Very Quick Chili: Chili for Two, from the 1971 Better Homes and Gardens Cooking for Two.; seventies; 1970s; tomatoes; Better Homes and Gardens; black beans; recipe; chili; quick recipe; kidney beans

While the recipe calls for kidney beans, the beans in the photo are black beans. I love black beans in chili and often make that substitution.

Despite only making about four servings, this is a double recipe. The original was two servings, not surprising for a cookbook named “Cooking for Two”. The cookbook tried very hard, and generally successfully, to provide recipes that not only didn’t leave leftovers, but also didn’t leave a lot of partial items in its wake. Thus, the original did not call for half a can of beans. It called for an 8-ounce can of beans. I haven’t been able to ascertain if that’s for real or a cheat. If 8-ounce cans of beans used to exist, they don’t seem to now.

I was unsure about how good dried onion would be in chili, but it worked out well. And using dried onion instead of fresh onions helps make the recipe much more scalable.

This is a great base for any kind of embellishments you enjoy in your chili.

Drop in again soon for another vintage recipe! I’ll have a different recipe every Sunday afternoon throughout the year. Keep an eye on this page or subscribe to the RSS feed for further details. You can also browse past featured Club recipes as well as some of the vintage promotional cookbooks I’ve used as sources. And I collect many of these recipes in A Traveling Man’s Cookery Book.

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You have to share some of the preparation in the kitchen with friends. — Jacques Pépin (Essential Pépin)