by Rebecca Rupp
The practice of cooking peas with mint may have originated to disguise the starchy taste of early varieties of peas. Hannah Glasse’s Peas-Porridge recipe in The Art of Cooking Made Plain and Easy, Which far Exceeds any thing of the Kind ever yet Published (1747) calls for “a bunch of dry’d Mint,” and Amelia Simmons’s instructions “To boil green Peas” (1796) recommend adding to the water a few leaves of mint, salt, and a chunk of butter the size of a walnut.
The mint custom became so entrenched that it persisted, despite the development of newer, sweeter, and less starchy cultivars of peas. By the nineteenth century progressive pea cooks were urging that it be abandoned. Instead, they suggested, peas should be prepared in the “American mode” — that is, boiled in plain mintless water. “The cooking of pease with mint,” wrote Mary Henderson in Practical Dinner Giving (1882) “is a good way of utterly destroying the delicious natural flavor of the pea.”
The nineteenth-century garden pea was delicious and rapidly becoming more so. Perhaps more than any other vegetable, the pea is a study in obsolescence: as breeders developed increasingly sweeter peas, older and less satisfactory varieties vanished. The Hastings pea seems to have disappeared by the early eighteenth century; the Rouncival was all but gone by the early nineteenth. The 1807 edition of Philip Miller’s Gardener’s Dictionary reports dismally that “Rose, Rouncival, sickle, tufted and hotspur peas are lost.”
The culling of the starch-heavy, smooth-seeded, old-time peas was largely the fault of Thomas Andrew Knight, who, sometime prior to 1787, discovered a peculiar wrinkle-seeded pea. Knight, who served as president of the Royal Horticultural Society from 1811 until his death in 1838, is arguably the father of horticultural science. One story holds that he became fascinated with plants as a small boy, watching a gardener plant what he thought were sticks and being told that they’d grow up to be beans. They did, upon which the awed young Knight planted his pocketknife, hoping to grow a tree of knives. When the knife tree failed to materialize, Knight there and then determined to figure out why. He was to spend his life elucidating the mysteries of plant growth and development.
At the age of 29, upon the death of his older brother, Knight inherited a castle, a substantial bank balance, and a 10,000-acre estate, upon which he was able to pursue his wide-ranging interests in plant physiology and breeding. His true love seems to have been the apple, although he investigated and improved upon a wide range of plants, among them strawberries, pears, cabbages, and potatoes, as well as peas. Knight crossed his serendipitous wrinkle-seeded pea to produce a series of wrinkled cultivars known as “marrowfats” for their superlative tastiness. By 1787, “Knight’s wrinkled Marrow peas” were a prime pick for British gardens.
Knight’s experiments with wrinkle- and smooth- (or round-) seeded peas preceded the famous pea-plant experiments of Gregor Mendel by some fifty years and established some of the same principles, although Knight never made the intellectual leap that allowed Mendel to formulate the laws of inheritance and infer the existence of the gene. Both studied pea crosses using the same reliably reproducible characteristics in peas — height (tall or dwarf), flower color (white or red), seed color (green or yellow), and seed shape (round or wrinkled) — and both achieved the same results. Mendel, however, had the better interpretation of the evidence, which is why today we speak of Mendelian rather than Knightian genetics.
Only in the 1990s, however, did geneticists discover just what makes Knight’s wrinkled-seeded peas pucker up. As the round pea matures it converts its youthful sugar into starch, a more durable and stable storage form of carbohydrate. It does so by means of a starch-branching enzyme — SBE1 or starch-branching enzyme 1 — essential in the synthesis of the snarly branched-chain starch molecule called amylopectin. The wrinkled pea, on the other hand, has a mutant nonfunctional SBE1 and therefore is sugar-heavy and starch-deprived. High-sugar peas accumulate more water during development, due to osmosis — ripe, they’re generally fatter than starchy peas — but upon drying, they’ve got more water to lose, which causes them to wrinkle like deflated balloons.
By the latter half of the nineteenth century, dozens of garden pea varieties were available. William Cobbett, peevish author of The English Gardener (1833), lists seven, adding somewhat snappily, “There are several others, but here are quite enough for any garden in the world.” By 1885, Vilmon-Andrieux’s The Vegetable Garden described 170 different varieties, categorized as either shelling peas or sugar peas.
Shelling peas, which can be either smooth- or wrinkle-seeded, develop within inedible pods, rendered unchewably indigestible by their fibrous parchment lining. Parchment-less edible-podded peas of the sort commonly known as Chinese or snow peas seem to have been developed not by the Chinese, but by the Dutch. The earliest European mention dates to 1536. It is likely that these are the peas, expensively imported from Holland, that were considered such a treat at the court of Elizabeth I, and that were eaten as mange-tout, meaning “eat all,” in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century France.
The classic snow pea must be picked on cue, at what breeders call the “slab-pod” stage, before the inner peas begin to bulge out and stringiness develops. A snow pea past its prime tends to twist arthritically due to the lack of supportive parchment — the “bones” of the pod — and concomitantly develops an unpleasant taste. The eighteenth-century “sickle” pea was likely an edible-podded pea.
These problems have been eliminated for spoiled modern gardeners by the advent of the Sugar Snap pea, a hybrid developed in the 1950s by breeder Calvin Lamborn of the Gallatin Valley Seed Company in Twin Falls, Idaho. Lamborn’s pea is the result of a cross between a variant of a tough-podded processing pea called Dark Skilled Perfection and a conventional snow pea. His original intent was to solve the snow-pea twisting problem by adding genetic material from the strong-podded mutant strain; the unexpected outcome, a tasty sugar pea with a round (not flat, like the snow pea) pod, juicily edible into full maturity, is now touted as a serendipitous triumph for pea breeding. The “snap” designation comes from the pea’s breaking characteristics: it cracks neatly in two, like a green bean.
Sugar Snap peas, though best fresh off the vine, are also suitable for freezing, a fate that has overtaken 90 percent of the national pea crop since Clarence Birdseye came up with his commercial freezing procedure in 1929. Birdseye, who began his commercial career selling frogs to the Bronx Zoo, reputedly developed his fast-freeze process while working as a field naturalist for the U.S. government in Labrador, where he observed the local Eskimos’ technique for freezing fish. Prior to Birdseye’s rapidly “frosted foods,” green peas didn’t keep all that well. Amelia Simmons claimed that peas, drained and stored in bottles sealed with mutton fat, would last “till Christmas,” but frankly it sounds iffy to me.
A reliable bottling technique for preserving food was devised in 1809 by French confectioner Nicholas Appert, who was attempting to win the 12,000 franc prize offered by Napoleon — known for his canny insistence that an army marches on its stomach — for the better provisioning of his troops. Appert’s fragile glass bottles, the forerunner of today’s ubiquitous Mason jars, were replaced in 1810 by tin canisters (soon abbreviated to cans), pioneered by British merchant Peter Durand. Peas can be canned, but not prettily: the necessary heating process destroys the chlorophyll that gives peas their characteristic pea green, and turns them instead a dispiriting military olive shade.
Better by far to pick them from the garden. “All the essentials of life,” according to Winston Churchill, are a mere four: hot baths, cold champagne, old brandy, and new peas.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
In Which
PEPPERS WIN
THE NOBEL
PRIZE
plus
A Recipe for Guinea Pig,
Opposing Angry Elephants,
How a Pepper Is Like a Tarantula,
A Perspicacious Pirate,
and A Deathbed Bowl of
Son-of-a-Bitch Stew
DANIEL PINKWATER
Montezuma, in best Aztec tradition, drank his cocoa cold, unsweetened, and laced with vanilla and chile pepper. The Spaniards, who shortsightedly described the Aztec chocolatl as “food fit only for pigs,” were more enthusiastic about the fiery red spice, pegging it as a substitute for the outrageously expensive black pepper, Piper nigrum.
Black pepper, imported since ancient times from the Spice Islands via India and Persia, had served Europe for some 2,000 years as both a taste-tingling spice and a legitimate medium of exchange. Rome paid off the marauding Visigoths with pepper (3,000 pounds of it, by one account), and pepper featured heavily in medieval wills and dowries. Rents were paid in peppercorns, and in feudal France, if a serf could come up with a pound of black pepper he/she could buy his/her freedom.
By the late fifteenth century, black pepper was literally worth its weight in gold: the rise of the Ottoman Empire, followed by the fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1453, had disrupted trade routes and sent pepper prices through the roof. The appalling cost of pepper played no small part in the decision of Ferdinand and Isabella to fund Christopher Columbus’s long-shot spice-seeking voyage west.
On January 15, 1493, Columbus entered in his log the first written mention of New World pepper: “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 wholesome.” New World pepper — the name comes from the Hindi for pepper, pippali — was no more pepper than the New World natives were Indians, but the name, once bestowed, stuck. The new peppers — unlike such suspicious American introductions as tomatoes and potatoes — were wildly successful, adopted rapidly and enthusiastically by cultures across the globe.
The Portuguese brought them to India in the early fifteenth century, where they became a prime constituent of curry, and from whence they were conveyed further east. Within fifty years of Columbus’s pepper-discovering voyage, New World peppers were growing in China and Japan. The northern Europeans seem to have gotten theirs on the rebound from India, which led to confusion about where they came from in the first place. German herbalist Leonhart Fuchs refers to the American peppers in 1542 as “Calicut peppers;” and John Gerard in 1597 calls them “Ginnie Peppers,” adding that they were “verie well known in shoppes at Billingsgate.” The new peppers arrived in the Balkans with the conquering Turks in the first half of the sixteenth century, where they were called peperke or paparka — and the Hungarians, by a short linguistic jump, had acquired their famed paprika by 1569.
The New World peppers belong to Solanaceae, the Nightshade family, specifically to the genus Capsicum, which includes some twenty-five species, five of which are cultivated by human gardeners. The term “capsicum” — used by the precise when they want to talk about American peppers — was coined in 1700 by Joseph Pitton de Tournefort, early plant taxonomist and plant hunter for the gardens of Louis XIV. Supposedly he came up with it either from the Latin capsa (“box”), for the (at least in some cases) boxlike shape of the fruit, or the Greek kapto (“to bite”), for the pepper’s tongue-searing pungency.
Columbus’s aji (pronounced ah-hee), the Arawak name for pepper, is still used in Spain today, along with the near-universal chile, from the Nahuatl (Aztec) chilli, also meaning pepper. (We speak more Aztec than you might think: also from the Nahuatl we get avocado, chocolate, coyote, guacamole, mesquite, tamale, and tomato.) Most researchers agree that the capsicums originated in the mountains of central Bolivia; and recent studies by archaeo-biologists from the Smithsonian Institute and the University of Calgary indicate that they have been domesticated for upwards of 6,000 years.
* * *
The Pirate and the Pepper
Bell peppers were grown by the Indians of Central America well before the arrival of Columbus. When the name bell, presumably referring to the pepper’s shape, was first adopted is a mystery, but the earliest written use of the term seems to have been by Lionel Wafer in A New Voyage and Description of the Isthmus of America (1699).
Wafer, a ship’s surgeon, had thrown in his lot in 1679 in Jamaica with a band of buccaneers, eventually linking up with the brilliant William Dampier, who managed to combine piracy with literature, cartography, and natural history. Wounded in a gunpowder explosion in 1680, Wafer was marooned in Panama for many months, during which he lived with the local Cuna Indians and noticed the local peppers. By the time he was retrieved, his erstwhile shipmates failed to recognize him, since he was wearing face paint, a breechclout, and a ring in his nose.
Eight years later, with a chest full of pieces of eight, he decided to retire and settle in Jamestown, Virginia, where he was promptly arrested for piracy. He was eventually acquitted, although a portion of his loot was confiscated and used to fund the new College of William and Mary. His account of his life with the Panamanian Indians was later translated into French, German, Swedish, and Spanish.
* * *
The latest tool for probing the pepper’s distant past is the microscopic analysis of starch grains, tiny particles left behind on ancient stone grinding tools and cooking vessels. The semi-crystalline starch grains are distinctive enough that researchers can distinguish capsicum grains from those of corn, beans, and squash, and differentiate between grains from wild and domesticated peppers. The oldest identified so far, dating to 6,100 years ago, came from a pair of archaeological sites in southwestern Ecuador, where the inhabitants, based on their microscopic leavings, ate a varied diet of peppers, corn, squash, beans, yucca, arrowroot, and palm fruit.
Dozens of varieties of today’s five domesticated pepper species were grown by pre-Columbian Indians. Perhaps our best window on early pepper cuisine is the General History of the Things of New Spain, also known as the Florentine Codex, completed in 1569 by the astute and observant Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagún. Father Bernardino — who lived to the age of ninety — spent more than sixty years in Aztec Mexico, during which he learned to speak fluent Nahuatl and compiled the detailed twelve-volume work on Aztec society touted by some as the first work of modern ethnography.
In the matter of food, he notes that the Aztecs had more than twenty different varieties of chile peppers, among them “hot green chiles, smoked chiles, water chiles, tree chiles, beetle chiles, and sharp-pointed red chiles,” variously used in a range of dishes such as “frog with green pepper, newt with yellow pepper, tadpoles with small peppers, maguey grubs with a sauce of small chillis [and] lobster with red chilli, tomatoes, and ground squash seeds.” Bernabé Cobo, who traveled through Central and South America in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, observed some 40 different pepper varieties, some as small as pine nuts, others the size of plums.
Most common in gardens today are breeds of Capsicum annuum, a versatile crew that includes sweet bell peppers, red paprika peppers, pimiento peppers (used primarily to stuff olives), and an array of hot peppers, among them the familiar jalapeño and cayenne and the tiny chiltepin or bird pepper. The first description of the mild bell pepper is generally attributed to Lionel Wafer, a surgeon’s mate turned buccaneer, who observed them in the 1680s while marooned on the Isthmus of Panama. Visiting Swedish naturalist Peter Kalm, observing the plants of Philadelphia in 1748, noted “Capsicum annuum or Guinea pepper” growing in gardens, used “strewed” over roasted meat or fried fish, or pickled with cucumbers.
Thomas Jefferson grew cayenne, “Bull Nose” (a form of bell), and bird peppers. Seeds of these last were the gift of a Captain Samuel Brown, who sent them from San Antonio, Texas, in 1813; Jefferson planted them both in his kitchen garden and in pots. He worried that the plant might be “too tender” for the Virginia climate, and in a subsequent letter to Brown reported that “the Capsicum I am anxious to see up; but it does not show itself . . . I do not yet however despair of them.” Eventually it seems that he did, since there is no further mention of bird peppers
in his Garden Book.
Capsicum baccatum and C. pubescens, cultivated by the Incas of Peru, both were among the gifts with which Atahualpa attempted to buy off the invading Spaniards under Pizarro. C. baccatum was reputedly a favored flavoring for accompanying broiled guinea pig, while C. pubescens, commonly called the rocoto pepper, is a thick-fleshed stuffing pepper, described by latter-day Peruvians as “hot enough to kill a gringo.” C. frutescens is known to most of us as the prime ingredient of Tabasco sauce, and C. chinense includes the bright yellow-orange habañero pepper and the Scotch Bonnet pepper, so named for its resemblance to a tam-o-shanter. Like all capsicums, C. chinense is American, not Chinese: the name is a goof perpetrated by Dutch plant collector Nikolaus von Jacquin in 1776, who may have obtained some pepper seeds from China.
C. chinense is blisteringly hot, which — although not all peppers are — is the capsicums’ major claim to fame. Historian Peter Martyr, writing in 1493, barely after American capsicums had touched down on European soil, mentions that the fruits were “hotter than the pepper of the Caucasus” (that is, black pepper). By the 1550s, botanist-physician Rembert Dodoens announced that the new peppers were strong enough to kill dogs; and in 1772 the botanically minded Dominican priest Francisco Ximénez wrote of a Cuban pepper so inflammatory that a single pod could render “a bull unable to eat.”
