by Rebecca Rupp
Pepper-generated heat (specialists prefer the term “pungency”) is due to a family of flavorless, odorless but explosively obvious chemical compounds known as capsaicinoids. Officially known as vanillyl amides, at least six of these have been identified to date — the first, capsaicin, crystallized and named in 1876 by John Clough Thresh, an Englishman working in India, where the dominant seasoning, curry, teems with capsaicinoids. The various capsaicin compounds have somewhat different effects on the human mouth: three give what are described as “rapid bite sensations” in the back of the palate and throat; two produce a low-intensity slow burn on the tongue and mid-palate. Different combinations of these produce the different hotness characteristics of individual pepper strains.
Pepper hotness rating — though now objectively analyzed using high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) — was in the past solely a function of the professional human tongue. The technique traditionally used is the Scoville Organoleptic Test, devised in 1912 by Wilbur Scoville of the Parke-Davis pharmaceutical company. In Scoville’s process, pepper samples are steeped in ethanol, and the extracts diluted in a sucrose solution to yield a “cordial.” Samples of these cordials are sipped by trained tasters, who determine the weakest dilution at which the hotness sensation is detectable.
* * *
Liquid Lava
The website www.peppers.com, which claims to feature the “World’s Largest Collection of Hot Sauces,” lists more than 2,000 fearsome pepper preparations, with descriptors that include “agony,” “venomous,” “hellfire,” “sudden death,” “liquid lava,” “berserker,” and “Krakatoa.” In season 8 of the popular TV show “The Simpsons,” Homer falls victim to the Merciless Peppers of Quetzlzacatenango (“grown deep in the jungle primeval by the inmates of a Guatemalan insane asylum”), a pepper so scorching that it brings on hallucinations, including an interlude with a talking coyote voiced by Johnny Cash. Collectively, such hot peppers have become a staple of popular culture, spawning mouth-scorching hot-pepper-eating contests nationwide.
* * *
The hottest pepper known to date is the recently identified bhut jolokia, or “ghost chili,” grown in northeastern India, evaluated at just over a million SHUs.
Pepper pungency is expressed in Scoville Heat Units (SHU), with the sweet bell pepper — dead bottom when it comes to pepper hotness — scoring 0 SHU. The feisty jalapeño usually ranges from 2,500 to 4,000 SHU, which means that jalapeño extract has to be diluted by a factor of 2,500 to 4,000 before it loses its zing. The Tabasco rates 60,000 to 80,000 SHU; and the unspeakable habañero, depending on the cultivar, packs a punch of 150,000 to 575,000. The hottest pepper known to date is the recently identified bhut jolokia or “ghost chili,” a C. chinense grown in northeastern India, evaluated at just over a million SHUs.
From pepper to pepper, capsaicin content is affected by climatic conditions, geographic location, and age of the fruit. As a general rule, warm-weather peppers are higher in capsaicin than their cool-weather relatives, which explains why those crops raised in the United States are usually calmer than those raised south of the border. The weather factor can be felt on even a short-term basis. According to the late Jean Andrews, Texas pepper expert and author of Peppers: The Domesticated Capsicums (1995), a summer heat wave will spice up the capsicums of every garden in its path. Particularly effective are sweltering nights: a high night temperature appears closely correlated to capsaicin level. Hotness also increases with age of the fruit. Infant peppers are universally harmless; in most, pungency only begins to develop around four weeks of age, then increases steadily with advancing maturity.
New York City Transit officials dusted hot pepper on subway token slots to prevent unprincipled teenagers from sucking tokens out of the turnstiles.
Capsaicin can be off-putting. It’s the major ingredient in the anti-dog-and-mugger aerosols toted by mail carriers and joggers; ranchers smear it on their sheep to discourage wolves and coyotes; gardeners spray it on their flower bulbs to ward off squirrels and (in Texas) sprinkle it around their vegetable gardens to fend off armadillos. Experiments conducted in Alaska indicate that pepper spray is effective in deterring bears (except when it’s windy) and Indian researchers hope to use extracts of bhut jolokia both as a counterinsurgency weapon and as a defense against marauding elephants.
In a brief surge of creativity in 1983, New York City Transit officials dusted hot pepper on subway token slots to prevent unprincipled teenagers from sucking tokens out of the turnstiles. In what can only be hoped was an even briefer surge in the eighteenth century, entertainment-minded Londoners sneakily poured hot pepper into snuffboxes as a practical joke.
Capsaicin is also the main component of modern and historical organic insect sprays. In the mid-1800s, a Dr. Barton of Philadelphia boasted of successfully defeating cucumber beetles with his personal fumigatory mix of ground red pepper and tobacco. A rose lover of the same era advised those with insect-infested rosebushes to “take a shovel of live coals of fire, split open a red pepper and lay on the coals, and hold so that the smoke will go through the bush.”
But what does capsaicin do for the pepper? What’s all this hot stuff for? Although it’s clear that evolutionarily, plants do nothing without a good reason, until recently the biological benefits of capsaicin to its parent pepper have been less than obvious. Now, however, research by Joshua Tewksbury and colleagues from the University of Washington indicates that capsaicin functions in “directed deterrence” — that is, it wards off some pepper-eating animals but not others.
In the wild, pepper seeds are usually dispersed by birds, which is why wild peppers tend to have gaudy-colored and jauntily erect fruits. Attached in an upright position to the parent plant, the fruit sticks suggestively up out of the foliage, the better to attract the attention of birds. (In the hands of early pepper growers, who were anti-bird, plants were selected for pendant fruits, dangling downward and sneakily hidden in the leaves, which is standard for the modern cultivated pepper.) Pepper seeds pass undamaged through avian digestive tracts, to be scattered far and wide in the aftermath of bird dinners.
Seeds eaten by masticating mammals, however, are for the most part crunched up and destroyed. Hence the purpose of tongue-searing capsaicin: it doesn’t bother helpful, seed-distributing birds, but puts off seed-munching mammals. Backyard birdwatchers sometimes spritz birdseed with capsaicin-containing pepper to keep squirrels out of their feeders.
The obvious mammal that capsaicin does not protect the pepper against is us. No matter how scorching the pepper, people persist in eating them. Psychology professor Paul Rozin of the University of Pennsylvania, who studies people’s relationships to food, believes that our passion for peppers is an example of “constrained risk”: we like hot peppers for the same reason that we enjoy scary movies and roller-coaster rides, because they give us an exciting and adrenalin-laden thrill of danger, without actually being dangerous.
Alternatively, consuming hot peppers may give us a natural high. Capsaicins bind to sensory neurons in the mouth and throat that specialize in sensing heat and pain. Activation of pain receptors on the cell surfaces releases substance P, a neuro-peptide that transmits pain signals to the brain and central nervous system, and triggers the release of endorphins, endogenous morphine-like compounds that reduce pain and stress, and — if you’re lucky — induce euphoria. Pepper eating, in other words, may invoke the lazy person’s equivalent of the runner’s high.
The sensation of heat that accompanies pepper eating is also the result of a molecular interaction. A protein called the TRPV1 receptor on the surface of sensory cells is activated by heat at temperatures above 109 degrees F — these are the cells, for example, that tell you when you’re being scalded in the shower. Similarly, TRPV1 is activated by capsaicin, but (deceptively) at normal body temperature (98.6 degrees F) or below, which gives you the sensation of being scorched without actually being burned. Peculiarly, capsaicin seems to share this mechanism of action with t
arantula venom. Pain-inducing chemicals in spider venom bind to the same receptor on the sensory cell surface, creating the same painful, burning effect. If you’ve eaten a hot pepper, in other words, you know how a tarantula bite feels.
* * *
Ow! Try Yogurt
To get rid of the burn of a hot pepper, forget water or beer.
Capsaicinoids are not water-soluble, but will dissolve in fats and oils.
The best bet is a mouthful of yogurt, cheese, or ice cream.
* * *
If you’ve eaten a hot pepper, you know how a tarantula bite feels.
As well as harmlessly hot and painful, peppers are flavorful, and these days most growers and diners aim for a more positive gustatory effect than a screech followed by a gulp of milk. Flavor appears closely associated with carotenoid compounds, colorful molecules that turn the capsicums their gaudy reds, oranges, and yellows. The deeper the color, according to Jean Andrews, the more flavorful the pepper.
The major red in red peppers is capsanthin, a carotenoid that constitutes some 35 percent of pepper pigments. This powerful and safely natural coloring agent is used these days to color sausages, cheeses, fruit gelatins, drugs, and cosmetics. Included in chicken feed, it turns chicken skin yellow and attractively darkens the color of egg yolks; fed to dairy cows, less successfully, it produces pinkish milks and butters. It spruces up plumage color in cage birds and, in zoos, improves the look of dingy flamingoes.
Red peppers also contain at least five other carotenoid pigments and, in some varieties, as many as thirty. The yellow and orange capsicums get their color from beta-carotene, also a major pigment of carrots. Green peppers are capsanthin-less; brown peppers, such as the “chocolate-colored” Mexican pasilla pepper (or chile negro), contain both chlorophyll and capsanthin, a mix of red and green that produces a biological brown. (The pasilla, dried, resembles a raisin; hence its name, from the Spanish pasa, “raisin.”)
* * *
Son-of-a-Bitch Stew
Kit Carson’s last words may have been “Adios, compadres” — or, favored by chili fans, he may have said in his last gasp, “Wish I had time for just one more bowl of chili.”
The origin of Carson’s favorite chili is also up for grabs. Various theories attribute its source to the chile-laden pemmican of the Plains Indians, to the Canary Islanders who introduced cumin seed to San Antonio in the 1730s, or to the chuckwagon cooks on the cattle trails. Or possibly to the lavanderas, or laundresses, who accompanied the Mexican army during the border battles of the 1830s and 1840s, and who, along with scrubbing shirts, stuffed the soldiers with a mix of goat meat, wild marjoram, and red chiles known as son-of-a-bitch stew.
From any or all of the above, chili has evolved into a meal for all regions. Maine chili is made with shell beans, California chili with avocados and olives, Alaska chili with moosemeat, and Texas chili (which originated, claims a vociferous Ohio faction, in Cincinnati) with goat, skunk, or snake. Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders made chili with beefsteak and may have consumed a pot or two before taking part in their famous charge up San Juan Hill.
Famous chili fanciers include Will Rogers, who routinely judged a town by the quality of its chili, and Jesse James, who passed up the bank in McKinney, Texas, because the town harbored his favorite chili parlor.
* * *
The pepper is a repository of nutritional goodies. Peppers bulge with vitamins C, A, E, thiamine (B1), riboflavin (B2), and niacin (B3). Vitamin C — now touted as a preventive for the common cold — was first purified in 1928 by Hungarian biochemist Albert Szent-Györgyi from a rejected supper dish of sweet paprika peppers. The sweet pepper concoction may be the most fortunate failed recipe in history. Szent-Györgyi, who had been struggling unsuccessfully with extracts of bovine adrenal glands, described it as a “treasure trove” of the new vitamin, for which discovery he was to win the Nobel Prize for Physiology and Medicine nine years later in 1937.
Peppers can contain six times as much vitamin C as oranges and, as early as the seventeenth century, were taken to sea by Spanish sailors, who may or may not have recognized their usefulness as a scurvy cure. The green fruit has the highest levels of vitamin C. Levels decrease with maturity, and one researcher has found that as capsaicin goes up, C drops off, which argues that the hottest peppers aren’t necessarily the healthiest. Raw fresh fruits are the best C sources; content diminishes about 30 percent in canned or cooked peppers and essentially vanishes altogether from dried peppers. One three-ounce sweet pepper is enough to provide an adult with his or her U.S. Recommended Daily Allowance of vitamin C with a bit left over.
Szent-Györgyi’s peppers may be the most fortunate failed recipe in history, leading as it did to the discovery of vitamin C.
Historically, the capsicums have also been valued medicinally, dating back at least to the ancient Mayas, who used them to treat asthma, coughs, and sore throats. The sixteenth-century Spanish priest José de Acosta noted that moderate consumption of peppers “helps and comforts the stomach for digestion,” which it may indeed have done: recent research has shown that capsaicin boosts secretion of saliva and stomach acids, and increases peristaltic movements. On the other hand, too much pepper “is prejudicial to the health of young folks, chiefly to the soul, for it provokes to lust.”
Henry Phillips, in his History of Cultivated Garden Vegetables (1822), recommends preparations of “Guinea Pepper” for yellow fever, influenza, and toothache, and various contemporaries pitched peppers for everything from acne and apoplexy to vertigo and venereal disease. Capsaicin does seem effective in deep-heat rubdown liniments for achy muscles and arthritis, and a dash of powdered pepper in your socks is said to warm up cold feet.
There’s also some evidence that capsaicin may be effective as an anticancer drug. Preliminary studies have shown that capsaicin effectively kills tumors in mice suffering from pancreatic or prostate cancer. In the latter study, mice were given capsaicin in amounts equivalent to a human consuming ten habañero peppers three times a week; results showed that 80 percent of the cancer cells in the treated mice had died and the remaining tumors were just one-fifth the size of those in the untreated controls. On the other hand, other results indicate that capsaicin may actually exacerbate stomach and skin cancers, so plunging into a weekly gorge on peppers may be premature.
A dash of powdered pepper in your socks is said to warm up cold feet.
These days Americans eat on average 16 pounds of bell peppers and 6 pounds of hot peppers a year. California is the leading bell-pepper producer in the United States, while New Mexico — whose state vegetable is the chile pepper — leads the nation in chiles. America’s most popular chile pepper is the jalapeño, and of all peppers it has probably had the most exciting career. In November 1982, when astronaut Bill Lenoir took a few on board the spaceship Columbia, the jalapeño became the first capsicum in space.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
In Which
POTATOES BAFFLE
THE
CONQUISTADORS
plus
A Victorian Dr. Spock, Weeping
Peruvian Brides, Rafting to Polynesia,
Marie Antoinette’s Coiffeur,
The Reverend Berkeley’s Microscope,
and A Weapon of Mass Destruction
What I say is that if a fellow really likes potatoes, he must be a pretty decent sort of fellow.
A. A. MILNE
Pye Henry Chavasse, the Dr. Spock of the Victorian era, was a fan of potatoes. In his 1844 bestseller, Advice to a Mother on the Management of Her Children, he avers that “old potatoes, well cooked and mealy” are the best vegetable a child can possibly eat — provided they were very well mashed, since lumps, warns Chavasse, have been known to send the young into convulsions. He was doubtful about the benefits of greens, though reluctantly permitted an occasional serving of asparagus, broccoli, cauliflower, or turnip, and he absolutely forbade onions and garlic.
Thanks to Chavasse, students at Eton were fed nothin
g but mutton and potatoes for lunch and dinner all three hundred and sixty-five days of the year, the dietary monotony only alleviated by plum pudding on Sundays, a bequest of Lord Godolphin in 1785. Charles Dickens wrote that “the inmates of a workhouse or gaol were better fed and lodged than the scholars of Eton.”
The unfortunate Etonians were not alone in their distaste for potatoes. Eighteenth-century French Enlightenment philosopher Denis Diderot, chief editor of the famous Encyclopédie (which eventually ran to thirty-five volumes, published from 1751 to 1772), stated sourly that the potato “cannot pass for an agreeable food.” No matter how one prepared it, the result was “tasteless and floury,” although it just might possibly have “some value in the colonies,” where presumably people were hungry enough to eat it. French naturalist Raoul Combs in 1749 pronounced it “the worst of all vegetables,” and William Cobbett, English farmer, journalist, and social activist, who called it “the villanous root,” simply loathed it. Even drinking the water in which potatoes were boiled, according to Cobbett, could induce irreversible moral damage; and he bemoaned the fact that Sir Walter Raleigh was not beheaded earlier, before he had had the chance to introduce the British to the insidious potato.
Actually, the potato may not have been Sir Walter’s fault. Potatoes were domesticated about 10,000 years ago in the Andes of Peru by high-altitude-dwelling ancestors of the Incas. To the original planters, the potato must have been a godsend, since not much else grows readily in the Andean high sierra. While corn wimpishly peters out around 11,000 feet, potatoes proliferate undaunted up to 15,000, which means, should you be so inclined, you could establish a productive potato patch halfway up Mount Everest.
