It’s early spring in these parts and that means that gardeners like me have had a switch go off in their heads. Normally slow and slothful, as my long-suffering wife will attest, I’ve been overtaken by a sudden urge to get enough vegetable seedlings in the ground within the next month to green the Sahara Desert.
Among the plants that have triggered this aberration is the humble chilli. While I merely like them, my wife eats them the way other people snack on apples. So I dutifully grow a row of them in our market garden each season, and it’s a minor miracle that any reach the farmer’s market on a Saturday morning.
Chilli (also spelt chili) is an Aztec word that is unrelated to that outlandishly long and narrow country clinging limpet like to the western face of the Andes. About the only thing longer than that Chile is the list of theories regarding the origin of its name, and it’ll take a braver person than me to wade into those murky waters.
When the Spanish encountered chillies for the first time, they did what conquering peoples so often do – they ignored the existing (and no doubt inferior) nomenclature and called them peppers for the obvious reason that they reminded them of the familiar Piper nigrum that still fills pepper shakers the world over. Ironically, it was that pepper that they’d inadvertently bumped into the Americas in search of.
In a remarkable show of redundancy, some people now insist on calling chillies chilli peppers. Among them is Bob Dylan, who began Romance in Durango with the line “hot chilli peppers in the blistering sun”. At least he had the poet’s excuse that it needed to be done if the line was to scan. Also, he has a Nobel Prize in Literature so until I’m similarly recognised (which, by the way, I’m expecting any day now), I’m not picking a fight with him over how song lyrics should be written.
As readers will be aware – some through bitter experience – chillies come in varying degrees of heat. Down the lower (though not lowest) end of the scale are the jalapenos beloved of pizza makers and Subway outlets, while the upper register is occupied by habaneros, ghost chillies and, current champion of champions, the Carolina Reaper (1,641,183 Scoville Heat Units according to Guinness World Records).
Even tiny quantities of any of the last three in your succotash will wake you up. Why the hell anyone would want to pop any of them into their mouths whole is anyone’s guess, but pop them in their mouths some people most definitely do.
In doing so, they’re triggering the release of massive quantities of capsaicin (pronounced cap-SAY-a-sin) into their bodies. Put bluntly, this is an act of insanity. An otherwise fine judge of what’s happening to you, your body is tricked by capsaicin into thinking you’re now on fire and, in response, it turns on every cooling mechanism at its disposal including sweating, whimpering like a man begging for forgiveness and writhing about in agony.
The heat you feel from horseradish, mustard and wasabi is caused by another compound entirely, called isothiocyanate. While it, too, can trigger newsworthy dramas, the pain generally subsides quickly. Unless you’re the unfortunate Israeli woman who wolfed down a teaspoon of wasabi at a wedding believing it to be avocado. It took a month and the intervention of a sizeable medical team armed with many pharmaceuticals for things to return to normal.
My first encounter with seriously hot chilli was as a callow youth. I’d recently moved from the family farm to attend university in Auckland. During one of the term breaks at the international hostel I was staying in, the Asian students generously invited me to attend a casual dinner they were hosting. At some point I innocently picked up a deep-fried wonton-like delicacy and dipped it into what I assumed was a sweet, mild chilli sauce like those I was accustomed to.
Chilli it was. Sweet and mild it was not.
For a while afterwards, I was convinced that such sauces were an Asian plot to humiliate the rest of us. My views have softened since, in parallel with a growing appreciation of chilli’s many charms.
(Having also encountered many more Asian people since then, I’ve also learned that they, like everyone else, are neither evil enough nor organised enough to be plotting anything I need worry about.)
Today, there are few savoury dishes I don’t enjoy more with a dash of Tabasco sauce and, as far as I’m concerned, God must have been feeling very kindly towards humanity the day he gave us the deliciously fruity habanero chilli.
As for the garden, I hope it blesses us once again with an abundance of chillies. Even more fervently, I hope my wife - a stunning cook who I don’t deserve - continues to remember when serving dinner that a little chilli goes a very long way.
Quote of the week
“It’s a cold bowl of chili when love lets you down.”
Neil Young, Saddle Up the Palomino