NEVER EVER PUT BEANS IN CHILI
The original chili never had beans and neither will mine. When I make a big old pot and bring some for lunch the next day my co-workers all look at it strange and comment on how that's not chili if there are no beans.

Wife wants it with beans so beans it is.

FUDRUKER, did I miss it or did you not finish your "jingle".

"The more you toot, the better you feel, so let's have beans for every meal".

So, according to the article, if you don't use rotten goat or old deer meat then you ain't eating true "texas chili".

So, Im guessing all you purest never, ever, never put any sort of beef in your chili, only rotten goat and deer meat.

If not, then your no more "authentic" then anybody else that puts beans, macaroni or masa in it.

There is nothing further that needs to be discussed.

I just don't understand all of the hubbub about beans in the chili.

I feel that if someone truly like chili, they would eat it with or without the beans...

I have more important things to worry about...

http://whatscookingamerica.net/History/Chili/ChiliHistory.htm

1967 - The most famous and well known chili cook-off took place in 1967 in Terlingua, Texas. Terlingua was once a thriving mercury-mining town of 5,000 people and it is the most remote site your can choose as it is not close to any major city and the nearest commercial airport is almost 279 miles away. Just getting to Terlingua requires a major effort. It was a two-man cook-off between Texas chili champ Homer "Wick" Fowler (1909-1972), a Dallas and Denton newspaper reporter, and H. Allen Smith (1906-1976), New York humorist and author, which ended in a tie.

The cook-off challenge started when H. Allen Smith wrote a story for the August 1967 Holiday Magazine titled Nobody Knows More About Chili Than I Do, which claimed that no one in Texas could make proper chili. Smith contended that ". . . no living man, I repeat, can put together a pot of chili as ambrosial, as delicately and zestfully flavorful, as the chili I make." His article included his recipe for chili that included beans.

He was a dam Yankee dude! Beans disqualify you in competion.

I'll put beans in my chili if I want and not one of you is going to stop me.

Not in the original competition. Beans in chili were so good that they had to rig the rules to exclude them to save face.

So, all the claims about chili rules are just that, a feeble attempt to declare a win.

Sad.