With beans or without beans, that is the question when it comes to chili.

Rival chili cooks are as passionate about beans as rival makers of clam chowder are about tomatoes. “If you know beans about chili, you know that chili has no beans!” thundered Wick Fowler, journalist and chili fan from Texas, the state that made (beanless) chili its official state dish in 1977.

Today, the bean line remains drawn in the sand, sharp as the divide between Red States and Blue, despite a host of modern-day chefs who insist that chili is a creative, eccentric, and open-minded dish for which there are no rules. Chili is “an expression of the cook’s personality rather than codified chow,” write Cheryl and Bill