Chile Peppers

by Dave Dewitt

  So, sometime between 1538 and 1548, chiles were introduced into Hungary, and the first citizens to accept the fiery pods were the servants and shepherds who had more contact with the Turkish invaders. Zoltán Halász tells the tale: “Hungarian herdsmen started to sprinkle tasty slices of bacon with Paprika and season the savory stews they cooked in cauldrons over an open fire with the red spice. They were followed by the fishermen of the Danube . . . who would render their fish-dishes more palatable with the red spice, and at last the Hungarian peasantry, consuming with great gusto the meat of fattened oxen and pigs or tender poultry which were prepared in paprika-gravy, professed their irrevocable addiction to paprika, which by then had become a characteristically Hungarian condiment.”

  In 1569, an aristocrat named Margit Széchy listed the foreign seeds she was planting in her garden in Hungary. On the list was “Turkisch rot Pfeffer” (Turkish red pepper) seeds, the first recorded instance of chiles in Hungary. Upon Mrs. Széchy’s death and the subsequent division of her estate, her paprika plots were so valuable that they were fought over bitterly by her daughters, and the litigation went on for 25 years before the supreme court awarded title to Mrs. Széchy’s youngest daughter.

  After the settlement of this dispute, there was no mention of paprika in Hungarian writings for many years, and Halász speculates that the century between the turn of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was when “the silent revolution in Hungarian cooking” developed, “with paprika conquering the common people first of all.” In 1604, a Hungarian dictionary listed the spice for the first time as “Turkish pepper, piper indicum,” and the word “paprika” didn’t make an appearance until 1775, when J. Csapó called it “paprika garden pepper” in his Herbarium.

  During this time, “townspeople sprinkled their bacon with paprika, made of crudely crushed ‘cherry paprika’ and added it to a variety of dishes, mixing it with sour cream,” notes Lang, who adds that the “landed gentry” were slower to adopt the spice but eventually “recognized that not only was paprika cheaper than black pepper, but it stimulated the appetite and had a most delightful character of its own.” Also during this time, Hungarian growers developed the hundreds of paprika varieties ranging from “very hot to sugar sweet,” with a wide range of colors and textures. “Somewhere along the line, the Hungarians hit on the holy trinity of lard, onion, and pure ground paprika,” and “this simple combination became the base of virtually unlimited taste combinations.”

  Capsaicin, the chemical that makes chile peppers hot, became a major focal point of the paprika debate that soon ensued. At the end of the eighteenth century, a visiting nobleman named Count Hoffmanseg tasted paprika for the first time in a cabbage stuffing and wrote to his sister, “It stings terribly, but not for long, and then pleasantly warms the stomach!” On the other side of the debate was, of course, the Catholic Church, with the ultraconservative Capuchin priest Ubaldis writing around the same time about Hungarian sins: “The spice of their food is some sort of red beast called paprika,” he railed. “It certainly bites like the devil.”

  Roasted pepper goulash. Photograph by Ralf Roletschek. Wikimedia. GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2.

  Lang notes that the nobility was the very last part of Hungarian citizenry to adopt paprika, “probably because it did not stem from aristocratic tradition.” But even that refined segment of the population would eventually succumb to the conquering spice. The first time paprika turned up in a cookbook recipe was 1817, when F. G. Zenker, chef of Prince Schwarzenberg, published his Theoretical and Practical Compendium of Culinary Arts, which was printed in Vienna. He listed paprika as an ingredient in Chicken Fricassee in Indian Style. This was followed in 1829 with the appearance of two classic Hungarian dishes in István Czifrai’s (or Czifray’s) cookbook, apparently titled, simply, The Cookbook of the Master Chef István Czifray. The first was halász-hal, or fisherman’s soup, mentioned above, and the second marked the first appearance in print of paprikás csirke, or chicken paprikash, perhaps the most famous Hungarian dish in the world.

  It wasn’t until 1844 that this dish appeared on the menu of the National Casino, the rather exclusive club of the House of Lords, but it soon became the favorite dish of Queen Elizabeth, the consort of Franz Josef I. “A queen couldn’t be wrong!” proclaims Lang. “Paprika’s victory was now complete.” This triumph was followed by another in 1879, when the famous French chef Escoffier bought paprika during his visit to Szeged and, on his return to France, introduced it into the grande cuisine in the form of gulyás hongrois (Hungarian goulash) and poulet au paprika (paprika chicken), two of the most typical paprika-laden Hungarian dishes.

  Around this same time, chile peppers, known as peperoncini, and tomatoes, known as pomodori, were just becoming accepted into Italian cuisine, an adoption that would forever change that country’s cuisine. In 1881, bowls of chiles were often described in Giovanni Verga’s realistic novel, I Malavoglia (rough translation: Me, Reluctantly); in 1889, Pizza Margherita with tomatoes was named for King Umberto’s wife, Queen Margherita; and in 1891 the first all-Italian cookbook, La scienza in cucina e l’arte di mangiar bene (The Science of Cooking and the Art of Eating Well) by Pellegrino Artusi, included many tomato recipes.

  Today, the great pepper-growing areas around Kalocsa and Szeged have just the right combination of soil characteristics, temperature, rainfall, and sunshine required to cultivate the numerous varieties of paprika successfully. In March, the pepper seeds are put in water to germinate, then transferred to greenhouse beds. Seven weeks later, in May, the small pepper shrubs are replanted in the open fields. Harvesting starts at the end of the first week in September and lasts for about a month, depending on weather conditions. By harvest time, the mature plants will have grown to a height of 16 to 24 inches. And the pepper pods—3 to 5 inches long and about 1 to 1 ½ inches wide—will have ripened from green or yellow to bright red.

  In Kalocsa, the annual harvest is celebrated with a paprika festival in September. Known as the Kalocsa Paprika Days, it features an exhibition of food products and agricultural machinery, a professional conference on the topic of paprika, various sports events, a “Paprika Cup” international chess tournament, and a fish-soup cooking contest. But the highlight of all this is the Paprika Harvest Parade, complete with local bands and colorful folk-dancing groups, followed that same night by a Paprika Harvest Ball.

  With regards to paprika, the Catholic Church seems to have reversed its original opinion of the “devilish” aspects of this pepper. “It isn’t surprising how many religious festivals are connected with phases of its cultivation,” Lang notes; “man sore felt the need for divine help.” For example, the seeds are placed in water for germination precisely on St. Gregory’s Day in early March, and the harvest begins on September 8, the feast day of the Nativity of the Holy Virgin, which in reality is a combination of a medieval festival and a “vast block party.”

  Types of Hungarian Paprikas

  note In Hungary, paprika has a great variation and depth of flavor, having not only distinct pod types but also specific grades of the powders made from these pod types. The hottest paprikas are not the bright red ones but rather the palest red and light brown ones.

  Special Quality (különleges): The mildest and brightest red of all Hungarian paprikas, with excellent aroma.

  Delicate (csípmentes csemege): Ranging from light to dark red, a mild paprika with a rich flavor.

  Exquisite Delicate (csemegepaprika): Similar to Delicate, but more pungent.

  Pungent Exquisite Delicate (csípös csemege, pikant): A yet more pungent Delicate.

  Rose [rózsa): Pale red in color with strong aroma and mild pungency.

  Noble Sweet (édesnemes): The most commonly exported paprika; bright red and slightly pungent.

  Half-Sweet (félédes): A blend of mild and pungent paprikas; medium pungency.

  Hot (erös): Light brown in color, this is the hottest of all the paprikas.

  Paprika in
Serbian Seeds of Hope. Photograph by Farmers’ Association Schwäbisch Hall. Wikimedia. Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

  So how do those tons of newly picked peppers get turned into the condiment known as paprika, in all of its many forms? Before the Industrial Revolution, farmers used to string all their ripe peppers by hand and hang them up in a protected place to dry. After a certain period of time, the drying process was completed in large earthenware ovens. The peppers were then crushed underfoot, and finally, pounded into a powder by means of a kulu, a huge mortar with a large pestle driven by human power. Water mills later replaced the kulu for grinding paprika, and by the late 1800s steam engines were being used for this task.

  But until the mid-1800s it was difficult to control the pungency of the paprika produced. The capsaicin that gives paprika its spicy flavor is found in the pod’s veins and seeds, which were removed by hand before the crushed dried peppers were ground into a powder. This was a time-consuming and inexact process, which yielded paprikas in taste from rather mild to fairly hot. The results were unpredictable. In 1859, the Pálfy brothers of Szeged invented a machine for removing the veins and seeds, then grinding the dried pods into a quality-controlled powder. The mill master could now determine exactly how much capsaicin was to be removed and how much should be retained. The Pálfys’ technique continued to be used in Hungarian factories for almost a century—until the fairly recent introduction of modern automatic machines that wash, dry, crush, sort, and grind the peppers in a continuous process.

  The Pálfys’ invention made possible the large-scale commercial production of very mild (Noble Sweet) paprika, which had a much bigger export market than the hotter-tasting varieties. As the industry expanded to meet both local and foreign demand for this mild (but still richly flavored) paprika, the growers saw the advantage of cultivating a spice pepper that did not need to have its veins and seeds removed.

  Ferenc Horváth of Kalocsa developed the first cultivar of Hungarian pepper that was “sweet” throughout—meaning that its veins and seeds contained very little capsaicin indeed. This kind of pepper is now favored by growers in the regions of Kalocsa and Szeged. It can be used alone, ground to produce a mild but flavorful paprika powder—or used in combination with other, hotter peppers to produce some of the standard varieties of paprika marketed by the Hungarians. But with all this emphasis on the demand and supply of mild paprika during the past 100 years, one is tempted to speculate that Hungarian food before Horvath and the Pálfys must have been much hotter than it is today.

  Other countries also grow and consume paprika, including Spain, Serbia, Romania, Slovakia, Croatia, and the United States, but in only one does it reign supreme: Hungary.

  In the Hungarian countryside, paprika peppers are threaded onto strings and are hung from the walls, porches, and eaves of farmhouses, much like the chile ristras in the American Southwest. As mentioned previously, today Hungary produces both pungent and sweet paprikas, but originally all Hungarian paprika was aromatic and quite hot. It was evidently too hot for some tastes, for by the turn of this century other countries were requesting that Hungary develop a nonpungent variety. By accident, farmers produced a sweet variety in their fields when they planted milder “eating” paprika with hotter “seasoning” paprika in proximity and insects cross-pollinated the two. The resulting hybrid reduced the pungency of the paprika pods and probably led to the nonpungent varieties now grown in Spain.

  Food authority Craig Claiborne notes, “The innocuous powder which most merchants pass on to their customers as paprika has slightly more character than crayon or chalk. Any paprika worthy of its name has an exquisite taste and varies in strength from decidedly hot to pleasantly mild but with a pronounced flavor.” This is why, for cooking, Hungarian paprika should be favored over that produced in the United States or Spain.

  Paprika has exerted a great influence on the culture of the people of central Europe. Hungarians believe that the passion of a woman is reflected in her capacity to consume the fiery, paprika-spiced food, and bad moods are often blamed on paprika considered too pungent. Paprika also has its own very popular folkloric figure, Jancsi Paprika. Often represented as a puppet, Jancsi has the shape of a red chile, complete with a large chile hat and a pod-shaped nose. Jancsi Paprika is the prototype of the folk hero, being at once valiant, generous, knowledgeable, humorous, and ingenious. He is often called the Hungarian Sancho Panza—an appropriate personification of the pungent paprika pod so beloved by the people of the region of the Danube.

  For a country of just 10 million people, Hungary has some impressive agricultural production. Although it does not rank in the top 20 countries for tomatoes or potatoes, it is the number 12 country in the world for maize production, number 20 for green chile peppers—producing about 18 percent of what the US grows—and it’s 19th in the world for dry chile-pepper production, which is a result of all that growing, drying, and grinding of paprika.

  THEY CALL ME IL PAPA DEL PEPERONCINO

  When we arrived in northern Italy, we were not expecting torrential rains and flooding, so we were relieved when the rains ended and we were greeted with a rainbow of color, which symbolized a new direction for our travel: dry and warm.

  Our trip to spicy Italy was organized by Marco Del Freo, a food lover and chilehead who came out to our National Fiery Foods and Barbecue Show and invited us to visit his haunts and witness how Italians were learning to love everything hot and spicy. First we visited the wine country of Lombardy, where we stayed in an agriturismo B&B and nearly got flooded out when the rains hit the area hard. The first night, we and 60 other foodies attended a launch party for two new products developed by Marco that help create spiced-up dishes, including seafood, risotto, and even dessert.

  With Marco translating, I gave a brief address to the diners at the restaurant associated with the Il Montù winery and grapperia. Based on their applause, I could tell that not only were they impressed with the food but with the products themselves. Nettare di Habanero, or Habanero Nectar, is a first pressing of olive oil and habaneros to create an aromatic and medium-hot olive oil that is used to dress foods such as salads, breads, and even grilled meats. Spirit of Habanero is an award-winning grappa infused with habaneros until a medium heat level is achieved to make a delicious—and spicy—cordial or liqueur.

  Lombardy vineyards. Photograph by Dave DeWitt.

  Of course, while in this area, we were surrounded by vineyards. Lombardy has the highest concentration of vineyards in the entire country, and although it was too wet to walk through them, they were truly beautiful right after the rain. I particularly enjoyed the fruits of these vineyards in the form of an Il Montu Bonarda, a tasty and dry red wine. After two nights at the B&B, we moved on to Marco’s house and the rainbow. Marco and his wife, Maggie, live on top of a small mountain near Parma in the agricultural village known as Salsomaggiore, and their view is the valley called Bellacavalle, known for its incredibly tasty Parmesan cheese.

  On Sunday, May 9, Marco and I worked the chile plant sale and food fair at the Azienda Agraria Sperimentale Stuard (Stuard Agricultural Experiment Station) in Parma with his new products, Spirit of Habanero grappa and Habanero Nectar olive oil. Mario Dadomo, the station director and the “Paul Bosland of Italy,” had 442 different varieties of chiles to choose from, which was like having ChilePlants.com in one convenient greenhouse. The public was there in good numbers to buy the plants and sample products both spicy and nonspicy. A group of about 30 Italian chileheads showed up, and I had my picture taken with them. On one side of us was a honey producer, and on the other side our friend Mauritzio was selling his ‘Jolokia’ products, including Big Bang Powder, so Marco joked that the public could choose from Paradiso (Heaven), Purgatorio (Purgatory), or Inferno (Hell). This was an allusion to Dante’s Divine Comedy but I’m not sure that the Italians got the literary joke. As a show producer, it was interesting for me to watch the flow of the crowd: in the morning there was a st
rong crowd, then it dropped off to nothing during lunch and “siesta time,” and then was strong again after about 3 p.m. Marco’s sales were good, which bodes well for the new products. We closed down about 6 p.m., then drove to a winery with nearly vertical vineyards atop Monte Roma (Mount Rome), 350 meters above sea level. Then, in typical Italian fashion, another 30-mile drive to dinner at an agriturismo (agricultural tourism) restaurant atop another “mountain.” I loved the grilled sirloin steak served on top of a solid block of salt. We got back to Marco’s house at midnight—16 hours of hustle—but fun!

  THE PEPERONCINI OF ITALY

  Note: This section was compiled and illustrated by Harald Zoschke, the German chile-pepper expert who now lives with his wife, Renate, in Bardolino, Italy.

  Just like corn and tomatoes, chile peppers were unknown in Italy before Columbus’s discovery of the New World in 1492. Imagine Italian cuisine without tomato sauce, polenta, risotto, and peperoncini. This all changed in the sixteenth century, when trade ships distributed the New World goodies across the globe. At first hot peppers were considered poisonous because they are Nightshades, but soon they became the spice of choice, especially in the Calabria, Puglia, and Basilicata regions, as well as in Sicily. Why particularly in the South? One reason could be the antibacterial properties of the fiery fruit, quite helpful in a hot climate with no refrigeration back then. For example, there’s a lot of peperoncino piccante in ’nduja, the traditional Calabrian spreadable sausage. Despite the fire that came with the hot pods, peperoncini are mostly used with moderation in traditional Italian cuisine—flavor is considered more important than heat.