Stirring It Up with Molly Ivins (6 page)

6

MOLLY LOVED FOIE GRAS, RACK OF LAMB
, tournedos, and roasted duck breast as much as the next food freak, but she was just as much at home whipping up a pan of jalapeño cornbread as accompaniment to a spicy bowl o' red. She served her chili in heavy, oversized blue-and-white bowls emblazoned with images of broncos, cowboys, and lassos.

A sincere chili aficionado, she clipped all manner of recipes for it, and even organized chili parties during her stint in Colorado as the
New York Times
's Rocky Mountain bureau chief.
Denver Post
reporter Jack Cox, a longtime friend, still remembers the 1979 “First Annual Rocky Mountain Correspondents' Chili Cookoff,” organized by Molly and Oklahoman Gaylord Shaw, who, the year before, had won a Pulitzer Prize for the
Los Angeles Times
. Her wry wit is again evident even in the flyer she mailed out to friends:

Chili is a variety of nutriment invented by Canary Islanders and perfected by Texans, Oklahomans, and, some claim, others as well, for over a century. Its virtues include, but are not limited to curing trombonophobia, preoperative lobotomy complications, decreased mental alertness, antropomania, peptic ulcers, falling hair, fallen arches, ingrown toenails, in-law troubles, recession, apathy, frostbite, cynicism, pollution and acute sobriety.

As was often the case with Molly events, families and children were welcome. Jack brought his daughters, who are now adults. “[Molly] had a rent house in Denver, and we actually dug a pit and built a fire in the backyard,” Jack recalled. “People were bustling around in the kitchen and Molly was giving orders. It
was a kind of organized chaos.” Chaos is a recurring theme where Molly and cooking are mentioned.

Her archives include dozens of recipes for one kind of chili or another—a festival version of Frank X. Tolbert's Chili, Neiman Marcus Chili, Senator Barry Goldwater's Fine Chili, Mrs. Lyndon Baines Johnson's Pedernales River Chili, and Louisiana Bayou Chili from US representative Lindy Boggs. There is also a recipe for Joe Cooper's Chili, whoever Joe Cooper might have been, with a note from Molly's mother informing Molly that it had taken her father two days to make it.

The invitation to “Ze Beeg Chili Cookoff” of '79 featured a guest list that could easily have been plucked from a “Who's Who” of Colorado Democrats, give or take a governor or two—John Echohawk, executive director of the Boulder-based Native American Rights Fund; Howard Higman, founder of the Conference on World Affairs at the University of Colorado (more about that later); Pat Schroeder, the first woman elected to the US House of Representatives from Colorado; and to affirm her egalitarian sensibilities,
Denver Post
reporter and noted contrarian Joe Sinisi was also part of the crowd.

“I have one of those memories where I remember stuff like Mickey Mantle's batting average in 1955, and a really good chili party,” Sinisi said. “And she had a really good one when she had that little house down in Englewood [a close-in Denver suburb]. There were about thirty-five to forty people and the chili was good and spicy. It was a Saturday afternoon and there was a good mix of people, not just a bunch of media types but people who tended to be more interesting than a bunch of reporters. There was a table full of snacks and stuff. Nobody was gonna go home hungry.

“What really impressed was the fact that she had done all the cooking. Molly wasn't the type to have anything catered. And I remember thinking how cooking isn't something that people would ordinarily associate with her but there she was, being the gracious hostess.”

She and I once had a chili cookoff of our own where she pitted her bowl o' red against mine, but, she insisted, the competition was nullified by the presence of beans in my version. As if that weren't bad enough, I intensified her horror by boiling spaghetti to create what was lovingly known in my home-town as “chili mac,” made in most Midwestern places by piling chili onto a mound of macaroni or spaghetti and topping the whole mess with chopped
onion and Cheddar cheese. Mind you, the St. Louis version isn't to be confused with Cincinnati chili, which is laced with cinnamon, for cryin' out loud. St. Louisans do have
some
standards.

There was no such nonsense as beans in the Ivins iteration. Barely tolerant of my ground pork and beef mixture, she had the butcher chop hers into little chunks. I was not permitted to see how much of what seasonings she put in hers, but at least we agreed that our respective pots needed to simmer for hours and rest overnight before they could be deemed fit for consumption. Of course, by the time mine was done she had already decided that, what with beans and spaghetti, the Sweets version was absolutely not ready for prime time. At least we agreed that the only acceptable beverage for the occasion was beer—as both an ingredient and a libation.

I knew how to make only three things in my post-college life, and I took them with me when I moved to New York City: chicken noodle soup, spaghetti with meat sauce (or semi-decent meatballs), and chili. I'd already made soup once and spaghetti twice for my newfound boyfriend, so it was time to feed him my other masterpiece. Somewhere down the line I learned that if you wanted to use black beans instead of red, it kinda spruced it up.

Black bean chili still triggers a retrospectively amusing moment in my culinary career, such as it is. It dates to my life in New York City. I lived on the sixth floor of an ancient apartment building in Harlem. As in any self-respecting old Manhattan high-rise, there were roaches. I lived on the seventh floor. The closer you were to the ground floor, the more of them there were—hateful little ovals on stumpy legs that scampered with remarkable speed up walls and across ceilings, especially ceilings in a tiny closed–up kitchen with a steaming pot of chili simmering below. Sometimes, steam makes cockroaches fall. The results can be unpleasant if the pot doesn't have a lid.

In a stockpot, without their legs clearly visible, they look a lot like black beans. Once alien ingredients impose themselves on a dish prepared on a severely restricted budget and under equally severe time constraints, starting over is not an option. Should you make the chili too soupy and need to reduce it by leaving the lid off for a protracted period of time, it is possible that scampering Norwegian cockroaches might fall into the steaming open pot. This can easily result in the addition of black beans with legs, a presence that lends a whole new meaning to “bon appetit.”

Molly approached the making of chili with the same intensity she invested in snapper
en papillote
—and she was just as likely to serve the fancy fish to her gal pals as, say, to Pulitzer Prize–winning economist Paul Krugman. Now and then she would share a tidbit about a particular meal she prepared—but it was not because she had prepared it for a prominent federal judge; it was because she had dared to try it for the first time
and
serve it to a prominent federal judge. What I called her “show-off” meals were invariably from either
Simply French
or
Mastering the Art of French Cooking
.