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Chili Con Carne

A hearty stew of ground beef, pinto beans, garlic, chili pepper, and spices.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Clove and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 17,451 recipes. Both carry ethyl octanoate, which smells fruity, wine. The science ↓

Chili Con Carne

Ingredients

Directions

Make the base

  1. Fry the minced garlic in lard, Crisco, or a similar oil until brown, then remove from the grease.

  2. Add the chili pepper, argana, camina, and small red peppers to the skillet and stir thoroughly, frying until brown.

  3. Add the ground beef and fry, stirring constantly until it is light pink.

Simmer and finish

  1. Combine the meat mixture with the well-cooked beans, add salt, and cook together for one hour or until the desired consistency is reached.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Clove + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  2. Beans + garlictop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,935 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

  3. Garlic + peppertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,090 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  4. Beans + clovetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together908 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-heptanol (bitter, floral).

  5. Beef + peppertop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,971 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Ground beef
Provides the meaty body and savory base of the chili.
Pinto beans
Add starch and body, thickening the chili as they cook down.
Small red peppers
Add heat and pungent flavor to the spice base.
Argana
Fat that carries the spices and helps them bloom in the pan.

The step that matters

Frying the garlic and spices until brown. Browning the garlic and peppers in fat develops deeper, toasted flavors through the Maillard reaction. Burning them, however, turns them bitter, so they need steady attention over moderate heat.

Swap the clove

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, beans, garlic, pepper):

  1. Cuminfits better
  2. Rosemaryfits better
  3. Oreganofits better
  4. Clovethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, beans, garlic, pepper. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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