Tasty

by John McQuaid

  The first new record-holder was the Infinity Chili (1,087,286 Scoville units), bred in Lincolnshire, England, by a gardener named Nick Woods. It was quickly overtaken by the Naga Viper (1,359,000 Scoville units), grown by Gerald Fowler, a pub owner in Cumbria, England. “Hot enough to strip paint,” he declared. Next was the Trinidad Scorpion “Butch T,” grown by Australian planter Marcel de Wit (1,463,700 Scoville units). When de Wit took his first batch to Melbourne to make hot sauce, the cooks put on chemical protective gear to shield themselves from fumes and accidental splashes.

  Meanwhile, a mortgage banker living in South Carolina named Ed Currie was also pursuing the Guinness record. He tended to hundreds of chili plants in greenhouses he had built in his yard from two-by-twos and white plastic sheeting. He had a growing hot sauce business, but craved the recognition and cachet of being a world record-holder. Currie believed he had a chili so hot it might hold the title for years. He named it Smokin’ Ed’s Carolina Reaper. It was a cultivar of the pepper species Capsicum chinense, known for its explosive heat; its wrinkled, blazing-red chilies were about an inch long and shaped like fists. A nearby university lab verified that Reapers scored consistently above 1.5 million Scoville units; some surpassed 2 million. Currie had submitted the paperwork to Guinness, but its world record verification process was known to take months, sometimes years. So he waited, and kept working to make his chilies even hotter.

  Biologically, chili heat is neither a taste nor a smell, but a visceral, intrinsically unpleasant burning sensation. Animals hate it; humans embrace it with gusto. There are several unsatisfying scientific explanations for the chili’s ubiquity in cuisine, and for why some people endure severe—though harmless—pain to savor the hottest. One theory is geographical: chilies are a common ingredient in the tropics, and eating them makes people sweat, which helps them stay cool. But this fails to account for the chili’s expanding popularity in colder climates. Another theory is sensual: food science writer Harold McGee suggests that by inflaming nerves in the mouth and on the tongue, chilies make the palate temporarily more sensitive to touch and temperature, and flavors more vivid and pleasurable. But some scientific evidence shows that the burn actually obscures these sensations.

  Chili heat makes no biological sense. It is a flavor koan. Sweet, bitter, sour, salty, and umami tastes predate humanity by hundreds of millions of years. But chili heat is a new sensation for Homo sapiens. The chili pepper evolved far from the East African Rift Valley where modern humans first appeared, in an area in the Andean highlands of South America spanning present-day Peru and Bolivia. Humans first tasted the chili only about twelve thousand years ago, while migrating south into the Americas from Asia; it has become a fixture in global cuisine in only the past five hundred years. Humans have always tested and embraced new flavors. The rise of chili heat shows that the flavor sense is expanding its range further still, incorporating new kinds of sensations. This has strange implications. The senses of taste and smell have deep connections to human physiology, playing roles in metabolism, emotion, and social interactions. What happens when a new type of flavor comes along, barraging brains and bodies with a powerful, mysterious neurochemical signal over hundreds or thousands of years? Like the flood of dietary sugar that it has paralleled in the past few centuries, the spread of chili heat is as much a massive experiment in human physiology and behavior as a culinary trend—except that chili may prove to be a boon, not a curse.

  • • •

  Like the bitterness of broccoli, the chili burn is, in essence, a weapon. As dinosaurs died out about sixty-five million years ago, flowering plants, then relatively obscure members of the plant kingdom, developed elaborate defenses to survive in a world of proliferating threats from the changing climate and newly dominant mammals. Roses developed thorns; chilies, capsaicin.

  Chili peppers belong to Solanaceae, the nightshade family. Nightshade and mandrake are notorious for their toxins. Jimson weed produces hallucinations. Most domesticated Solanaceae plants, such as potatoes, tomatoes, and eggplant, had such noxious substances bred out of them in the past few thousand years. But a few, such as chilies and tobacco, are grown specifically to heighten the effects of their active ingredients, a class of chemicals called alkaloids. Besides capsaicin and nicotine, they also include caffeine and the active ingredients in heroin and cocaine. Alkaloids are also a fixture in the most vividly flavorful foods. Chocolate contains a suite of them, including phenethylamine, a mild amphetamine, and anandamide, the human neurotransmitter that stimulates the hedonic hotspots, prodding pleasure.

  Why did chilies develop this powerful defense? The burning sensation deters animals. But some wild peppers are hot and others bland; if capsaicin were solely a mammal repellent, the bland ones would have no protection. Biologist Jonathan Tewksbury of the University of Washington studied this question, focusing on a wild species growing in the Bolivian highlands, Capsicum chacoense, that produces both hot and mild peppers. Bugs with pointed proboscises infect the chilies with a fungus that rots them and kills their seeds. Hiking through verdant Andean valleys, Tewksbury tasted peppers, studied their skin for bug puncture marks, and looked for signs of infection. He found the fungus was doing far more damage to bland chilies than to hot ones; capsaicin seemed to repel the bugs, kill the fungus, or both.

  This did not explain why some chilies were bland, but as Tewksbury mapped the disease, another twist emerged. Bland chilies produced more, and hardier, seeds, and they predominated on higher, colder slopes. This might mean too much capsaicin somehow impaired their ability to reproduce, and that it was not essential at high altitudes, where the risk of fungus was low. The hottest chilies grew in warmer valleys. The maps also suggested that over thousands or millions of years, as chilies spread down mountainsides to lowlands, they grew hotter.

  Birds, which cannot sense capsaicin, expanded the chili’s range by eating the fruits and spreading the seeds in their droppings. By the time humans arrived, pepper plants were growing across South America, the Caribbean, and all the way to North America. People first tasted capsaicin’s heat somewhere in Mexico. It was, almost certainly, a disappointing experience. But not for long.

  Linda Perry, a paleobotanist at the Smithsonian Institution, was piecing together evidence collected from archaeological sites around the Americas in 2005, looking for clues about prehistoric tastes, when she found something she could not explain. Perry’s method is similar to Patrick McGovern’s search for the chemical signatures of ancient beverages; she looks for evidence of the ancient meal. Many plants store carbohydrates in microscopic ampules called starch grains. These are like fingerprints: they vary in size and shape depending on the plant that makes them. They pass through the human digestive tract and fossilize. To find them, paleobotanists painstakingly scrape detritus off tools and kitchen implements excavated from prehistoric homes. They pick apart fossilized feces. The different starch grains provide a vivid portrait of the meals, snacks, and diets of a particular place and time.

  As Perry examined microscopic traces from sites across Latin America, a mysterious kind of starch grain popped up repeatedly alongside those from staples such as corn, potatoes, and manioc root. This was puzzling, Perry thought; all the major starches in ancient American food had already been accounted for. Then she had a chance encounter.

  “I was at a party, and they had these chili pepper hors d’oeuvre things, and a guy was explaining to me in rather gruesome detail that he couldn’t eat them because they caused him distress,” Perry said. “Probably not the best party in the world, but anyway. And I thought, that’s strange, because these grains are usually left by undigested starch, and pepper doesn’t have starch. But maybe it does.” She extricated herself from the conversation and returned to her lab. Some quick research revealed that chilies did indeed contain starch grains. Images of modern ones matched her ancient mystery starches.

  Suddenly, the understanding of ancient American diets c
hanged. Before Perry’s discovery, botanists believed that chilies had been cultivated in many places across the Americas. But there was little archaeological evidence, which usually rotted away. The biggest finds were caves in the highlands of central Mexico, where excavations of eight-thousand-year-old garbage heaps uncovered dozens of intact fossilized chilies. The evidence showed that people had first collected them wild, and had started to cultivate them six thousand years ago. The assortment included ancestors of today’s jalapeño, ancho, serrano, and tabasco peppers. They also farmed maize, beans, squash, and avocado, all still used in Mexican cuisine.

  Perry’s starch-grain discovery proved that chili peppers had been in use across the Americas. They were an ancient craze to rival the modern one. Chili peppers were the best, most available source of spice to liven up diets heavy on bland, mushy maize, squash, and roots. The starch-grain traces stretched back six thousand years, to a village near the coast of Ecuador. Perry deduced that cooks there had chopped chilies up, pulverized them on grindstones, mixed this mash up in bowls and cooking vessels, and scattered the remains. About two thousand years later, rocoto peppers, a round red chili with a bite, were kept in the larder of a house two miles above sea level in the Peruvian Andes. Fishermen-farmers on San Salvador in the Bahamas apparently used a manioc grater to slice up chilies about a thousand years ago. And in coastal Venezuela sometime between ad 1000 and 1500, chilies were paired with ginger to liven up corn, arrowroot, and another tuber called guapo.

  • • •

  In 1492, Christopher Columbus arrived in the Caribbean on his first voyage to the New World. Making his way through the Bahamas to Cuba and then Hispaniola, he sampled the native cuisines, dining on yams and corn, a bread made from manioc, conches, and a six-foot iguana, which, he noted in his log, “tastes like chicken.” The red, hot chilies the Indians mixed with sweet potatoes and corn caught Columbus’s eye. After misidentifying the Caribbean as the Far East and the people living there as Indians, he added another misnomer to the list, calling the chili plant “pepper”—pimiento in Spanish—after black pepper, pimienta, an unrelated plant that produces a similar, though less powerful, sensation. Columbus believed it would make a profitable export. “There is also much aji, which is their pepper and is worth more than our pepper, no one eats without it because it is very healthy,” he wrote in his log, using the Taino term for them. “Fifty caravels can be loaded each year with it.”

  But the chili pepper turned out to be virtually worthless to traders. The big-money spices of the day were relatively scarce: cloves and cinnamon grew only in the South Pacific; sugar production depended on mills and refineries. Chilies could be grown by anyone in a mildly warm climate; only seeds were required. They spread as a poor person’s spice, traded hand to hand. Over a few decades—a blink of an eye from the perspective of human evolution, and even culinary history—chili heat blazed from one side of the world to the other.

  The Pinta was likely carrying the first chili pepper seeds to reach Europe when it returned to Spain, landing at the port of Bayona on March 1, 1493. Word of the new spice spread quickly. Six months later, Pietro Martire d’Anghiera, a prominent Italian historian at the Spanish court in Barcelona, noted that Columbus had discovered a pepper “more pungent than that from the Caucasus.”

  Monasteries along the coasts of southern Europe collected many kinds of pepper seeds, and monks experimented, breeding both hotter and milder kinds. Hungarians embraced paprika as their national spice. In Germany, chilies appear in a 1543 guide to herbs by the professor of medicine Leonhard Fuchs, who carefully rendered them in woodblock prints (though he mistakenly thought they originated in India, calling them by the name “calicut” pepper, after Calcutta). Portuguese sailors used them to spice their food, and brought them to ports of call around the world. Chili peppers traveled to West Africa, and then to the Congo, by 1498. They appeared on the Chinese island of Macau, and inland in Szechuan. By 1542, three types of peppers were being cultivated in India. Curries, previously spiced with black pepper, suddenly flared with heat. Purandara Dasa, a composer of the time, wrote a song devoted to the red chili, calling it the “savior of the poor”: “I saw you green, then turning redder as you ripened. Nice to look at and tasty in a dish, but too hot if an excess is used.”

  From south Asia, chilies spread to Siam and Burma, the Philippines, and beyond; they were already growing on some Pacific Islands when Europeans first arrived later in the sixteenth century. Chili routes soon began to double back on themselves: when Africans were captured and enslaved starting in the late 1500s, they brought food flavored with hot chilies back to the Americas.

  Four hundred years later, chilies are found nearly everywhere in the world. Four thousand strains provide the sizzle for countless dishes, from Mexican moles to Thai curries. They’re second only to salt on the list of most popular spices, outselling their next closest competitor, black pepper, by five to one. In the twenty-first century, a chili pepper renaissance has pushed heat to new levels. A generation ago, traditional varieties such as the Scotch bonnet and habanero peppers had set the upper bounds of hotness, clocking in at 200,000 and 300,000 Scoville units, respectively. Ghost peppers were considered too painful for Western palates. But tastes changed. Jalapeños and banana peppers became standard fare in the blandest salad bars. Reality TV shows followed hosts roaming the world, sampling outrageous dishes. The worldwide chili pepper trade is 25 times the size it was fifty years ago, the world’s population only 2.2 times larger. Americans ate an average of three pounds of chilies a year in 1980. That number has more than doubled, and the upward arc continues.

  The race to breed superhot peppers is the vanguard of this heat movement. Aficionados belong to a passionate subculture whose ethos falls somewhere between those of wine connoisseurs and Star Trek fans, obsessed with the minutiae of seed trading, cultivar purity, and the Scoville scale. The field tends to be male-dominated; studies have shown men favor chili heat more than women, and there is some competitive macho frisson in the experience—and the idea—of ultrahotness. “You’ve got to understand the chili-head mentality,” said Jim Duffy, a chili grower who lives outside San Diego. “It’s like the person who goes out shopping for knickknacks at garage sales: they’ve got to keep satisfying that thing. They throw so many plants in their backyard and their wife’s going, ‘What are you going to do with all those peppers? Where are we going to plant my cucumbers?’ And they’re like, ‘Uh, I didn’t think of that.’ They went on my website, saw all the pretty pictures, the eye candy, just like a guy looks at the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue.”

  There are thirty known pepper species, all of the genus Capsicum (from the Greek kapto, meaning “bite”). Five have been domesticated. Ordinary bell peppers, which have no bite, are a variety of Capsicum annuum; in addition to the Carolina Reaper, Capsicum chinense varieties include habaneros and ghost peppers. When he began cultivating peppers in earnest in the early 2000s, Ed Currie gathered seeds from those and others from around the world—at first, the package deliveries, his greenhouses, and the odd smells emanating from his kitchen raised the eyebrows of neighbors, who called the police.

  Every one of the two hundred kinds of peppers Currie grows rates above 200,000 Scoville units, the pungency of a habanero. But he paid attention to flavor as well. He was trying to build a hot sauce business, and hot sauces have many aromatic subtleties to bring out the flavors in foods. He coaxed notes of sweetness, chocolate, cinnamon, and citrus from his chilies. In his greenhouses, colors of these varieties explode: yellow, orange, white, purple, as tantalizing as jungle fruits would have been for our primate ancestors. The business grew slowly at first, then faster with the help of friends. An accounting firm agreed to do his taxes in exchange for a case of hot sauce. A next-door neighbor offered backyard space for a greenhouse. A friend lent him a few acres of fallow farmland south of town for growing space.

  As his business grew, Currie experimented
with several dozen superhot cultivars. The Carolina Reaper is the crowning achievement of an arduous process. It typically takes eight years to produce a horticulturally unique chili. Plants must be carefully segregated to prevent cross-pollination. Repeated crosses and certain traits must take hold, so that genes can be passed from generation to generation. Many growers try, but cannot produce consistently hot fruits, and abandon the effort. Currie claims to have accelerated this process by three years, and grown a strain that always produces a desired level of heat. At a university lab, samples are freeze-dried, ground into powder, and dissolved in alcohol: the resulting solutions are clear shades of red, yellow, and caramel. They are run through a gas chromatograph, which vaporizes them and measures the concentration of capsaicin to get the Scoville scale measurement. The Carolina Reaper averaged 1,569,700 Scoville units. Currie had some up-and-coming varieties that surpassed that figure. But Guinness was taking its time. “We’ve been going back and forth with Guinness for three years. I don’t care if it takes another three years,” he said. “Because what we’re doing will last. World records can be one-off peppers that couldn’t be reproduced.”

  The hucksterism surrounding the Guinness record led scientists at New Mexico State University’s Chili Pepper Institute to take a more deliberate approach, growing top superhot varieties (though not Currie’s) together under controlled conditions in 2011. The winner was the Trinidad Moruga Scorpion, another Capsicum chinense cultivar, ranked at 1.2 million Scoville heat units.

  • • •

  At a local restaurant, Currie opened a plastic zipper bag and dumped a pile of chilies, collected from his greenhouses, onto the table: Reapers, ghost peppers, and another variety called the Moruga Viper, in shades of red, orange, and bright yellow. He took a steak knife and carefully cut narrow slices of each, then passed the plate. The sensation of any superhot chili is not a raw blast; its qualities vary depending on the type of plant, the amount of capsaicin, and related substances called capsaicinoids, tempered by the complex chemical makeup of the pepper. Chili heat has three main elements. The first involves suspense: as chewing breaks open cell walls and releases capsaicin, there’s a lag time between the initial bite and the perception of heat. This varies by pepper variety; habaneros have a particularly long delay of fifteen to twenty seconds. The second feature is dissipation. The heat from chilies in Thai cuisine tends to ease quickly, while varieties such as the ghost pepper linger. Finally, each burn has a unique feel. Asian peppers have a prickly heat; with American Southwest chilies, it’s broad and flat.