The author of Chile Peppers: A Global History is neither a botanist nor a historian, or, for that matter, a folklorist, but rather a media specialist who in the late 1970s began doing research on chile peppers and therewith found his calling. Indeed, Dave DeWitt developed into a virtual chile-appreciation industry, having now written (or co-authored) over forty books on chiles and other fiery foods; co-founding Chile Pepper magazine and serving originally as its editor-in-chief; co-producing an annual trade and consumer event known as the National Fiery Foods and Barbeque Show in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where he lives; and promoting his availability for talks, cooking demonstrations, and judging dishes at spicy food festivals. In my own house I need only look up to see two of his books on my shelves: The Whole Chile Pepper Book (1990) and The Pepper Garden (1993). The New York Times once dubbed him “The Pope of Peppers” (https://www.dave-dewitt.com/).
What does one find in this newest book of his? DeWitt describes the volume as a mix partly of old and new writings on culinary history and partly of accounts of his travels around the world in search of information on chiles and their uses. It does not purport to be a purely scholarly work like that of Janet Long-Solís, Capsicum y Cultura: La Historia del Chilli (1986); on the other hand, the book is not simply a journalistic travelogue describing the fortunate author’s dining on interesting foods in places that most of us will never get to visit. Instead, DeWitt interweaves historical and botanical information about chiles with descriptions of exotic meals that he and his wife enjoyed. The author has a journalist’s knack for varying his material to maintain his readers’ interest.
DeWitt organizes most of his presentation by geographical region. His central chapters (ch. 2-8) survey chiles and chile-based cuisines in the Caribbean, Latin America, the United States, Europe, Africa, India, and Asia. These geographical surveys are framed at the front end by a discussion of the domestication of the wild chile (ch. 1) and at the back end by discussions of chiles in relation to botany and to lore and tradition (ch. 9-10). Each of the ten chapters explores a particular topic, winds down with a focused look at a “featured chile” (for example, chiltepín), and concludes with several pages of recipes in illustration of the cuisine or topics just discussed. Most of the recipes are anonymous, though some are attributed to a particular, named person. The text is enlivened throughout with well-chosen, high-quality photographs.
Chiles, we learn, belong to the genus capsicum, of which there are five domesticated species: annuum, baccatum, chinense, frutescens, and pubescens. Most well-known chiles in the United States are varieties of the first, annuum, including jalapeños, serranos, poblanos, New Mexican, cayennes, and bells (bell peppers developed from poblanos). Exceptions are the super-hots such as the habanero and Scotch bonnet, which are classified as chinense, and the tabasco, which is a frutescens. All chiles are native to South America, where wild chiles already flourished before humans came on the scene. The first chile plants had small, upright fruits. As a consequence of human selection and domestication, some species developed large, pendent pods. The plants spread, diversified, and eventually became the major spice of the New World, corresponding to black pepper in the Old.
Chile’s culinary conquest of the rest of the world began with the explorations of Columbus, who encountered chiles in the West Indies and as part of his second voyage in 1493 brought samples back to Europe. He also made two famous errors that we live with today: he mistook the West Indies for the East Indies and so named the inhabitants Indians; and he misclassified chiles as a kind of pepper, whence “chile pepper,” the subject and title of the book under review. The Spanish and presently the Portuguese brought chiles from the New World not only to their own homelands in the Old World but also to their colonies and wherever else they conducted trade. Most peoples accepted the fruit and integrated it into their cuisines with surprising speed. Within a century, chiles were being consumed around the world.
An interesting phenomenon that is illustrated again and again in DeWitt’s book is that, for all the familiarity of chiles throughout the world, their exploitation is quite uneven. For example, in South America, where the chiles are native, the cuisine of Peru is hot; that of Venezuela is not. Similarly, in Central America: Belize and Guatemala are hot; Panama and Costa Rica are cool.
The United States has two notable hot spots. One is Louisiana, where tabasco sauce (and its competitors) originated in the mid-nineteenth century, made by a method that involves fermenting a mash of chiles in barrels. Tabasco chiles themselves came originally from the area around the Port of Tabasco on the Gulf of Mexico, whence the name. The other spicy region is of course the Southwest, including New Mexico (home of the popular long green chile usually known as New Mexican and sometimes as Anaheim), Arizona, southwest Texas, and southern Colorado, each of which has its own style of Mexican-inspired cooking. The official state dish of Texas, chile con carne, probably developed there in the nineteenth century.
Among European lands, Hungary is an interesting case both for the way chiles reached it and for its enthusiastic adoption of one species, the paprika chile (the name derives ultimately from Latin piper “pepper”). Turks seem to have gotten this pepper from a Portuguese colony in India in the 1500s, and brought it to Bulgaria, whereafter Bulgarian immigrants introduced it to the Hungarians. Originally all Hungarian paprika was hot, but later a non-hot variety was developed, facilitating the manufacture of sweet paprika. Hungarian goulash and chicken paprikash are now internationally known dishes.
Introduced by the Portuguese, chiles were so readily integrated into African cookery that when European explorers reached the interior of the continent, they thought that chiles were native plants. A common chile in Africa is the pili-pili (or peri-peri), that is, “chile-chile,” also called bird’s eye chile, which grows both wild and as a garden plant. Since chiles are widely used throughout the continent, DeWitt surveys Africa by cuisine rather than by region, distinguishing, for example, the Arabic countries north of the Sahara as being linked culturally with the Mediterranean more than with the rest of Africa.
The Portuguese probably introduced chiles to southern India in the early 1500s, after which they spread to the rest of India and to neighboring lands via pre-established spice-routes. Chiles became the principal hot spice in curries. South Indian cooking remains hotter than that of the rest of the country, and the cuisine of Sri Lanka, to the south, is extremely hot. Most chiles grown in India are varieties of cayenne, a very pungent chile that is grown only for heat, not flavor.
In the course of the 1500s, chiles also reached Thailand, Indonesia, China, and the Pacific Islands. So, a century after Columbus’s voyages to the New World, chiles had encircled the globe. Notably hot regions in Asia include Thailand, Indonesia, China, and Korea. The Thais adopted chiles with fervor, creating one of the world’s hottest cuisines. One kind of Thai chile, Kashmiri, also called sriracha, is an ingredient in the now well-known hot sauce made from it that originated in the town of Sriracha. In China the Sichuan and Hunan regions are particularly renowned for their chile-based dishes, while Koreans can boast of having the highest per capita chile consumption in the world, due in part to the popularity of their national dish, kimchi. Chiles are less important in the diet of the Philippines and Japan.
After his geographical survey, DeWitt turns ostensibly to chiles and human health (ch. 9: “Hot Means Healthy”), but the chapter is misnamed, since its focus is mostly botanical. The heat in hot chiles is caused by a “crystalline alkaloid” called capsaicin, which chile pods produce at the junction of the membrane and inner wall. As every chile-head knows, this substance, depending upon the variety of the chile, can be very powerful. It is unaffected by time, cooking, or freezing, and it has no flavor, color, or odor. It is an old puzzle why humans are so fond of something that causes pain, and DeWitt lists the usual explanations that have been put forth. (It seems to me that the posing of this problem would benefit from the Buddhist distinction between pain and misery, namely, that pain is inevitable, but misery is optional.) Happily, capsaicin is mostly harmless to humans. The substance is of no direct use to the plant but possibly discourages mammalian predators, though it does not affect birds, which eat the pods and excrete the seeds, thereby dispersing the plants.
The amount of capsaicin in a particular variety of chile is measurable, the quantity being expressed as so many SHU, or Scoville Heat Units. DeWitt provides a minibiography of Wilbur Scoville, an American pharmacist who, in the early twentieth century, developed a test for rating the pungency of different kinds of chiles. According to the Scoville scale, pure capsaicin has a rating of 16,000,000 SHU; the world’s hottest chile, the Carolina Reaper, rates 1,000,000 SHU; poblanos range from 1,000-1,500 SHU; and bell peppers, which entirely lack capsaicin, earn a score of 0.
In his final chapter (“Chiles Become Legendary”), DeWitt offers a quick survey of chiles in belief and festival. Thus, chiles play or have played a variety of roles in magic, rituals, fumigation, and torture. More obvious to most of us is their role in fun. Around the 1950s we find chile-eating contests (jalapeños are the usual chile of choice), originating perhaps in Louisiana, and around the same time chile con carne cookoffs first appear in Texas. There are now hundreds of chile festivals in the USA and abroad—paprika festivals in Hungary, pepperoncino festivals in Italy, and so on. Chiles have become the world’s second-most traded spice, after their old rival, black pepper.
DeWitt covers a lot of ground in his book, and, perhaps inevitably, there is the occasional slip. Spanish is quoted here and there, not always correctly. More crucially, the author is inconsistent on the big question of whether beans are a permissible ingredient in chile con carne. In one place he provides a chile recipe from San Antonio with the stern admonition: “Never cook beans with chiles and meat! Serve them as a separate dish if you must” (127), but unhappily, his discussion of the “national dish” of Texas is accompanied by a color photograph of a large pot of chile in which beans are manifestly a major ingredient (106).
The author of Chile Peppers is a journalist and independent researcher, and makes no claim that his book makes a scholarly contribution to folkloristics. Nevertheless, folklorists who work in food and foodways will find much of interest in this well-written and ambitious attempt to put chiles in world perspective, including the history of chiles, the development of chile cuisines, the botany of chiles, and the celebration of chiles in festival.
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[Review length: 1854 words • Review posted on March 4, 2021]