Recipe for Bill Casselman's Silly Chilli

This is a kind of Bill Casselman cross between ham & potato stew and chili con carne. It may read as a strange concoction, but it warms one after a frosty winter's day here in Dunnville, Ontario. Over the years Silly Chili has been a favourite of those of my guests who enjoy stick-to-the-ribs meals. This is one chili-like concoction that does not have any tomatoes, at least not in my kitchen. I'm sure the fried ham and sugar syrup ought to be left out for health's sake, but left in for flavour's sake.

Canola oil
Water or stock 2 cups
One can condensed consommé (10 oz or 285ml)
2 packets Bovril instant Vegetable Bouillon
Fried ham (2 thick slices)
4 potatoes, new, medium size
4 carrots, big
1 green pepper
2 cooking onions, large
2 tablespoons commerical sugar syrup (like Aunt Jemima brand)
Chili powder, 2 or 3 tablespoons
Cayenne pepper
2 freshly crushed garlic cloves
Hot pepper sauce (home made, Cholula, Louisiana Jalapeño, or Tabasco)
1 can red kidney or pinto beans (14 oz or 400 ml)
Lima beans, frozen
Peas, frozen

Preparation

In a hot skillet, fry the two slices of ham in hot canola oil until they are golden and crispy. Then dice them into 1/2 inch cubes and set aside.

Silly Chili tastes best to me simmered in a large stainless-steel pot with cover. Fry the ham and sauté the onions in separate utensils. Dissolve the chili powder in cold water and make a reddish paste. Then make the stock in the big stew pot, adding the water, stock, consommé, Bovril vegetable powder, chili paste, 3 dashes of cayenne pepper, and 2 or 3 shakes of Tabasco or other hot pepper sauce.

Cover the pot and simmer for about 20 minutes. Then toss in the diced ham, 2 tablespoons of sugar syrup (or less depending on one's sweet tolerance). Add also now a few frozen lima beans and peas.

Simmer for another 15 minutes.

Finally, add the canned red kidney or pinto beans and bring the pot to the bubble one last time.

I serve Silly Chili in big soup bowls. For sops or dippin' bread, I find the thickest bread I can and cut slices of it into long strips. Black Russian bread is good, so is pumpernickel, or, as a last resort Dempster's squidgy 12 grain Bread. Also toothsome with this chili is freshly baked cornbread (aka johnnycake).

Word Lore of Terms Used in this Recipe

CANOLA
In 1994-95 canola surpassed wheat as the largest cash crop in Canada. It used to be called rape, from rapum, the Latin word for turnip. But rapeseed as a term, even in the 1940s, was tainted by the fact that it is spelled and pronounced exactly like sexual rape (from an entirely different Latin word rapire, to seize and carry off).

Canadian farmers first grew the yellow flowers of this crop during WWII when rapeseed oil proved to be an effective lubricant for ship engines. After the war, Canadian scientists led by R. K. Downey hybridized rape to produce an oil high in monounsaturated fats and low in cholesterol. The euphemism canola was formed by compounding Can (Canadian) + ola ( Latin, oleum, oil).

But chili con carne (Spanish 'peppers with meat')or in American English chili con carne is made with chili powder, which is, confusingly, made from cayenne peppers and cumin and a few other spices.

JALAPEÑO
Jalapeño is a Mexican hot pepper. The Spanish word means 'from the city of Jalapa,' which is the capital of the Mexican state of Veracruz. The Aztecs named the site of the original settlement. In their language Nahuatl, jalapa means 'sand beside water' or, as we latter-day hedonistas might say, "Beach, dude!"

TABASCO
Tabasco is a city in Mexico, whose name in Nahuatl means 'moist soil place.' Around 1868 an American named Edmund McIlhenny bought some hot pepper seeds and made a fiery sauce with the peppers that grew from them. In recent years Tabasco has made more than 50 million bottles of their hot sauce per year. Still, as every cook knows, there are much hotter peppers than chilis and jalapeños.

the fiery, quarter-sized habanero pepper

The king of pepper tasters and measurers was a gent named Wilbur Scoville who in 1912 came up with a method to calibrate the hotness of peppers. Your common jalapeño pepper clocks in at a tongue-rippling 5000 Scoville units. But the blast furnace of peppers, the habanero (the chili from Havana) fires up a biter's lip at 300,000 Scoville units, sixty times as hot as jalapeños!

PUMPERNICKEL
Pumpernickel means 'farting little devil,' an apt label for a hearty German bread that certainly might make one flatulent. Pumpern is an Austrian and southern German dialect verb that means 'to thump, to bang, to make a loud noise, to fart.' There is an even more flatulent-sounding cousin in northern Germany, pfumpfen. One pronounces all the ps and fs, so its origin as an imitation of a farting sound is quite clear.

Ein pumper is one way to refer to 'a fart' in German. The more common one is Farz, just like English. There is also Furz. Nick is used in some German dialects just as it is in the English expression Old Nick to refer to the devil. The -el added to Nick is a diminutive meaning 'small' or 'little.' But here it is almost an affectionate nickname for the devil, whose more formal name in German is der Teufel.

Among Bill Casselman's books is Canadian Food Words, winner of the Cuisine Canada Gold Medal in 1999 for best specialty book about Canadian food.

This recipe is also available at the official site of the Casselman Ancestral Society: