Even in NC, you can celebrate Super Bowl Sunday with Cincinnati’s signature dish
If your Super Bowl party plans include serving foods from Cincinnati and Los Angeles, you’ll probably have a hard time deciding what best represents LA.
That metropolitan area of nearly 19 million people is such a melting pot of cultures and cuisines that it’s hard to know where to begin.
Cincinnati isn’t so complicated.
The adventurous might try to find some goetta, a mixture of meat and oats that Cincinnatians mostly eat fried with eggs at breakfast. Or you might see if your grocery sells Graeter’s ice cream, preferably black raspberry chocolate chip, or order a shipment of Montgomery Inn ribs with a bottle of Ribs King sauce.
But Cincinnati’s most famous culinary gift to the world is a peculiar style of chili, and you can find it in the Triangle.
Cincinnati chili is a meat sauce that is simmered with spices that include cinnamon, then ladled over hot dogs or spaghetti and smothered under a thick blanket of finely grated, bright yellow cheddar cheese. It’s seldom eaten alone in a bowl, and sometimes attracts derision or confusion from people expecting the chili you’d find in Texas or at a cook-off.
Cincinnati chili got its start in 1922, when Macedonian immigrants Tom and John Kiradjieff opened a hot dog stand next to the Empress, a burlesque theater downtown. Tom Kiradjieff is credited with modifying a Mediterranean stew, renaming it chili and serving it over spaghetti. The original Empress Chili restaurant disappeared in the 1960s, but you’ll find its successor across the river in Kentucky.
The Internet is full of recipes for Cincinnati chili, but growing up there, I never knew people who made their own. Chili was something eaten out. The city is dotted with neighborhood chili parlors or local chain restaurants, dominated by the two big rivals, Gold Star and Skyline.
You can get Gold Star at Paul Brown Stadium, home of the Cincinnati Bengals. But of the two, Skyline has the broader reach; you’ll find cans of Skyline chili at some Triangle groceries, including Harris Teeter, Publix and Wegmans.
If you can find a Cincinnati chili spice mix, or put one together from scratch, you can make your own chili with lean ground beef and tomato paste or sauce. I bought a spice mix from Cincy’s restaurant in downtown Greensboro, which I notice includes a small bar of baker’s chocolate, something restaurants back home don’t use.
But the chili is just the start. The key is in assembling the dishes, which are named for the number of ingredients. Here’s how it works:
▪ Three-way: Chili ladled over spaghetti and topped with grated cheddar cheese.
▪ Four-way onion: Spaghetti, chili, chopped fresh onions and cheese.
▪ Four-way bean: Spaghetti, chili, cooked kidney beans and cheese.
▪ Five-way: Spaghetti, chili, onions, beans and cheese.
Serve with oyster crackers, which can be used with one hand to help corral the spaghetti-chili mixture on your fork.
Another option is the cheese coney — a hot dog with mustard, fresh diced onion and chili topped with cheese.
If you’re making your own chili, you might want to let it simmer a bit. The Cincy’s recipe suggests 90 minutes, and notes, “The longer you simmer the spicier it gets.” Kickoff for the Bengals-Rams game is 6:30 p.m. Sunday.
By the way, Dave, a friend and North Carolina native, asked me about Cincinnati chili so he could carry on a tradition of making food from both teams’ cities for the Super Bowl.
I asked what he was going to make to represent LA, and he acknowledged it wasn’t easy to decide. “LA is hard to define,” he said.
They finally settled on kale smoothies with wheat-grass powder. I’ll take a five-way over that any day.
This story was originally published February 8, 2022 at 10:03 AM with the headline "Even in NC, you can celebrate Super Bowl Sunday with Cincinnati’s signature dish."
