The Cook-Off

For thirty-one years, the Annual Chili Cook-Off in Mesquite Springs, Texas, population 2,400, had been a one-horse race. Every September, Dolores Garza, known to the whole town as Abuela Lola, set up her folding table outside the fire station, filled her great-grandmother's iron pot, and walked away with the blue ribbon. The other contestants competed, as one of them put it, for the honor of coming in second.

This year, however, there was a new kid on the block. Tyler Brandt was twenty-six, had trained in a famous restaurant in Austin and had recently opened a food truck called Heat Seeker. He had also, unwisely, told a local radio station that Mesquite Springs chili was "stuck in the past" and that he intended to "bring it into the twenty-first century". By the following morning, the gauntlet had been well and truly thrown down.

Abuela Lola did not listen to the radio, but her grandson did. "He says your chili is old-fashioned," he reported. Lola carried on chopping onions. "Old-fashioned," she said, "is another word for tried and tested. Let him come." Then, after a pause: "Bring me the good chiles. All of them."

On the day of the contest, the whole town turned out. Tyler arrived with a gas burner, three assistants and a laminated card describing his entry as a smoked brisket chili with charred poblano, black garlic and a hint of dark chocolate. Lola arrived with her pot. The two of them shook hands in front of the fire station with the warmth of rival boxers before a title fight. It was going to be a close-run thing, and everyone knew it.

Then the judge was introduced. Normally the cook-off was judged by the mayor, but the mayor had broken his leg, and his replacement was a retired food critic from Houston named Harlan Pruitt, a tall, gloomy man who, it emerged, had come with a typed list. He read it aloud into the microphone. He was allergic to garlic. He was allergic to onions. He could not eat beans, tomatoes, dairy, chocolate, cumin or, he added after some thought, anything smoked. "I look forward to tasting your work," he concluded.

There was a long silence. Tyler stared at his laminated card as if it had personally betrayed him. Of the eight ingredients listed, six were now banned. Across the square, Lola was already giving instructions to her grandson in rapid Spanish. The playing field, it seemed, had suddenly been leveled. Neither competitor had a single legal dish.

What followed was the most frantic two hours in the history of the event. Tyler's assistants were sent to every store within twenty miles. Lola's grandson came back from his aunt's house with a cooler, a bag of dried chiles and a jar of something he refused to name. Tyler stripped his recipe to the bone: beef, salt, chile and stock, cooked fast and hard over a fierce flame. Lola went the other way. She toasted her chiles slowly on a griddle, ground them by hand and simmered the meat in a sauce made from little more than chile, oregano and patience.

By four o'clock the two pots were ready and the crowd was holding its breath. Mr. Pruitt tasted Tyler's chili first. He chewed thoughtfully. "Bold," he said. "Honest. A little rushed." Then he tasted Lola's, and for a moment his gloomy face did something nobody in Mesquite Springs had seen it do. It relaxed. He took a second spoonful, then a third, and then, against all regulations, a fourth.

The result, when it came, was the closest in the contest's history. Lola won by a whisker: a single point out of a possible hundred. The crowd cheered, Lola's grandson cried, and Tyler, to his credit, was not a sore loser. He walked across the square, held out his hand and said, "I came here to beat you, ma'am. I didn't stand a chance, did I?" Lola looked at him for a long time. "You stood a chance," she said. "You just didn't have a grandmother."

Before he left, Tyler asked for the recipe. "Over my dead body," said Lola cheerfully. But she also told him that Sunday lunch was at one o'clock, that he should bring tortillas, and that if he arrived late he would be washing the dishes. As for Mr. Pruitt, he asked the organizers whether he might judge again next year. He had not, he said, enjoyed a meal so much since 1987.