyi found paprika peppers to be a rich source of which vitamin?

Vitamin C was so plentiful in paprika that the peppers became his laboratory's supply of it; the work helped earn him the 1937 Nobel Prize in Medicine.

Tabasco sauce has been made since 1868 at which Louisiana location?

Avery Island sits on a salt dome, and salt is one of the sauce's three ingredients: the pepper mash is salted and aged in oak barrels whose lids are sealed with more of it.

How do Tabasco's pickers judge that a pod is ripe?

They compare it to a red stick, 'le petit bâton rouge', and take only the pods that match; the peppers are picked by hand and mashed with salt the same day.

What is New Mexico's official State Question, heard in restaurants across the state?

Red or green? is how servers ask which chile sauce you want; legislators made the question official in 1996, and diners who want both answer 'Christmas'.

Which New Mexico village, famous for its chile crop, has held a harvest festival since 1971?

Hatch's festival began as a small gathering of local farmers celebrating the harvest; it has grown to draw about 30,000 visitors to the village over Labor Day weekend.

English borrowed the word 'paprika' from the language of which country?

Hungary's signature spice is an import: paprika peppers descend from American chilies that reached Europe only after Columbus's voyages.

What gives Spanish pimenton de la Vera its distinctive flavour?

Ordinary paprika is simply dried and ground red Capsicum annuum.

Which country is by far the world's largest grower of green chilies and peppers, harvesting about 17 million tonnes in 2024?

China, far ahead of every other grower, had no chilies at all until the 1500s, when traders carried the American plant to Asia.

Chili peppers belong to which plant family, along with tomatoes, potatoes and tobacco?

Nightshades run from food crops to poisons such as belladonna, and the family's potent plant chemistry gave the world nicotine as well as capsaicin.

What is a Cincinnati 'coney'?

A hot dog with the city's chili is where the dish began: in 1922 the Kiradjieff brothers ladled their spiced meat sauce over wieners at a stand they named Empress.

Which of these chili peppers is typically the hottest?

Habanero pods rate 100,000 to 350,000 Scoville units, at least twice a cayenne; the name means 'of Havana', from an old theory that the pepper came from Cuba.

Serrano peppers take their name from the Spanish word for which kind of landscape?

Mountains, or sierras, are where the pepper comes from, in the highlands of Puebla and Hidalgo; it looks like a slimmer jalapeño but is generally the hotter of the two.

Under its 2024 rulebook, the Chili Appreciation Society International bans which two things from cook-off chili?

Beans and marinated meat both break the rules: fillers such as beans, macaroni and rice are out, and every pot must start from raw, unmarinated meat cooked on site that day.

Which north Texas newspaperman invented 'Two-Alarm Chili' and insisted on adding tomato sauce?

Wick Fowler cooked against humorist H. Allen Smith at the first Terlingua cook-off in 1967; it ended in a tie, one account says, when the deciding judge spat out his spoonful.

White chili is typically made with white beans, green chilies and which meat?

Chicken or turkey, pale broth and white beans keep the pot light in colour, which is where the name comes from; some cooks mash a few of the beans to thicken it.

In parts of Nebraska, Iowa and Kansas, chili is traditionally served alongside what?

Cinnamon rolls joined chili on school lunch trays in the early 1960s and never left; the Nebraska-born Runza chain lists the two side by side on its menu.

Which Texas canned chili did Lyman Davis name in 1921 after his pet, Kaiser Bill?

Wolf Brand honours Davis's pet wolf; the men who bought him out sent salesmen on the road in can-shaped Model T trucks with a live wolf caged in the back.

Before home refrigerators, dehydrated commercial chili was sold in what form?

Bricks of chili had nearly all the moisture pressed out, leaving a block about the size of half a house brick that kept without ice and was simmered back to life in water.

Which St. Louis diner dish smothers hamburger patties, hash browns and eggs in chili?

A slinger is a St. Louis invention best known as late-night diner food; ask and the cook will swap the patties for ham, sausage, bacon or even a T-bone steak.