This is the oldest fight in the bowl. Competition red chili bans beans under both major rulebooks, yet the International Chili Society now requires them in two of its own categories. Texans have eaten beans with chili for a very long time, and they still argue about whether the beans go in the pot or beside it.
Ask a room of chili cooks about beans and the answer usually tracks where the cook grew up. For many Texans, beans in the pot mark a chili as foreign. For much of the rest of the country, a chili without beans looks unfinished.
The written rules start early. CASI traces the first recorded chili contest to the 1952 State Fair of Texas, whose rules already said no beans. Today the CASI rulebook lists beans first among the fillers it bans, alongside macaroni, rice and hominy. The International Chili Society bans beans in its Traditional Red and Chili Verde categories too.
The same ICS rulebook requires beans in its Homestyle category, naming Bush's Beans and asking that they be clearly visible in the cup. Adult cooks at ICS events are also required, with some exceptions, to serve a People's Choice chili, and that one must contain beans. Bush's is the presenting sponsor of the ICS World Championship.
Beans were part of the very first Terlingua fight. H. Allen Smith's 1967 recipe, printed by the Texas chili historian John Raven, finished with two cans of kidney or pinto beans. Sports Illustrated's reporter wrote that year that Texans regarded any chili but their own as trickery, with beans high on the list.
History gives both sides something to hold. CASI's own history says the Chili Queens of San Antonio served frijoles as a side dish, and that trail cooks kept beans in a separate pot that cowboys sometimes mixed on the plate. A Texan chili maker told the Christian Science Monitor in 1986 that Texans had long eaten beans with their chili, sometimes stirred in and sometimes on the side. National Geographic notes that American cookbook chili recipes called for beans by the 1920s.
Even the law is read two ways. National Geographic describes Texas as having made beanless chili its state dish in 1977. The resolution itself, as CASI reprints it, praises the Texan bowl of red and never mentions beans at all.