Today I’ll be following that up with a profile of two books being published this spring, each taking a fascinating look at the role of reading in the lives of women.

By the Book

Barbara Sicherman’s research of the day-to-day of the Gilded Age public has paid off: with Well-Read Lives: How Books Inspired a Generation of American Women, Sicherman has created an outstanding look at how girls and young women of all classes and colors counted reading as an integral part of their lives. Those born into aristocracy, like The Greek Way author Edith Hamilton, had almost every resource at their fingertips, while others like African American journalist Ida B. Wells used reading as an escape from the reality of being orphaned and expelled from school as a teen. Sicherman details how characters like Little Women’s Jo March inspired women of the late-19th century to be the cultural leaders they became in adulthood. (We recently ran another post about Sicherman’s book: see Louisa May Alcott and the Godmother of Punk!)

Reading Is My Window: Books and the Art of Reading in Women’s Prisons, a recent UNC Press publication by Megan Sweeney, sheds light on the current state of reading among incarcerated women, analyzing everything from recent Supreme Court decisions that make it possible for inmates to be denied all non-religious and non-legal reading materials, to the three genres most popular with the subjects she interviewed (narratives of victimization, urban crime fiction, and self-help). In the end, Sweeney explains just why reading is a crucial part of rehabilitation for incarcerated women in America’s prisons, arguing that books are often their only means of support, betterment, reflection, and most of all, a connection to the outside world.

- Matt

In a guest post for the First Peoples blog, Bauer talks about the importance of kinship in American Indian culture, particularly for American Indian historians who study their own communities. Bauer begins:

In the 1940s, the Dakota novelist and scholar Ella Deloria wrote eloquently about the significance of kinship and family in Dakota life. Kinship, Deloria explained, was an all-encompassing aspect of being Dakota, governing relationships within Dakota communities and with outsiders. When it comes to writing American Indian history, Deloria’s comments resonate far beyond the Dakota people, and they are as significant now as they were when first published some seventy years ago. This is especially true for American Indian scholars who write about the histories of our communities and homelands. When we research and write about our communities, we inevitably discover our own family histories, which offer an opportunity to interpret and organize our studies. Three narratives from my own research demonstrate the potential of writing American Indian history in a family way.

Bauer’s piece reveals the bonds of kinship that informed both his documentary and oral history sources for his new book. Read his full article here.

–ellen

To mark today, I’d like to offer some UNC Press books that may help more fully understand, think about, and recontextualize our involvement in Vietnam and its continuing presence in our consciousness.  So today I offer you the opportunity that good books always give—the chance to read, rethink, and build greater understandings, to build new meaning from the potentially meaningless tragedy.

–beth

In Not a Gentleman’s War: An Inside View of Junior Officers in the Vietnam War, Ron Milam examines the lives and actions of the much-maligned junior officer. Conventional wisdom holds that the junior officer in Vietnam was a no-talent, poorly trained, unmotivated soldier typified by Lt. William Calley. Drawing on oral histories, after-action reports, diaries, letters, and other archival sources, Ron Milam debunks this view, demonstrating that most of the lieutenants who served in combat performed their duties well and effectively, serving with great skill, dedication, and commitment to the men they led. Milam’s narrative provides a vivid, on-the-ground portrait of what the platoon leader faced: training his men, keeping racial tensions at bay, and preventing alcohol and drug abuse, all in a war without fronts. Yet despite these obstacles, junior officers performed admirably, as documented by field reports and evaluations of their superior officers. Read Milam’s guest post on the Calley apology (from August 2009).

The materials gathered by Michael Hunt in A Vietnam War Reader: A Documentary History from American and Vietnamese Perspectives remind readers that the conflict touched the lives of many people in a wide range of social and political situations and spanned a good deal more time than the decade of direct U.S. combat. Indeed, the U.S. war was but one phase in a string of conflicts that varied significantly in character and geography. Michael Hunt brings together the views of the conflict’s disparate players–from Communist leaders, Vietnamese peasants, Saigon loyalists, and North Vietnamese soldiers to U.S. policymakers, soldiers, and critics of the war. By allowing the participants to speak, this volume encourages readers to formulate their own historically grounded understanding of the events in Vietnam.

A few more about the Vietnam conflict, our thinking about war in the 20^th century, and war’s lasting effects on us all:

Until the Last Man Comes Home: POWs, MIAs, and the Unending Vietnam War by Michael J. Allen

Kingdom to Commune: Protestant Pacifist Culture between World War I and the Vietnam Era by Patricia Appelbaum

The Warrior Image: Soldiers in American Culture from the Second World War to the Vietnam Era by Andrew Huebner

Confronting the War Machine: Draft Resistance during the Vietnam War by Michael S. Foley

Imagining Vietnam and America: The Making of Postcolonial Vietnam, 1919-1950 by Mark Philip Bradley

Tonkin Gulf and the Escalation of the Vietnam War by Edwin E. Moïse

From People’s War to People’s Rule: Insurgency, Intervention, and the Lessons of Vietnam by Timothy J. Lomperis

Working-Class War: American Combat Soldiers and Vietnam by Christian G. Appy

This award comes in the year we re-issue her 1989 landmark book, Ecological Revolutions. In this classic and much-loved study, Merchant shows how social changes have reshaped the land as she analyzes two major transformations in the New England environment between 1600 and 1860.  The first was the arrival of European explorers and settlers during the seventeenth century, when Native American ways of life and the environment itself underwent radical alterations as human relationships to the land and ways of thinking about nature all changed. This colonial ecological revolution held sway until the nineteenth century, when New England’s industrial production brought on the second–a capitalist revolution that again remade the ecology, economy, and conceptions of nature in the region.

Ecological Revolutions: Nature, Gender, and Science in New England, First Edition

In the telling, Merchant explores how ideas about nature are socially constructed and argues that major cultural and economic changes not only result in changes to the landscape but also to the basic fabric of how people conceive of and relate to the natural world.  As she writes, “an ecological transformation in the deepest sense entails changes in ecology, production, reproduction, and forms of consciousness.”  Changing the way we think about our relationship to the environment comes first, and understanding how we have related to it, over the course of history, is the precursor to this shift.  And what has been occurring in the field—and in the minds of Americans—in the twenty years since this book first appeared, is just such a shift in thinking.

And so, Professor Merchant’s book becomes increasingly relevant as the issues she explores continue influence our environment.  The new edition will address ideas about narrating environmental change based on gender and the dialectics of transformation, as well as a new epilogue situating New England in the context of twenty-first-century globalization and climate change. Merchant argues that past ways of relating to the land could become an inspiration for renewing resources and achieving sustainability in the future.

So today we send a big congrats over the ether to Professor Merchant for all the work she’s done to help students, scholars—and all us creatures—more fully understand how our predecessors interacted with and shaped the world in which we live, as well as how we continue to do just that.

Hip hip hooray!

–beth

In her book, Lillian Wald: A Biography, Marjorie Feld examines the crucial and complex significance of Wald’s ethnicity to her life’s work. In addition, by studying the Jewish community’s response to Wald throughout her public career from 1893 to 1933, Feld explores the changing landscape of identity politics in the first half of the twentieth century.

To mark Wald’s birthday, as well as her own, Feld writes about her study of Wald’s complex life, as well as the ways in which their lives have–and have not–become intertwined in the process of her academic study.

Below we link to Feld’s post at the blog of the Jewish Women’s Archive. Enjoy!–beth

I remember precisely where I was in the Glenn G. Bartle library—what part of the stacks, which corner, what bench—when I realized that Lillian Wald and I shared the same birthday, on March 10^th.   I was a junior at State University of New York at Binghamton, enrolled in a U.S. women’s history course that was gradually changing the direction of my life.  It was here that I discovered Lillian Wald, a Jewish woman who was deeply involved in American Progressives’ campaigns for immigrant, women’s, and civil rights, for public health and world peace.

Read the full post at Jewesses with Attitude, the blog of the Jewish Women’s Archive.

However, right there on page 10, Smith points to reading Little Women as a turning point in her development into the rocker, poet, and artist that she was to become.

“I drew comfort from my books. Oddly enough, it was Louisa May Alcott who provided me with a positive view of my female destiny. . . . [Jo March] gave me the courage of a new goal, and soon I was crafting little stories and spinning long yarns for my brother and sister. From that time on, I cherished the idea that one day I would write a book.”

We asked Barbara Sicherman, author of Well-Read Lives: How Books Inspired a Generation of American Women (UNC Press 2010), whose book takes a close look at Little Women’s Jo March and how she served as a youthful model of independence in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, for her take on Smith’s quote.

“Patti Smith. I am surprised. But I shouldn’t be. Jo March has been inspiring girls since she first appeared on the literary landscape nearly a century and a half ago. I am convinced that a major reason for the novel’s staying power is Jo’s success as a published author. She was a new kind of heroine to Alcott’s first readers who were thrilled to encounter a feisty literary tomboy and bookworm in print; some of them even kept journals in Jo’s name.

But what is truly amazing, given how much the world has changed since then, is that Jo remained the exemplar of female ambition well into the twentieth century–for writers as different as Simone de Beauvoir, Ann Petry, and Cynthia Ozick. And now Patti Smith, whose account of crafting stories and spinning yarns for her siblings after reading Alcott’s classic is in the same tradition.”

So, without Jo March and Little Women there may not have been a Patti Smith Group, one of the few rock bands with a woman leader and lyricist. And without Louisa May Alcott, Smith might not have created the body of work for which she was named a Commander of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture in 2005.

Read a full interview with Barbara Sicherman on the transformative power of reading in women’s lives see at the UNC Press website.

–Gina

There was a time when Republicans did celebrate Grant. In a speech delivered in 1900, for example, Theodore Roosevelt maintained that among the past presidents, the trio emerging as the “mightiest among the mighty [were] the three great figures of Washington, Lincoln and Grant.” Roosevelt’s deeply appreciative comments reflected the widespread respect of his generation for Grant, and for good reason.

Yes, Grant’s administration was marred by corruption and controversy. But Grant himself remained steadfast in his belief that the goals of the war — unity and freedom — should be preserved even as the country’s enthusiasm for biracial reconstruction of the South faded away.

He proudly signed off on the 15th Amendment to the Constitution in 1870, describing the law enabling black suffrage as “a measure of grander importance than any other one act of the kind from the foundation of our free government to the present day.”

Grant’s final task as president hearkened back to his first and perhaps most important achievement: to ensure a stable transition, this time in the disputed election of 1876. He succeeded, and the country reconciled for good.

Read the full text of Waugh’s full piece: Ulysses S. Grant earned his $50 bill.

In this post Ramos marks the anniversary of the Battle of the Alamo,  addresses the decisions now being made about how this history will be taught to the state’s children, and explores both how these decisions arise from Texan culture and how they help shape it. –beth

This Saturday marks the anniversary of the Battle of the Alamo in 1836, the battle that ended the 13-day siege on the fort by the Mexican Army.  The date carries added meaning this year as the Texas State Board of Education decides on the social studies standards affecting the education of the state’s public school children.  Debates over the standards have garnered national attention especially since they impact how textbooks will be written for the nation’s largest market.  It was the subject of a recent New York Times Magazine cover story.  When it comes to Texas history, few if any events carry the emotional weight of the Alamo.  The governor even invokes the memory of Texas Independence to score political points with the anti-Washington crowd.

It seems like, 174 years later, battles over the Alamo’s meaning and significance rage on, reflecting contemporary debates as much as commenting on the past.  This has been the backdrop for writing my book, Beyond the Alamo: Forging Mexican Ethnicity in San Antonio, 1821-1861.  The book reframes events during the period from the perspective of Mexican people in San Antonio.  In a sense, the book serves as a narrative intervention into the immensely strong dominant narrative that places the Battle of the Alamo at the center of the region’s history.

The Alamo story itself shines so dominates the historical landscape that any broader context for understanding these events is practically wiped out.  I often use what I call the “postcard” image of the Alamo as a metaphor to illustrate this point.  The image of the Alamo is often presented without people or surrounding buildings.  The icon has become timeless in more than one sense.  Reinserting this context meant shifting the focus away from the battle and recasting events and people.

At times this meant using new terminology to escape the baggage traditional labels have acquired over time.  Stephen F. Austin and his settlers were immigrants rather than merely colonists and the Texas Revolution is now the Texas War of Secession.  This latter example allowed me to situate the war in Texas as a civil war within Mexico.  In this light, the meaning of the war to Mexicans can be better understood.

Commemorating the Battle of the Alamo itself brings up personal memories for me and many other ethnic Mexican people in Texas.  At school we learned the “official” version of events, while at home we heard our parent’s perspective.  In school, the Texas Revolution was a war for liberty and freedom.  At home, it was about stolen Mexican territory as part of the land grab of Manifest Destiny.  Writing the history of Texas then means understanding where each of these perspectives came from, how they have been reproduced and where they have been deployed to shape power and relations in the state.

As the State Board of Education now deliberates over how this history will be written, taught and tested for children from first grade through high school, understanding these multiple perspectives becomes even more important.  Early in the process, Patricia Hardy, the board member representing Fort Worth, made clear her concerns with emphasizing Mexicans in Texas and American history.  She noted, Hispanic children “want to see some brown faces and in Texas there are a lot of people with Hispanic surnames who are a part of Texas history. So that’s easy to come by.”  She continued, “But you cannot distort Texas history. You cannot give people an elevated place in history when their place was not elevated.”  Such is the tenacity of the dominant narrative in the popular culture of Texas.  When a more expansive narrative is presented, it is dismissed as representing the present rather than reflecting the past in order to diminish it.

While the answer is not necessarily to “Forget the Alamo” as in the poignant (and ironic) closing of John Sayles’s film Lone Star.  Rather, it takes expanding its historical context to make it more meaningful to all Texans and to those outside of the state as well.

For March, we’re celebrating National Women’s History Month at the Press, and I’ll be highlighting some fantastic new books we’re publishing that focus on women in America. We have titles spanning this history of women in the United States, from before the Revolution through a book profiling women of the past decade.

Women at War

Today’s post centers on two new books from UNC Press that focus on women at war in America. Published in September, Judith Giesberg’s Army at Home: Women and the Civil War on the Northern Home Front explores how both black and white women assumed increased social and political roles in the Union while their husbands and fathers fought the Confederacy. Giesberg includes striking details about how even with the return of the soldiers, these new gender roles remained.

150 years after the stories found in Giesberg’s Army at Home, Laura Browder and Sascha Pflaeging have put together this arresting new collecting of images and oral histories of women returning from combat in Iraq and Afghanistan, titled When Janey Comes Marching Home: Portraits of Women Combat Veterans. Along with 48 of Pflaeging’s portraits, Browder presents the oral histories that run across the emotional spectrum, providing the reader with a sense of just what it means to be a woman on the front lines of both a physical war and culture war.

Check back here for more posts in March about the great coverage of women’s history we have at UNC Press. Next week, I’ll provide a post on two new titles about the role of books in the lives of American women.

–matt

I thought it would be fun to take pictures of Zina making these cookies, especially to show people who want to bake–and aren’t sure they know how–that it really is easy. All the basic moves are here in this recipe: getting that sugar and butter together, using a real vanilla bean, adding the flour, rolling, baking. Just take your butter out an hour or two before you start–you’ll want it to be at room temperature for this recipe–and then you’ll see the easy magic that you and a wooden spoon can make. (You really don’t need an electric mixer.) These shortbreads are always welcome, munched with hot coffee or cold milk, or propped alongside a ball of ice cream. Karen gives some great serving tips at the end of the recipe, below. The cornmeal gives the shortbread a little southern touch. And remember: the more butter in a cookie, the shorter it is. Thanks, Zina and Karen.

Cornmeal Vanilla Bean Shortbreads

from Sweet Stuff: Karen Barker’s American Desserts

Makes 32 2-inch cutouts or 16 wedges

Every baker has a favorite recipe for shortbread cookies, and here is mine. The addition of fresh vanilla bean and the slight crunch of cornmeal make these buttery treats irresistible. You can customize their shape, depending upon your mood and the occasion. Try cutout stars for Christmas or the Fourth of July, hearts for Valentine’s Day, or Scottish-style wedges for tea.

INGREDIENTS

16 tablespoons (8 ounces) butter, at room temperature

seeds of 1 vanilla bean

¼ teaspoon kosher salt

½ cup + 1 tablespoon sugar

1 ½ cups flour

¼ cup cornstarch

½ cup stoneground yellow cornmeal

Here’s how to get those vanilla bean seeds:

PREPARATION

1. Using a mixer with a paddle, cream the butter with the vanilla bean seeds, salt, and sugar, scraping the sides of the bowl once or twice.

2. Combine the flour,

cornstarch,

and cornmeal

and add to the creamed butter in 3 additions.

Scrape the bottom and sides of the bowl to make sure the dough is evenly mixed.

Gather the dough together, divide in half, flatten into rounds, and wrap in plastic.

Chill for one hour or up to 2 days. This dough can be frozen. Defrost overnight on the refrigerator before using.

3.  Preheat oven to 350°.

4. A. For shortbread cutouts: On a lightly floured surface, roll the dough out ¼ inch thick.

Cut the cookies into desired shapes and place them on a parchment paper–lined baking sheet. Gather the scraps and reroll one time.

B. For shortbread wedges: On a lightly floured surface, roll each piece of dough into a circle 8 inches in diameter and ¼ to ½ inch thick. Use a plate or a cake pan as a guide. Place on a parchment paper–lined baking sheet. Score each round into 8 wedges, being careful not to cut all the way through the dough. Decoratively prick the shortbread with the tines of a fork if desired.

5. Bake at 350° for about 15 to 20 minutes, until the edges just start to brown. Reduce oven to 325° and bake an additional 10 to 20 minutes. Wedges will need a longer baking time than cutouts. Rotate the baking sheet midway through the baking process–you want the shortbreads to remain fairly light in color, but you do want to make sure they’re baked through. You can always break a cookie open to test for doneness. No traces of raw dough should exist in the center. The texture of the cookies will crisp up once they are cool. You’ll want to recut the scored shortbread wedges once the cookies are baked.

Baker’s Note: You can keep an airtight box of rolled shortbreads on hand in your freezer and bake them as needed.

Serving Suggestions: These are great all on their own or as a side cookie to a scoop of purple plum rum sorbet (page 282) or bourbon molasses ice cream (page 264). I have also fashioned a stacked shortcake-like dessert by layering 2 shortbread cookie wedges with fresh strawberries or bourbon poached peaches (page 149) and whipped cream.

In the corner of our living room sits a stately 213-year-old secretary made of walnut, complete with secret compartments, cubbyholes, and four drawers massive enough to store the contents of a modern office. As a child, the desk’s craftsmanship, solidity, and age fascinated me. But it also intrigued me for another reason: it is a tangible part of our family’s history. My grandfather Josiah Rohrer, who lived in Germantown, outside of Philadelphia, would gather us around the desk and, in reverential tones, tell us about the desk’s history. My brothers and I listened carefully, stroking the old wood as he spoke. A Mennonite craftsman by the name of John Rohrer, who was Josiah’s great-grandfather, built the desk in 1797 when he was 17 and coming of age in Lancaster County, Pa. Since then the desk has been passed down from father to son, until it ended up in my hands in the late 1980s while I was living in Salisbury, N.C. I learned the desk’s history from my grandfather and from the wrinkled old piece of paper squirreled away in a cubbyhole that lists the names of the desk’s owners and the year they were born.

Lure and lore—both are part of family history’s irresistible attractions. For profound and deep-seated reasons, humans have long wanted to discover who their ancestors were and where they came from. The lure of family history can easily be seen by glancing at the burgeoning number of websites and organizations devoted to genealogy. County libraries routinely hold seminars on researching family history. Indeed, the legions of genealogists are growing by the day, spurred on by the Internet and the ease with which one can now read courthouse records and family documents online. The lore involves family stories passed down from generation to generation. When friends and colleagues learn that I am a social historian whose first book was on the Moravians, and that I am a descendant of German Mennonites, they enjoy telling me about their family histories and their efforts to uncover their family’s past. These investigations are almost always journeys of love.

As a “professional” historian, however, I have always kept my research interests separate from family ones. The usual academic considerations led to my second book—Wandering Souls: Protestant Migrations in America, 1630-1865. I wanted to understand how Protestantism influenced the movements of ordinary Americans in an earlier age.

It took a chance encounter with a genealogy site to bring me back to my roots, so to speak. In a posting that I stumbled upon one snowy night while Googling Wandering Souls, Gena Philibert Ortega notes how valuable my book could be to people researching their family histories:

I imagine, or maybe it’s me, that when we think of religious migration across the United States, we think of the Mormons. But there [were] other religious groups that migrated. This [book] can be helpful in genealogical research because it allows you to not only understand your ancestor’s religion but to understand the localities they may have ended up in.

Her insight is important. The interconnections between religion, family, and migration are crucial to my book. Indeed, although Chapter 4 deals explicitly with family and migration, the entire book could have been devoted to this theme. Religion and ethnicity defined my ancestors, and that connection most likely influenced their migratory patterns. My grandfather could get quite emotional when he talked about the persecution that Mennonites faced in early modern Europe; such persecution played a prominent role in the trans-Atlantic migration of Mennonites and many other Protestant and Catholic groups.

Religion played a major role in the wanderings of Americans within this country as well. People of faith migrated to points north, south, and west in the colonial and antebellum periods for all kinds of reasons. To escape religious persecution. To join like-minded believers. To rekindle their flagging faith in God. To become “reborn.”

Many sojourners traveled in family units. One common thread linking disparate journeys across the centuries was that family and religion often defined a migration, be it Puritan in 1635 or Inspirationist in 1860. Many times, these families were part of colorful sectarian groups with exotic customs that today fascinate their descendants and others. But not always. Religious migrants could be found among the state churches, too.

Wandering Souls covers a cross-section of these religious migrations, and does it from a variety of angles. Through a series of case studies, the book explains the many motives that spawned Protestant migrations in early America. In doing so it takes readers deep into the inner world of eight Protestant groups. Historians, it is to be hoped, will view Wandering Souls as an important contribution to migration studies and to understanding the development of the United States.

General readers, meanwhile, may find its attractions elsewhere. As the walnut desk and the posting on Gena’s Genealogy reveal, there is another side to my story. Families matter.

S. Scott Rohrer
Arlington, Virginia

But why should you care?  Well, I’d say, because what’s better on a cold, windy night than warm chili?  Isn’t that reason enough?  If you need another reason—if you’re like that—you need to know that today is also, by your great good fortune, National Chili Day.  Did we plan this?  No.  But it does seem that fortune smiles on us in this matter.

Chili Night:  Its beginnings are lost in the mists of time.  It just is.

What will be in store tonight?  There will be three, count em, three pots of chili: David’s (our Venerable Editor in Chief) famous chili, and Robbie’s (our Esteemed CFO) equally famous chili.  Not that this is a competition.  Of course it’s not, but still.  We’re just saying.  So David and Robbie cover the con carne options, and of course, we will also have veggie chili, made by Heidi (our Most Honorable Design and Production Manager).  And fixins, of course there will be all the fixins.

But enough about us.  How will you celebrate National Chili Day?  A cook-off?  A bowl and nice big hunk of cornbread at your favorite diner (and my choice would be Elmo’s chili and cornbread, if you’re near Durham or Carrboro).  Or, you can break out the pots and pans and try your hand at it.  I’d give you David’s or Robbie’s or Heidi’s recipes, but they’re not talking.

Since that’s the case, we’ve turned to our books to give you some recipes, in case you’d like to participate, along with us, and raise a glass at the same time we are, in Carrboro, NC.  Here are two recipes for you, one from Marion Brown’s Southern Cookbook, and the other from Cooking the Gullah Way Morning, Noon, & Night.

As Marion Brown writes, “Chili Con Carne, according to ‘Sally Ann’ (La Cocina Mexicana), ‘is no such basic staple of diet in Mexico as it is supposed to be—but is an Americanized dish.’”  That Marion Brown, she’s a stickler!

Cut pieces of pork, beef, veal, or mutton into chunks about ½ inch square, and fry until crisp in very hot fat with a chopped clove of garlic. When meat is browned, pour in enough sauce of chili Colorado (which you have already prepared and have in the refrigerator) to cover the meat and let it boil. Add cooked frijoles (pinto beans) if you like, and never hesitate to put in a few pieces of onion and green chili. Chili con carne is best served on hot steamed rice along with a green salad and plenty of good strong hot coffee. It is an excellent way to utilize leftover beans.

From La Cocina Mexicana, by “Sally Ann,” Food Editor, El Paso Herald-Post, El Paso, Tex.

And also from “Sally Ann,” Chili Colorado (Red Chili Sauce) is made thusly:

“The base for all red and all hot sauces used in Mexico and Mexican cookery is made as follows, and no substitute, such as chili powder or tomato will do:

“Put a pound of dried red chili peppers to soak in hot water for about an hour. Drain and clean out the veins and seeds. Put through the meat grinder with one large onion and a clove of garlic.  Strain and put in salt and pepper. Place the resultant pulps and the water in which the peppers soaked in a glass jar and keep in the refrigerator for future use. The flavor of the chili can be varied by the kinds of peppers used.  Some red chili is hot and some sweet. Most cooks prefer a chili Colorado made of half hot (picoso) and half sweet (pasillo) peppers.”

Mrs. Manuel Rodarte, from La Cocina Mexicana, by “Sally Ann,” Food Editor, El Paso Herald-Post, El Paso, Tex.

But I’d like to give you some options.  Perhaps you cannot quite handle such a definitive recipe.  Perhaps you do not abhor a tomato to the extent that “Sally Ann” does.

Here, then, is Sallie Ann Robinson’s  Carolina Chili:

When you think of eating chili, most times it’s when the weather is cool. But eating chili can be good all year round, whether you like your chili with beans or ground meat, hot or mild. As with most soups today, it is easier for us to put it all in a crock pot and be on our merry way. Here is one way that I like to cook up a big pot of chili. Some like it with beef; I like it with beer and pork.  This is a real treat.

Disyah da way fa do it.

2 pounds lean ground beef

1 pound lean ground pork

3 ½ cups onion, chopped

1 ½ heaping tablespoons garlic, minced

1/3 cup green bell pepper, chopped

1/3 cup  red bell pepper, chopped

3 tablespoons chili powder

4 ½ cups fresh tomatoes, diced

¾ cup tomato paste

1 teaspoon cumin

2 bay leaves

black pepper

2/3 teaspoon dried oregano

4 cups red kidney beans (optional)

1 ½ cups shredded cheddar cheese

In a large soup pot, brown the ground beef and pork. Add the onion, garlic, and bell peppers. Cook over medium heat until tender. Add the chili powder, tomatoes, tomato paste, cumin, bay leaves, black pepper, and oregano. Mix well and let simmer slowly for 1 ½ to 2 hours, stirring occasionally. You may add kidney beans at this time and cook for another 30  to 40 minutes. Stir in the cheese. Turn off the heat and dish up a bowlful of some belly-filling chili.

Well, I hope these ideas are helpful.  Think of us tonight, as we celebrate our chilly Chili Night.

–beth