Chile con Came

Chile con carne is a spicy meat dish from Texas and New Mexico. The phrase is Spanish for ‘chillies with meat’, a literal emphasis since the original dish probably contained more chillies than pork. When the Spaniards colonized Mexico they brought with them pigs, which quickly entered the heart of Mexican cooking. Indeed, lard is still used there extensively to this day and is preferred to vegetable or olive oils.

The original dish is carne con chile Colorado, a stew of bitesized pieces of pork cooked with mild dried red chillies and coriander, a relatively gentle spicing by Mexican standards. In its Tex-Mex reworking, the meat becomes beef, which is not minced but cut into pieces about the size of a little fingernail, then browned in oil before being stewed slowly in beer and stock or water with chopped onion, garlic, tomatoes and sweet peppers, hot chilli flakes or powder, ground toasted coriander and cumin seeds, oregano, salt and pepper.