Some years back, a television commercial posed a question:

When’s the last time you had a good, hot bowl of chili?

That commercial came to mind the other night as we were cooking up a big batch of chili for a Waco ISD Foundation fundraiser. When you’re browning 16 pounds of meat, you’ve got time to ponder things like old television commercials.

I also had time to ponder what an important dish chili has been in my life. I’ve been consuming it since I was weaned and have been cooking it, with varying degrees of success, for 40 years.

During my lifelong love affair with chili, I’ve accumulated a fair amount of trivia that means much more to chiliheads than normal people. For years, I had the privilege of working with the late Frank X. Tolbert of The Dallas Morning News, one of the founders of the big chili cook-off in Terlingua.

Frank knew all about the origins of chili and had strong opinions about the proper way to prepare his favorite dish. A few years before he died, he gave me a recipe that explained how to make it the old-fashioned scratch way, boiling dried chili peppers to extract the spicy paste rather than using store-bought chili powder.

Frank considered it lazy to use chili powder and maintained that it gave the chili a rancid taste. Personally, I can’t tell much difference between the troublesome homemade paste and a good chili powder, so I use the powder for convenience. I’m sure he’d turn over in his grave if he knew that.

I could happily eat good chili four or five times a week and never get tired of it. So I was highly supportive of the Texas Legislature’s decision to declare it Texas’ state dish in 1977.

Frankly, I don’t know of any food that fits us Texans better.

Think about it: Chili starts with “trim,” scraps of meat left over after the prime cuts are sliced into steaks and such.

Texas, much like a bowl of chili, was populated primarily by people who, for one reason or another, didn’t make the prime social list back home in their native lands. They journeyed to this tough, demanding place between the Red River and the Rio Grande and scratched out a new life. And a new country.

Chili meat is seared under high heat, just like we Texans are every July and August.

The meat is then joined in the pot by chili powder or the chili pepper paste, onions, garlic, tomato sauce, cumin, paprika, salt and maybe a touch of cilantro or oregano. All these elements — as varied and diverse as the people and geography of Texas — simmer together in a magical blending of tastes, textures and aromas.

The result, any chilihead will tell you, is the best meat stew on Earth.

You may have noticed that I didn’t mention putting beans in the chili. Like most purists, I don’t know why you’d want to do something that ugly to a perfectly innocent bowl of chili. But you can if you want to, of course. It’s a free country.

So now I’ll repeat the question from the old TV commercial: How long has it been since you had a good, hot bowl of chili?

Well, partner, that’s too long.

Donnis Baggett is publisher of the Waco Tribune-Herald . His e-mail address is dbaggett@wacotrib.com.