Back in the early 1990's, I remember my group of friends getting very excited about a chili recipe. Not just any chili recipe, but "The Amazing Molson Canadian Beer Chili" recipe. This was before the internet changed the world.
This was a time when a promotion like this would have been found in the Events section of the newspaper. I remember the add was about a half page and ran for about a week leading up to Canada Day. It was to entice you to pick up not just the beer, but whatever company's products they had partnered with for your July 1st barbeque. I am thinking it was either the company who made the canned tomatoes and beans or who made the spices.
I remember this recipe being the talk of my then group of friends whom had all just turned Age of Majority. All excited and puffed up at the fact we could legally buy the product in question. And remember there being a large poster at the beer store too with the recipe printed on it. Who would have thought one little common recipe would have become such a localized cultural event?
My group and I were not cooks to say the least, but even we could not mess up this chili recipe. One person in the group, who made batch chili all the time for her dad and brother was the first to explore this recipe. It was decent. She of course tweaked it to her personal taste, passing on the recipe to a friend with both the original form and her notes on what she changed. By the end of that summer, the recipe had made it's way through about ten kitchens, each of us having tried it in it's original form that got us all excited in the first place; tried it with each other's enhancements and still coming up with out own in the end.
I recently came across my original handwritten copy of this chili recipe. The ink faded and the recipe card itself torn and stained. I haven't made that recipe in over twenty years, but it's remained important to how I cook and how I view cooking.
That summer my friends and I had gone on an unintended culinary adventure without even realizing it.
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