With chili pots and collateral commotion already bubbling furiously at the Tobolandia fairgrounds, it’s an apropos moment to offer newcomers a glance back at the origins of the 35th National Mexican Cookoff.
Ultimately it all goes to back to the 1967 Holiday magazine article entitled “Nobody Knows More About Chili Than I Do” penned by author-humorist H. Allen Smith. That bold claim spurred an ardent response from Dallas newsman and chili enthusiast Wick Fowler who fired back, “If you knew beans about chili, you’d know chili doesn’t have beans.”
The war of words morphed into a one-on-one chili cooking challenge between the two. While the contest ended in a draw, it gave birth to the annual Terlingua Texas Chili Cook Off, eventually igniting a phenomenon that has now gone global.
Competitive chili emerged at lakeside in 1978 with a hare-brained scheme drummed up by the late Ajijic restaurateur-hotelier Morely Eager and the Reporter’s former publisher Beverly Hunt. They rounded up a dozen of the expat community’s most colorful characters to concoct pots of chili for a tasty party in the gardens of the Old Posada, then under Eager’s peerless management. In the days before the area became the heavily populated and ever-busy retirement haven it is today, the event was a wildly popular lark that involved as much tippling as it did actual chili making.
The following year the first Mexican National Chili Cookoff was held on the Ajijic pier. Organized as a fund-raiser for local charities, it was run under the strict no-beans guidelines of the International Chili Society. To make sure everything was done by the book, ICS tagged the legendary chilihead Ormly Gumfudgin to oversee the event.
This is true folks. I was there, competing together with my husband with a classic Mexican green chile dish that was soundly scorned by this bizarre chili “expert” and his panel of persnickety judges.
Despite my own painful defeat, the cookoff was a resounding success and the Mexican National grew into a contest of widespread fame. Top notch chili competitors from all across the USA came year after for a shot at Mexican titles that would earn them slots in the ICS World Championship. Harold Timber, Jim Beaty, Margo and J.R. Knudson, Ed Pierczynski, Cathy Wilkey and Tom Hoover are on the list of world champions who dished out hot stuff over the years in Ajijic.
The Mexican National was invariably hailed as one of the most fun-filled events on the cookoff circuit for colorful entertainment attractions such as folk dance groups, equestrian spectacles and the flying men of Papantla. Local competitors rarely took top prizes but had a knack for antics that put a zany stamp on the gathering. No one ever outdid the inimitable Morley Eager, who contracted a circus to set up on the beach next to the pier and borrowed the troupe’s prize elephant to ride at the head of the first-ever cookoff parade.
The event has evolved, changing location and format through time. A salsa contest and a green chili category — redemption for my year-one debacle — were incorporated, and later ditched. The last ICS-sanctioned Mexican national was in 2008. When competitors from the States bailed due to a slumping economy and the outbreak of Mexico’s flu pandemic, the cookoff was reinvented. The old judging rulebook was tossed aside, eliminating all restrictions on recipe ingredients and adoption of a more popular people’s choice taste-and-vote system to designate winners. Innovations such as the Margarita mixing contest and rubber duck races have become big crowd pleasers.
Though most of our cookoff pioneers have relocated, retired from action or kicked the can, the Mexican National lives on as big and colorful as ever.
Do I dare claim: No one at lakeside knows more about chili than I do?