A bowl of chili con carne, consisting of pork, beef, beans, tomatoes, and chili peppers, garnished with two tortilla chips.
27 July 2022
(28 July: added parenthetical note on spelling)
A chili is a pepper of genus Capsicum, native to the Americas but now grown worldwide. The word has a rather straightforward etymology, and is unrelated to chilly, referring to temperature, or to the country of Chile. The word is originally Nahuatl and comes into English via Spanish.
Chili is recorded in Alonso de Molina’s 1571 Nahuatl-Spanish dictionary:
Chilli. Axi. o pimienta de las indias.
(Chili. Capsicum or Indian pepper.)
(The double < l > in Nahuatl represents a lengthened consonant, but since neither Spanish or English distinguish the length of the consonant, it’s spelled with a single < l > in Spanish and American English. British English tends to retain the double consonant in its spelling. Axi is the Taino word for the pepper.)
And chili makes its way into English discourse by the mid seventeenth century. Here is an extract from Thomas Gage’s New Survey of the West-Indias, in which Gage is in conversation with a Spaniard in Mexico:
One of these, who was thought the chiefe in my time, called Don Melchor de Velasco, one day fell into discourse with mee concerning England, and our English nation, and in the best, most serious and judicious part of his Don-like conference, asked me whether the sun and moone in England were of the same colour as in Chiapa, and whether English men went barefoot like the Indians, and sacrificed one another as formerly did the Heathens of that Countrey? and whether all England could afford such a dainty as a dish of Frixoles (which is the poorest Indians daily food there, being black and dry Turkey or French beanes boyled with a little biting Chille or Indian pepper with garlicke, till the broath become as black as any Inke).
Chili can also refer to a type of stew made with chilis, short for chili con carne (chili with meat). This sense is recorded in an 1857 book about the Mexican-American War by S. Compton Smith, titled Chile Con Carne; or, the Camp and the Field:
To this spot, also, would come the rancheros, who had learned that the Americanos del norte were not the cannibals their priests had at first taught them to believe; but were buenos Cristianos as well as themselves. Here would they assemble, and display their stock-in-trade, consisting usually of carne seco and carne fresco, leche de cabro, chile con carne,* tamales, frijoles, tortillas, pan de maiz, and other eatables, with puros, blankets, saddles, etc. These articles found ready purchasers among our men, often at most unreasonable prices; for soldiers, as well as sailors, spend their money, freely.
The marginal note under chile con carne reads:
*Chile con carne—a popular Mexican dish—literally red pepper and meat.
Colonization and warfare are one way that a people’s culinary tastes, and culinary vocabulary, expand.
Sources:
Gage, Thomas. The English-American His Travail by Sea and Land: or, a New Survey of the West-Indias. London: R. Cotes, 1648, 99. Early English Books Online (EEBO).
Molina, Alonso de. Vocabulario en Lengua Castellana y Mexicana. Mexico City: Antonio de Spinosa, 1571, 2.21r. Internet Archive.
Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. chilli, chilly, n.
Smith, S. Compton. Chile Con Carne; or, the Camp and the Field. New York: Miller and Curtis, 1857, 99–100. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Photo credit: Carstor, 2005. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Generic license.