Chili con Blarney 
The annual Texas chili cookoff 
is a bizarre and boozy food event 
by Raymond Sokolov 
Looking like a giant egg with eye- 
brows, a stranger came up to me in 
the lobby of an Austin, Texas, motel 
in 1971, proferring a plain, brown car- 
ton. I looked puzzled. He showed me 
his driver’s license, which was Viet- 
namese, but gave his name as Wick 
Fowler. The carton contained several 
packets of premixed spices boldly la- 
beled “Three-Alarm Chili.” Fowler 
had created the jocular product to cap- 
italize on his fame as the chief cook 
of the Chili Appreciation Society In- 
ternational (CASI), an outfit that 
sponsors the Annual World Champi- 
onship Chili Cookoff in a Texas min- 
ing ghost town called Terlingua. 
Fowler was not profaning the pris- 
tine sanctity of the Terlingua cookoff. 
His chili mix was by no means con- 
temptible. And self-advertisement lies 
at the heart of the cookoff itself, which 
began as a publicity stunt in 1967. 
A Dallas restaurateur and journalist, 
Frank X. Tolbert, had concocted the 
contest to promote the sale of his book, 
A Bowl of Red: The Natural History 
of Chili with Recipes. Originally, Tol- 
bert had planned to pit Fowler against 
Dave Chasen, the Beverly Hills res- 
taurateur, whose chief stirrer was to 
have been Elizabeth Taylor. But 
Chasen fell ill, and the humorist H. 
Allen Smith of Mount Kisco, New 
York, author of a boastful mock attack 
on Texas chili cooks, stood in for him. 
The result was called a draw, but the 
cookoff itself was a decisive success, 
spawning what Tolbert has called “an 
international subculture” involving 
thousands of “chili heads” who com- 
pete in CASI-sponsored local tourneys 
from Manila to Connecticut. Winners 
trek to Terlingua on the first Saturday 
in November for “the big showdown,” 
which is probably the biggest, gross- 
est, booziest, most self-inflated, and 
certainly most entertaining of all the 
thousands of American regional food 
events that each year purport to com- 
memorate and preserve the hallowed 
and embattled dishes of yesteryear. 
Second to none in my hunger for 
authentic American food, I traveled 
to Terlingua for the 14th Annual Wick 
Fowler Memorial World Champion- 
ship Chili Cookoff. Getting to the re- 
mote patch of desert on the banks 
of the Rio Grande where the contest 
is held isn’t easy. Essentially, you drive 
through the 8,000-foot, lunar Chisos 
Mountains in the Big Bend National 
Park, and turn right. Road runners 
skitter and bob across the highway. 
The sky is big, and the nearest town 
of consequence, Alpine, is eighty miles 
away. For cookoff weekend, Alpine’s 
motels are full, all their rooms having 
photographs by Adelaide de Menil 
A Matter of Taste 
96 
