Stuart Walton's The Devil's Dinner looks at the history of hot peppers, their culinary uses through the ages, and the significance of spicy food in an increasingly homogenous world.
The Devil's Dinner is the first authoritative history of chili peppers. There are countless books on cooking with chilies, but no book goes into depth about the biological, gastronomical, and cultural impact this forbidden fruit has had upon people all over the world. The story has been too hot to handle.
A billion dollar industry, hot peppers are especially popular in the United States, where a superhot movement is on the rise. Hot peppers started out in Mexico and South America, came to Europe with returning Spanish travelers, lit up Iberian cuisine with piri-piri and pimientos, continued along eastern trade routes, boosted mustard and pepper in cuisines of the Indian subcontinent, then took overland routes to central Europe in the paprika of Hungarian and Austrian dumplings, devilled this and devilled that… they've been everywhere!
The Devil's Dinner tells the history of hot peppers and captures the rise of the superhot movement.
Stuart Walton's The Devil's Dinner looks at the history of hot peppers, their culinary uses through the ages, and the significance of spicy food in an increasingly homogenous world.
The Devil's Dinner is the first authoritative history of chili peppers. There are countless books on cooking with chilies, but no book goes into depth about the biological, gastronomical, and cultural impact this forbidden fruit has had upon people all over the world. The story has been too hot to handle.
A billion dollar industry, hot peppers are especially popular in the United States, where a superhot movement is on the rise. Hot peppers started out in Mexico and South America, came to Europe with returning Spanish travelers, lit up Iberian cuisine with piri-piri and pimientos, continued along eastern trade routes, boosted mustard and pepper in cuisines of the Indian subcontinent, then took overland routes to central Europe in the paprika of Hungarian and Austrian dumplings, devilled this and devilled that… they've been everywhere!
The Devil's Dinner tells the history of hot peppers and captures the rise of the superhot movement.
The Devil's Dinner: A Gastronomic and Cultural History of Chili Peppers
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The Devil's Dinner: A Gastronomic and Cultural History of Chili Peppers
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Overview
Stuart Walton's The Devil's Dinner looks at the history of hot peppers, their culinary uses through the ages, and the significance of spicy food in an increasingly homogenous world.
The Devil's Dinner is the first authoritative history of chili peppers. There are countless books on cooking with chilies, but no book goes into depth about the biological, gastronomical, and cultural impact this forbidden fruit has had upon people all over the world. The story has been too hot to handle.
A billion dollar industry, hot peppers are especially popular in the United States, where a superhot movement is on the rise. Hot peppers started out in Mexico and South America, came to Europe with returning Spanish travelers, lit up Iberian cuisine with piri-piri and pimientos, continued along eastern trade routes, boosted mustard and pepper in cuisines of the Indian subcontinent, then took overland routes to central Europe in the paprika of Hungarian and Austrian dumplings, devilled this and devilled that… they've been everywhere!
The Devil's Dinner tells the history of hot peppers and captures the rise of the superhot movement.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781250163219 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | St. Martin's Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 10/09/2018 |
| Sold by: | Macmillan |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 320 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Stuart Walton is a cultural critic and historian who has written about drink and drug cultures since the early 1990s. He is the author of In The Realm of the Senses: A Materialist Theory of Seeing and Feeling, A Natural History of Human Emotions and Out of It: A Cultural History of Intoxication as well as a number of consumer guides to wine, spirits and liqueurs, and cocktails. He lives in Torquay, southwest England
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Our Favorite Spice — All About Chili
The chili pepper plant is a many-branched herbaceous perennial that grows up to around twenty-four to thirty-six inches tall. Often having a luxuriant, shrubby look, it is a member of the Solonaceae family, which includes nightshades, potatoes, tomatoes, and eggplants. It has smooth leaves that sprout alternately along each side of its stems and are oval or lanceolate (shaped like spearheads with tapered ends). At flowering, the plant produces bell-shaped white or pale purple blooms containing five stamens, and its fruits are seamless pods that vary in form from round berries to the more characteristic long, thin cases, with a central placenta to which the numerous seeds are attached. Depending on the variety, the fruit ripens to green, yellow, orange, red, violet, or dark brown. Cultivated in temperate rather than tropical climates, it may yield no more than a single crop annually, while some varieties are grown for ornamental purposes only.
Exactly where the wild chili plant first developed remains shrouded in mystery. From residues identified in primeval refuse dumps and in ceramic artifacts, we know that wild chilies were being gathered and used in cooking in Mexico as far back as 7000 B.C.E. The earliest evidence of the chili's domesticated use by humans, which dates back to around 5000 B.C.E., places it in an area of southeast Mexico that extends over sections of the present-day provinces of Puebla, Oaxaca, and Veracruz. These domesticated plants were descendants of the wild capsicums first encountered by nomadic Mongol peoples who had migrated into the Americas during the last Ice Age, when there was a northern land bridge across the Bering Strait between Asia and North America. As these peoples moved southward into the subtropical and then tropical zones of the continent, they came upon a whole array of wild plant foods, which they began incorporating into their own hunter-gatherer diets.
The fact that settled agricultural communities in Central America eventually began the cultivation of chili peppers, and much else besides, does not mean, however, that this was the chili's original home. Paleobotanists now think that chilies were carried to this region from the South American interior (most likely the vast tropical savanna zone of central Brazil known as the Cerrado) through a process of natural dispersion, principally by birds that would have consumed them in their regions of origin and then excreted the seeds as they flew north. By this means, the natural habitats of the chili plant expanded gradually into Central America. Unlike mammals, birds are not sensitive to the heat of chilies and do not grind up the seeds when eating them, so they pass whole through the avian digestive system.
There is evidence of the dispersal of cultivated chili peppers across a wide area of northern South America, as well as sites in Panama and across the Caribbean Sea in the Bahamas. Archaeological findings published in the journal Science in February 2007 by a team from the Smithsonian Institute's National Museum of Natural History, led by Linda Perry, revealed that chilies were being systematically grown and used in cooking as early as around 4100 B.C.E., in sites far distant from the original area of cultivation. Already, then, at this early stage, migrant peoples were transporting their expertise in growing the plant from one area to another and probably also trading the peppers. In many of the residues studied, chili was present alongside maize deposits, suggesting that an early food system combining the processing of cereal grains and chilies had arisen among these ancient peoples.
Four particular strains of the wild capsicum genus had been domesticated in this early era, and to this day most varieties of hot pepper belong to one or another of these four groups. The most widely cultivated is Capsicum annuum, the species that includes the jalapeño, cayenne, and poblano varieties but also the innocuous bell peppers of Mediterranean cuisine. All of these are distantly related to the original wild bird pepper of the Americas, which still grows naturally in the Caribbean, Mexico, and Colombia. After C. annuum comes C. frutescens, which includes the staple Thai pepper variety, the tabasco, the piri piri, the malagueta, the kambuzi pepper of Malawi, the Indonesian cabai rawit, and the xiaomila, one of the foremost varieties in Chinese cooking, grown in the southwest province of Yunnan. C. chinense, a probable descendant of C. frutescens, despite having a Latin name that translates as "Chinese pepper," originates, as all chilies do, in the Americas. (This misattribution was the slipup of an eighteenth-century Dutch botanist, Nikolaus von Jacquin, who thought chilies were native to China because of their widespread use there. In fact, they had originally been transported to China by European merchants and explorers in the sixteenth century.) Members of the species C. chinense are also known collectively as the bonnet peppers and include the fearsome Scotch bonnet of the Caribbean islands, the Trinidad moruga scorpion, the yellow lantern, the habanero, and India's bhut jolokia. C. baccatum encompasses the widely used aji variety, as well as lesser-known exotica such as the lemon drop and Brazilian starfish.
A fifth domesticated strain, C. pubescens, is by far the least widely disseminated, and is the only one that was probably not known to the ancient Native Americans. So named for its hairy leaves, it exists only as a cultivated species, having never been wild, and is quite distinct from its relatives. Grown in Peru, Bolivia, and Mexico, it is known respectively as rocoto, locoto, ormanzano — the last, meaning "apple," given the shape of the pepper's mature fruit.
As well as being a staple food, the chili pepper was likely also put to other uses in ancient times. The acrid fumes it produces when burned, especially in bunches, made this practice a known means of fumigating domestic dwellings in Aztec and Mayan civilizations (bloodsucking insects don't like smoke), and chili also became an indispensable tool in the pharmacopoeia of the Mesoamerican region. The efficacy of hot spice in clearing blocked sinuses is an experience known to many diners in Thai and Indian restaurants. Long before the modern science of dietetics established the nutritional value of the chili, though, simple observation showed that people who fed on it thrived. We now know it contains significant concentrations of iron, potassium, and magnesium, as well as vitamin A, many of the vitamin B complexes (especially B6), and plenty of vitamin C. It seems likely that the chili found a place in the regional diet because it was one of the few crops that grew reliably at high altitudes, and the fruits retained their pungency when preserved through drying into the winter months. A fascinating aspect of the archaeological study of chilies is that trace elements of the plant have been found in a broad range of cooking vessels, suggesting that chilies were already subjected to a versatile repertoire of culinary uses very early on. Their presence in a vessel known as a spouted jar — essentially a form of decanter for transferring liquids to smaller containers — indicates that they were being used in drinks of one sort or another, as well as in condiments or relishes into which other food items, such as chunks of meat, could be dipped.
The chili plant is versatile enough to have adapted to a wide range of growing climates, and its domestication in various regions was determined by indigenous peoples by the establishment of which strains were best suited to which conditions. Around 1000 B.C.E., when the people known as the Arawak began their millennium-long migration from the northeastern zones of South America to the Caribbean islands — Trinidad, the Lesser Antilles, and Hispaniola (modern-day Haiti and the Dominican Republic) — they brought with them the tropical species of chili that had thrived in the torrid hinterlands of the southern Americas. This was the chili variety widely known as aji among the South American and West Indian peoples, probably C. baccatum. At some later stage — we don't know precisely when — a second chili species was transported to the West Indies from Central America, this one better equipped for thriving in more temperate climatic zones. It went by a name derived from the language of the indigenous Mexican Nahuatl (Aztec) people, and this is the term that has been in widespread use throughout the Western world ever since: chili. (Nahuatl would in time donate several other food names to European languages, via Spanish, including tomato, avocado, and chocolate.)
What would the chili pepper have looked like at the earliest phase of its domestication? An educated guess can be made in light of the fact that plant historians think that the C. annuum variety known as chiltepin, or chiltecpin, is probably the ancient ancestor of all domestic cultivars. Chiltepin chilies still grow wild across a broad swath of Central and South America, and even in the southern United States. Gathering wild chilies in Sonora Province in northwest Mexico and in the mountainous parts of the southern Arizona desert is an intensive activity that takes place in the fall and winter each year. The chiltepin chili has small round or slightly oval fruits that ripen to orange-red, and it is a hot variety. Its name also derives from the Nahuatl and has its root in tepin, the word for "flea," indicating something of its tiny dimensions. Despite its modest size, the chiltepin has the same intensity as a fleabite, registering up to around 100,000 on the SHU scale (see pages 18–20 for a full explanation of the heat-measuring systems for chilies). How hot the pepper is when it comes to be eaten depends on the stage at which it is processed: the unripe, green fruit is the mildest and is generally eaten as a condiment pickled in vinegar; the ripened, red, just-picked fruit has distinctly more attack on the palate; the dried, whole version more again; the fieriest of all comes in the form of the dried fruit with its seeds scraped out. Mexican people describe the action of the chiltepin as arrebatado, an adjective that connotes the sense of something snapped up hastily or impulsively, indicative of the fact that while the heat of the chili is certainly scorching enough, it tends to fade quite quickly rather than leaving a prolonged smolder in the mouth.
In some regions, chilies appear to have been reserved for tribal elites, the exclusive delicacy of chiefs and elders rather than the staple food of the common people. Archaeologists in northwest Mexico and the southwestern United States have unearthed charred chili seeds in the presence of luxurious items of jewelry made from copper, turquoise, and crystal, which finding does not necessarily mean that subaltern folk didn't eat them, too, but does suggest that chilies were an indispensable element of the lifestyle of the privileged. However, these areas probably began to produce domesticated chilies on a significant scale only after the arrival of Spanish colonialists in the early sixteenth century, so perhaps the chilies that appear in the much older garbage deposits in the Chihuahua province of Mexico were the product of a very restricted pre-Hispanic cultivation for the upper echelons of society only.
The fact that, in certain areas, chilies had become the food of elites anticipates the role they would come to play in the cosmologies of indigenous peoples, which we shall look at in greater detail in part 2. Whereas the chili pepper became a currency in simple barter economies, it took on a more exalted role in the myths of the Aztec, Toltec, Mayan, and Incan peoples over the centuries. Searching for the explanation in the distant prehistory of chili cultivation, we need only imagine the effect that these pungent, fiery little pods might have had on palates that had not encountered anything like them before. The standard diet of much of pre-Columbian America consisted of maize, beans, and squash. Against the background of these nutritious but essentially very bland ingredients — grains, pulses, and fleshy gourds — the sizzling heat of chilies transformed the eating experience into something else entirely. They have a digestive effect as well: the saliva produced by eating chilies is rich in the enzyme amylase, which helps to break down the sugars in starchy foods into more assimilable glucose. Chilies were, and are, a quintessential seasoning, a gift from the gods as indispensable as salt, and the grisly prospect of a life without them elevated them at an early historical stage to the status of the sacred.
The pugnacious flavor of chilies made them well-suited to perform combat and defense roles in indigenous mythologies. They were used not only to ward off evil spirits and more terrestrial pests, but also in counter-magical rituals to guard against the effects of the "evil eye," the maleficent intentions of enemies. Protective strings of dried chilies known in Spanish asristras were draped on the external walls of houses or worn as necklaces, a kind of spiritual armor against the attentions of demons and vampires that anticipated the symbolic role that garlic — another pungently enlivening food seasoning — would play in many European cultures.
The wide range of culinary and symbolic uses to which people have put chilies remains quite strange when set against one rather obvious fact: The chili pepper's biological makeup is telling humans, and other mammals, that it does not want to be eaten by them. So how did it come to develop such an aggressive nature, and how did humans manage to overcome its aversive signals?
How the Chili Came to Be Hot
The heat in chili peppers comes from a naturally occurring substance called capsaicin. On the tissue of many mammals, including human beings, capsaicin produces a burning sensation that gives the impression that some level of damage is occurring. It has this effect because mammals are equipped with a sensory pathway known as the transient receptor potential (TRP) channel. On contact, capsaicin binds with this channel and activates an alert signal that deceptively convinces the organism that it is being burned, typically at around 108°F (42°C). We'll look at the biology of this effect in more detail in the next section, but for now, the question arises as to why and how the chili plant developed this defense mechanism.
The most obvious advantage of capsaicin is that it deters mammals with grinding molars from eating the pepper plant and destroying its seeds or reducing them to a state where they are no longer capable of germinating. Birds, which lack the TRP channel and are consequently not sensitive to the searing heat of chilies, will feast on the ripe fruits to their stomachs' content, in due course dispersing and propagating the unharmed seeds in their excreta. This process is how the chili pepper spread northward from its original home in South America. But an interesting question remains: What influences some plants to produce hot chilies while others remain devoid of spice?
In 2001, a team led by Professor Joshua Tewksbury conducted a pathbreaking study in southeastern Bolivia, the wild chili's original heartland. What influences the development of capsaicin in wild chilies is not necessarily the behavior of either rodents or birds, but that of an order of insects belonging to the Hemiptera family known as the true bugs (cicadas, aphids, leafhoppers and their relatives). These insects also feed on wild chilies, using their pin-sharp proboscises to pierce the fruit of the pepper and ingest the juice inside. It appears, however, that these insects are as sensitive to capsaicin as mammals are, since after initial investigation they will reject those chilies that are hot. Tewksbury's team found an obvious correlation between the highest incidence of insect puncture marks and a lack of spiciness in those particular chilies. So what might the significance of that conclusion be?
When chilies are punctured in this way, the humid conditions prevalent throughout these tropical zones allow airborne fungi to enter and infect the plant. Molds form on the seeds and gradually kill them — unless, that is, the plant can manufacture its own defense against the fungus. That is where capsaicin comes in. The fungal growth cannot withstand attack by capsaicin, as Tewksbury's team confirmed when they replicated this process in the laboratory. As more capsaicin was progressively introduced, the molds had less chance of surviving. In drier areas, where there is naturally less humidity and smaller insect populations, there are more non-spicy chilies because the plants do not have to defend themselves from molds to the same degree. By contrast, in the more humid regions, where there are more insects creating more damage and allowing the pepper plants to become infected with fungus, there are more naturally occurring hot varieties.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Devil's Dinner"
by .
Copyright © 2018 Stuart Walton.
Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
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Table of Contents
Title Page,
Copyright Notice,
Dedication,
Introduction,
A Note on Spelling,
Part One: Biology,
1 Our Favorite Spice — All About Chili,
2 Apaches, Vipers, and Dragons — Types of Chili,
Part Two: History,
3 Spice of America — The Chili in Its Homelands,
4 Three Ships Come Sailing — The Columbian Exchange,
5 Blazing a Trail — Chili's Journey Through Asia and Africa,
6 "Red and Incredibly Beautiful" — Chili Goes to China,
7 From Piri Piri to Paprika — European Variations,
8 Bowls o' Red and Chili Queens — An American Affair,
9 Pepper Sauce — A Global Obsession,
10 Taste and Touch — How Chili Peppers Work,
Part Three: Culture,
11 The Devil's Dinner — Discovering the Dark Side of Chili,
12 Hot Stuff — Chilies and Sex,
13 Fighting Talk — Weaponized Chili,
14 Superhots and Chiliheads — The Cult of Chili,
15 Man Food — How Chili Became a Guy Thing,
16 The Globalization of Taste — Can Chili Save Us?,
Acknowledgments,
Notes,
Select Bibliography,
Index,
Also by Stuart Walton,
About the Author,
Copyright,