Cincinnati chili is made in reverse of most Texas practice. Raw ground beef is crumbled into water or stock and simmered for several hours with tomato and spices into a thin meat sauce, according to the Cincinnati Enquirer’s Polly Campbell as cited on Wikipedia. The seasoning commonly includes cinnamon, allspice, cloves, cumin, nutmeg and chili powder. Many recipes chill the finished chili overnight so that the fat can be lifted off before reheating.
Recipes adapt the method in different ways. America’s Test Kitchen notes that because the beef is not sautéed, there is no way to pour off its fat; its recipe blanches ground chuck in two quarts of boiling salted water only until foam rises, about thirty seconds, drains it, and then simmers it in the sauce for about an hour until the chili is deep red and slightly thickened.
The sauce is served over spaghetti or on hot dogs and ordered by number. A two-way is spaghetti and chili; a three-way adds shredded cheese; a four-way adds onions or beans; a five-way adds both. Sources disagree at the edges of this system. Dave DeWitt and Nancy Gerlach describe a one-way of plain chili and a four-way of onions only, with beans reserved for the five-way.