The Great Chili Book: 101 Variations on "The Perfect Bowl of Red"

Rating:
Summary: Reader, this is the great American chili book.
Review: Bill Bridges is unique among chili-book authors in his generosity of spirit: he is truely interested in everybody's chili. And while he offers some sure-footed guidance of his own in the intricacies of its making and to the tangled tale that is its history, these pages really spring to life when he ambles into somebody else's kitchen and crumbles crackers into yet another version of a bowl of red. Bridges talks chili not only in all the right joints but also in such unlikely ones as the home of Margaret Manning, book reviewer for The Boston Globe, or on Foggy Island in Alaska s Beaufort Sea, where Red Skinner makes chili with slab bacon and caribou for the oil men drilling on the North Slope. Tag along, and you ll begin to recognize chili as a resonantly American art form: a solitary passion that its practitioners can t help but make public...since few can eat all the chili they concoct and fewer still can bear not to show at least one other person how good their version is. Some of the recipes are terrific (Sam Huddleston s Texas chili, Casados Farms carne adovada); others terrifying (mountain oyster chili) but all are edifying, not least in demonstrating ad absurdum that universal American culinary tic: to never be able to stop messing with a good thing. Frank X. Tolbert and Joe Cooper can step aside -- this is the great American chili book.