| Find a Writer | Reading Room | Write Choices | Who We Are | Join PWAC | Main Menu |
Getting the Hots
& Things to do with Iceberg Lettuceby Dave Preston © 1995
Dave Preston has been a freelance contributor to Victoria's Monday Magazine since 1989. His food column, Fare Comment, covers local restaurant reviews and essays, such as this one, on food.
Hot weather usually means cold food, so the crack team of marketing gurus and media experts who put this wonderful magazine together thought it would be timely if I wrote about salads. I thought it would be timely too, but pathetically predictable, so I'm writing about hot food. Food that makes your eyes water and your nose feel like it's harbouring a stray July 1 firework. And hot's topical, since chile-based salsa now outsells the hallowed ketchup throughout North America, by some $40 million worth annually.
Let's start the great balls of fire rolling with chile. First, the spelling. As usual, the name for these peppers, which are technically fruits from the genus Capsicum, started simply as aji ("ah-hee") in Arawak, a South American Indian tongue, but English complicated the labelling. It's now acceptable to use "chile" for the plant and its fruit, and "chili" for the stuff we make and eat.
Chile peppers were eaten by people of central Mexico for about 9,000 years, and were among the trinkets and souvenir t-shirts taken back to Europe by Columbus after his first voyage. A fifteenth-century cartographer, Jose de Acosta, thought chile eating "Predudiciall to the health of young folkes . . . for that it provokes to lust." Yeah, yeah, yeah, just like coffee, tea, chocolate, bagels and everything else I've ever researched.
If you thought there were more than a few types of chile peppers you'd be right--there's around 2,000, from cranberry-sized to combustible beauties over a foot long. And chiles can hurt; pre-conquest Mexicans punished sex offenders by rubbing their privates with chiles, and speaking of sex (which I wouldn't have had chance to if I'd been doing salads), chile plants are shameless cross-breeders and farmers enforce chastity by covering plants with gauze to prevent jalapenos and serranos giving birth to some spicey mutt. Chile is so closely related to tobacco, incidentally, that smoking farmers can pass along viral diseases to their crop. And speaking of smoke, a dried, smoked jalapeno is called a chipotle.
There's at least one magazine devoted to chiles, and an International Chili Society sponsors huge cook-offs--Calgary chef Warren Chan has reached the world finals at least six times.
The reason for all this fuss? Could be we're after a drug, surprise, surprise. There's a drug in chile peppers which gives heat and is a damn good painkiller. It comes from a compound called capsaicin (not to be confused with Capsian, a Stone Age culture of North Africa, not that you would). Body cells exposed to capsaicin become tolerant, eventually, and signal the brain to produce endorphins, giving us a natural high. Chile, my dear, is addictive, but not controlled or taxed to death. Yet. And speaking of freedom, the same Baton Rouge that me and Bobby Magee tunefully busted flat in, is said to be named after the red stick that farmers there still use to test the colour and ripeness of peppers.
The hotness is measured in units, on a scale named after Wilbur Scoville, going from zero, where bell peppers register, through the jalapeno rating of 2,500-5,000, up to a palate-welding 300,000 earned by the habenero pepper from the Yucatan.
Although most Louisiana-style hot sauces use cayenne peppers, McIlhenny's, the world's favourite since 1868, has been using tabasco peppers which rate a respectable 30,000-50,000 Wilburs. One quart of this sauce, according to some cheerful scientist, is a lethal dose; not that anyone could get a quart past their epiglottis.
Apart from testing your Right Guard, chili peppers are good for you--capsaicinoids can lower cholesterol and triglycerides, help dissolve the nasty clots in blood and act as a decongestant, dilate your blood vessels, open up your sinuses, air passages, and, usually, a few bathroom windows. Chili can aid digestion, and speed up your metabolism to burn off calories, without exercise!
But why eat chili on a hot day? Well, it opens up your pores which helps you sweat more easily, and as all good fitness clubbers know, sweating can win friends and influence people. As a painkiller, the chile drug is sold as a topical analgesic cream, good for arthritic pain.
In case of overindulgence, you can cool the fire in your mouth by eating plain old bread. Or you can drink. Chateau Sooke Lake will cool your lips but capsaicinoids don't dissolve in water; fortunately, they do dissolve in alcohol. If wine's your tipple, look for something with residual sugars, with a good fruit flavour. Some of our BC Pinot Blancs and Pinot Gris are good, or the Mondavi White Zinfandel. Red wine fans could try a Beaujolais. Beer drinkers could sup of a malty brew, say, a brown or Scottish ale.
To really soothe the pain, drink protein-laden milk, which cuts the capsaicinoids like detergent cuts grease, or a government cuts funding. Yoghurt works too. Yucatan natives lick salt from the backs of their hands, others eat bananas, some simply shout or pray loudly to the god of their choice.
But at the end of the hot day, I think most of us eat chiles because of the flavour. And if flavour could be described as a colour, chile is red, or a range of reds, from bright scarlets to dark burgundies. From a sharp, lip-tingling tease to a rich, round body glowing with pre-spontaneous-combustion energy, both of which eventually give way to an overall feeling of numb well-being. Bland foods, such as tortilla chips, are given jalapeno wings or cayenne rockets firing them up into the realms of memorable taste. The deceptive, wet freshness of chile pepper slices can be a great awakening for salad, or, dried and ground into a powder, seeds and all, the spice marries acidic flavours of tomato to any kind of meat, or vegetables.
Gosh, look at the temperature, and not a capsaicin left on the plate. Time to test the cooling powers of C2H5OH. Oh, and the thing to do with iceberg lettuce? Avoid it. Even the folks in marketing say it ain't sexy.
Dave Preston
| Author Profile | More Writing Samples |
| Visitor Survey
| PWAC Victoria Contacts
| Credits & Thanks
| Webmaster |
| All written material copyright © PWAC Victoria or its individual members |
Last updated: September 17, 1996 
http://www.islandnet.com/pwacvic/presto02.html