When I was just out of high school and could not imagine any other career for myself than being a journalist for a metropolitan daily, I had the brilliant luck to get a job at the Courier-Journal in my hometown of Louisville, at the time one of the best papers in the country, with a huge slew of Pulitzer prizes to its name. (fun trivia for my Louisville friends: Pulitzer was Hungarian). Being a fledgling music critic I got to work with Ronni Lundy a lot. I think there is more brilliance in one of her tossed-off Facebook posts than in an entire edition of any daily newspaper. And the food-music nexus is really a marvelous thing that is truly her own. There is so much for which I have her to thank. And the Dwight Yoakam song is just sublime, with or without chili. Anyway, to paraphrase Ed McMahon, heres Ronni. So for lunch I took the rest of my chili and added the end of a pot of October beans cooked with salt pork and while it simmered, I thought about maybe adding green chile, but that didnt seem quite right. My season for chili bun chili includes a healthy dose of ground coriander seed to cumin and garlic and ground New Mexico red, and I realized that if I just added some cinnamon I could not only work on my stopped up sinuses and balance my chakras, I was near all the way to Cincinnati. So I did. And as the seasonings mingled, I thought about the journey my chili had made, echoing one sad, lonesome trail of the diaspora. In the first half of the previous century, miners who agitated for the union in eastern Kentucky might find themselves blackballed, their families evicted from company homes, all of them living under threat of bodily harm and death from the company employed gun thugs. Some who could moved on north and/or further east to the mines of West Virginia, where sometimes they got work, but sometimes their stories--and their union passions-- followed. So some moved again. Thats how some of my people ended up in Over the Rhine, others up in Hamilton, eating Gold Star and Skyline chili while dreaming of home... My chili was ready so I put it in a bowl with about an inch and a half of a sleeves worth of saltines on the side. Im feeling ecumenical about my chili today. How I spell it. How I eat it. I believe Ill have a chopped fresh onion on the bowl tonight, and maybe even a little grated cheese But even my open, bleeding liberal heart has got its limits. There will be no spaghetti boiling around here. This seemed like the song for such a contemplative autumn Sunday.
Posted on: Sun, 05 Oct 2014 18:44:24 +0000
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