As any chilihead will tell you, there is much debate about chili: its flavor, its ingredients, its consistency. But perhaps the most debatable point about chili goes back to the beginning, to its origin.

Some people think chili was invented in Mexico, then handed down to culinary Texans. Many attribute the Mexican washerwomen, who cooked at the boarder forts, with the creation of chili. It is said that the meat available to cook was so tough and stringy that the women used wild spices growing in the area, including red chile and marjoram, to make the meal palatable. This theory is questionable, considering the Diccionaria de Meficanismos, published in 1959, describes chili con came as “detestable food passing itself off as Mexican, sold in the U.S. from Texas to New York.”

According to H. Allen Smith, author of “Nobody Knows More About Chili Than I DO,” chili was invented by Canary Islanders. Because the settlers sent to the island from Spain were used to the spicy foods of their homeland, they searched their new environment for similar spices to add to their stew of beef, hot peppers, oregano and so on.

Chili may have been created as a trail ration in the mid-1800s. Some believe settlers ground meat, lard and pepper, then added the mixture to boiling water and a little flour or corn meal. Others believe the calvary created chili and carried it in their saddlepacks in a dehydrated form. In addition to being easy to carry, long-lasting and nutritious, it tasted a lot better than the bland, boiled food the untrained calvary cooks concocted.

Cowboys have also been credited with creation. Supporters of this theory believe that on cattle drives, meat and fat were allowed to simmer down in a blackened pot for several days. As it cooked, cowboys would toss in handfuls of spices according to their own “tastin’.” They used spices that had been packed as rations and that had been harvested along the trip. Occasionally, beans or rice were added to thicken the mixture.

Many chiliheads across the country will swear on their spices that chili was created in Texas—by Americans and for Americans. Texas, after all, is the only state in the union that has passed a bill naming chili the official state food. In 1984, Manuel J. Lujan, Jr., a congressman from New Mexico, introduced “House Joint Resolution 465” to have chili declared the Official Food of the United States of America!

Wherever it originated, the “Bowl of Blessedness,” as it was called by Will Rogers, has found a permanent spot on American’s dinner tables. Each month, over two million pots of chili are cooked nationwide. Chili powder is the third largest selling spice in the country (right behind salt and pepper). Mexican and Tex/Mex restaurants are the second most popular ethnic restaurants.

For true chiliheads, the real origin of chili—really great chili—is in their own culinary imaginations!