Culture:

Chile Peppers: A Global History

by Rhonda Brittan | February 22, 2021
4 min read
"Chile Peppers" book cover

“Chile Peppers: A Global History: Travels with the Fiery Plant that Changed the World” by Dave DeWitt, University of New Mexico Press 2020, Paper 354 pages, $29.95

Compiling 44 years of writings, Dave DeWitt, the “Pope of Peppers,” has put together a book every bit as colorful as the chiles he loves.

The creator/producer of the National Fiery Foods & Barbeque Show in Albuquerque, which began in 1988 and is still being held at the Sandia Resort and Casino, DeWitt begins by introducing us to five domesticated species of chiles, providing concise descriptions and close-up photographs of each.

Two of the species—bacctum and pubescens—were unfamiliar to me. But the others have become commonplace in the American diet: annuum (bells, jalapeños, cayennes, anchos and serranos), chinense (habeneros) and frutescens (tabascos).

After an opening chapter that explains how a “tolerated weed” came to be domesticated, the body of the book is organized geographically. DeWitt has visited each of the regions covered in the book, from the Caribbean to Africa to Asia. Given pandemic travel restrictions and the author’s warning that some countries he visited have since become more dangerous, the reader is the lucky beneficiary of his firsthand experiences and research into the agricultural and cultural history of each region.

All species in the capsicum genus originated in South America, we learn in Chapter 1. In fact, chiles were one of the earliest plants domesticated there. DeWitt traces those origins as far back as possible, to Pre-Colombian times in the Bolivian/Brazilian area, where pots excavated there reveal traces of chile peppers and chocolate cultivated from wild plants by the Incas, Mayans, and Aztecs.

Only three species—annuum, chinense and frutescens—migrated north, becoming commercially important. A photograph in this chapter showing an African grey parrot munching on a pepper pod surprised me, but that is how chile seeds were thought to have spread. Only later in the book is it explained that mammals are sensitive to the heat of chiles, but birds are not.

A section at the end of each chapter is devoted to recipes gleaned from restaurants, cultures and nations of each region. The reader can reap the rewards of the author’s investment of time, money and effort in scouring the world by cooking traditional dishes at home, all the while remembering the interesting characters the author encountered in gathering up these classic recipes from Jamaica to Malaysia.

I brewed a hot cup of the Xocolatl: Royal Chocolate with Chile. A sweet vegan drink featured in Chapter 1, it had me reflecting on how ancient Mayan society employed now-staple ingredients to make something that still tastes delicious millennia later.

Here’s the very simple recipe:

1 1/2 cups boiling water

1/4 cup cocoa powder

1 tablespoon honey

1/4 tsp chile powder

The recipe sections are printed on solid-colored pages the reader can see at the edge of the book, enabling its use as a cookbook. The first page of each chapter is a solid color, too, that matches its recipe section. Beautiful!

Chapter 4, titled “The Spicy US States,” treats us to a hilarious transcription of a shoot for a television show called “Heat Up Your Life” for which the author served as host. Filmed near Lafayette, Louisiana, it featured chef Scott Landry demonstrating how to properly cook and season an alligator. “The most important thing,” the chef advised DeWitt, “is to cut all that fat off, because that fat, oh man, that is nasty.”

Chapter 4 also takes us to colonial America, telling us that Thomas Jefferson cultivated several types of chiles at Monticello. The author spoke with Peter J. Hatch, the director of the gardens and grounds for the Thomas Jefferson Foundation. I thought it was funny that someone named Hatch would be in charge of chiles grown on the east coast.

The final two chapters of the book are, like the first chapter, organized thematically. In Chapter 9, titled “Hot Means Healthy,” DeWitt gives a nice explanation of how the Regolex plant in Radium Springs processes the paprika pepper that the owner of the plant also grows. We have all noticed the plant on the east side of I-25 and wondered about it. Regolex’s oleoresin paprika is used primarily by food processors to add color to their products. “It is an ingredient in chicken feed because it enriches the color of egg yolks, and gives gray chicken meat a pinkish hue,” DeWitt reports, providing perhaps more information than we need.

The author waits until this chapter to present the biography of Wilbur Scoville, the pharmaceutical chemist who was the first person to quantify the heat of chile peppers. A table of the Scoville Heat Units of several chile varieties is not to be found until page 283. Wrangling 44 years of research occasionally results in inconveniently placed information such as this.

Another criticism is that there are no geographical maps, so I found myself a bit lost at times and had to refer to my own world map. But the book, which concludes with a chapter titled “Chiles Become Legendary,” is written with such enthusiasm that any shortcomings can be forgiven.

Part memoir, part travelogue and part cookbook, this volume supplies a bounty of intricately detailed anecdotes and adventures with a purpose: to share the lore, mystery, history and flavors of chiles from around the world.

Buen Provecho!

author

Rhonda Brittan owned and operated Black Cat Books & Coffee, a used book store and community gathering place, in Truth or Consequences from 2001 to 2019.  In retirement, she has been able to spend more time with her husband at their Hillsboro cabin and taught herself to play an inherited ukulele. But she still enjoys turning people on to literary and non-fiction classics.

Share this:
HAVE YOU SEEN?

Understanding New Mexico's proposed new social studies standards for K-12 students

“The primary purpose of social studies is to help young people develop the ability to make informed and reasoned decisions for the public good as citizens of a culturally diverse, democratic society in an interdependent world.”
—National Council for the Social Studies 

Reader Michael L. Hayes of Las Cruces commented: What impresses me is that both the proposed standards and some of the criticisms of them are equally grotesque. I make this bold statement on the basis of my experience as a peripatetic high school and college English teacher for 45 years in many states with many students differing in race, religion, gender and socioeconomic background, and as a civic activist (PTA) in public education (My career, however, was as an independent consultant mainly in defense, energy and the environment.)

The proposed social studies standards are conceptually and instructionally flawed. For starters, a “performance standard” is not a standard at all; it is a task. Asking someone to explain something is not unlike asking someone to water the lawn. Nothing measures the performance, but without a measure, there is no standard. The teacher’s subjective judgment will be all that matters, and almost anything will count as satisfying a “performance standard,” even just trying. Students will be left to wonder “what is on the teacher’s mind?” or “have I sucked up enough.”

Four other quick criticisms of the performance standards. One, they are nearly unintelligible because they are written in jargon. PED’s use of jargon in a document intended for the public is worrisome. Bureaucrats often use jargon to confuse or conceal something uninformed, wrong or unworthy. As a result, most parents, some school board members and more than a few teachers do not understand them.

Two, the performance standards are so vague that they fail to define the education which teachers are supposed to teach, students are supposed to learn, and parents are supposed to understand. PED does not define words like “explain” or “describe” so that teachers can apply “standards” consistently and fairly. The standards do not indicate what teachers are supposed to know in order to teach or specify what students are supposed to learn. Supervisors cannot know whether teachers are teaching social studies well or poorly. The standards are so vague that the public, especially parents or guardians, cannot know the content of public education.

Three, many performance standards are simply unrealistic, especially at grade level. Under “Ethnic, Cultural and Identity Performance Standards”; then under “Diversity and Identity”; then under “Kindergarten,” one such standard is: “Identify how their family does things both the same as and different from how other people do things.” Do six-year-olds know how other people do things? Do they know whether these things are relevant to diversity and identity? Or another standard: “Describe their family history, culture, and past to current contributions of people in their main identity groups.” (A proficient writer would have hyphenated the compound adjective to avoid confusing the reader.) Do six-year-olds know so much about these things in relation to their “identity group”? Since teachers obviously do not teach them about these other people and have not taught them about these groups, why are these and similar items in the curriculum; or do teachers assign them to go home and collect this information?

Point four follows from “three”; some information relevant to some performance measures requires a disclosure of personal or family matters. The younger the students, the easier it is for teachers to invade their privacy and not only their privacy, but also the privacy of their parents or guardians, or neighbors, who may never be aware of these disclosures or not become aware of them until afterward. PED has no right to design a curriculum which requires teachers to ask students for information about themselves, parents or guardians, or neighbors, or puts teachers on the spot if the disclosures reveal criminal conduct. (Bill says Jeff’s father plays games in bed with his daughter. Lila says Angelo’s mother gives herself shots in the arm.) Since teacher-student communications have no legal protection to ensure privacy, those disclosures may become public accidentally or deliberately. The effect of these proposal standards is to turn New Mexico schools and teachers into investigative agents of the state and students into little informants or spies.

This PED proposal for social studies standards is a travesty of education despite its appeals to purportedly enlightened principles. It constitutes a clear and present danger to individual liberty and civil liberties. It should be repudiated; its development, investigated; its PED perpetrators, dismissed. No state curriculum should encourage or require the disclosure of private personal information.

I am equally outraged by the comments of some of T or C’s school board members: Christine LaFont and Julianne Stroup, two white Christian women, who belong to one of the larger minorities in America and assume white and Christian privileges. In different terms but for essentially the same reason, both oppose an education which includes lessons about historical events and trends, and social movements and developments, of other minorities. They object to the proposal for the new social studies standards because of its emphasis on individual and group identities not white or Christian. I am not going to reply with specific objections; they are too numerous and too pointed.

Ms. LaFont urges: “It’s better to address what’s similar with all Americans. It’s not good to differentiate.” Ms. Stroup adds: “Our country is not a racist country. We have to teach to respect each other. We have civil rights laws that protect everyone from discrimination. We need to teach civics, love and respect. We need to teach how to be color blind.”

Their desires for unity and homogeneity, and for mutual respect, are a contradiction and an impossibility. Aside from a shared citizenship, which implies acceptance of the Constitution, the rule of law and equality under the law, little else defines Americans. We are additionally defined by our race, religion, national origin, etc. So mutual respect requires individuals to respect others different from themselves. Disrespect desires blacks, Jews or Palestinians to assimilate or to suppress or conceal racial, religious or national origin aspects of their identity. The only people who want erasure of nonwhite, non-Christian, non-American origin aspects of identity are bigots. Ms. LaFont and Ms. Stroud want standards which, by stressing similarities and eliding differences, desire the erasure of such aspects. What they want will result in a social studies curriculum that enables white, Christian, native-born children to grow up to be bigots and all others to be their victims. This would be the academic equivalent of ethnic cleansing.

H.E.L.P.

This postmortem of a case involving a 75-year-old women who went missing from her home in Hillsboro last September sheds light on the bounds of law enforcement’s capacity to respond, especially in large rural jurisdictions such as Sierra County, and underscores the critical role the public, as well as concerned family and friends, can play in assisting a missing person’s search.

Reader Jane Debrott of Hillsboro commented: Thank you for your article on the tragic loss of Betsey. I am a resident of Hillsboro, a friend of Rick and Betsey, and a member of H.E.L.P. The thing that most distresses me now, is the emphasis on Rick’s mis-naming of the color of their car. I fear that this fact will cause Rick to feel that if he had only gotten the facts right, Betsey may have been rescued before it was too late. The incident was a series of unavoidable events, out of everyone’s control, and we will never know what place the correct color of her car may have had in the outcome. It breaks my heart to think that Rick has had one more thing added to his “what ifs” concerning this incident.

Diana Tittle responded: Dear Jane, the Sun undertook this investigation at the request of a Hillsboro resident concerned about the town’s inability to mount a prompt, coordinated response to the disappearance of a neighbor. From the beginning, I shared your concern about how our findings might affect Betsy’s family and friends. After I completed my research and began writing, I weighed each detail I eventually chose to include against my desire to cause no pain and the public’s right to know about the strengths and limitations of law enforcement’s response and the public’s need to know about how to be of meaningful assistance.

There was information I withheld about the state police investigation and the recovery. But I decided to include the issue of the car’s color because the individuals who spotted Betsy’s car emphasized how its color had been key to their identification of it as the vehicle described in Betsy’s Silver Alert. Because the misinformation was corrected within a couple of hours, I also included in this story the following editorial comment meant to put the error in perspective: “The fact that law enforcement throughout the state was on the lookout in the crucial early hours after Betsy’s disappearance for an elderly woman driving a “light blue” instead of a “silver” Accord would, in retrospect, likely not have changed the outcome of the search” [emphasis added].

I would also point to the story’s overarching conclusion about the inadvisability of assigning blame for what happened: “In this case, a perfect storm of unfortunate circumstances, many of them beyond human control, hindered the search that it would fall to Hamilton’s department to lead.”

It is my hope that any pain caused by my reporting will eventually be outweighed by its contribution to a better community understanding of what it will take in the future to mount a successful missing person’s search in rural Sierra County.

Scroll to Top