Like many stereotypes, it is not completely without justice: my in-laws from Indiana are incapable of handling any sort of spicy food. My wife, over the years of our association, has learned to handle fairly hot foods -- far hotter than anything made in China, where we lived in 2000-1 -- though still not as spicy as I like them.
But also like stereotypes usually, this one has limits. There's the usual fault of stereotypes generalizing too much. A German isn't "white" the same way someone from Ohio is, and Cincinnati chili isn't much like Texas red chili, which isn't much like New Mexican red chili.
More, though, there's a real corollary to this stereotype: while many white people don't like spicy foods, the white people who do like spicy foods like the spiciest food in the world. In fact the hottest chilies were mostly developed in the US, UK, or Australia. There's a reason that the second hottest chile pepper in the world is the Carolina Reaper, not something made in China (although this is obscured by the fact that all of them are part of the family capsicum chinense, which is due to a misconception by early Spaniards that the habanero and Scotch bonnets were from China; they were actually native to South America).
In 2001, Paul Bosland, a researcher at the Chile Pepper Institute at New Mexico State University, visited India to collect specimens of ghost pepper, also called the Bhut Jolokia or Naga king chili,** traditionally grown near Assam, India, which was being studied by the Indian army for weaponization.
We put it in food, bred hotter versions of it than nature ever dreamed, and put those in food too. If you go to any festival around the South, there will be a booth selling hot pepper sauces and/or pastes. These will definitely include not just habanero sauces, but sauces made out of Reaper peppers, Scorpion peppers, Viper peppers, and so forth. The super-hot peppers are new, but the love of spice in the South is not. Even when I was a boy, every truck stop restaurant had three kinds of pepper sauces on the table, including one that was just packed with hot peppers and white vinegar. In Smoky and the Bandit, from the same era, the sheriff orders a "diablo sandwich" in a hurry.
A friend of mine down the road was born in Acapulco, and married a Cherokee woman up here; his son is thus half-Mexican and half-Cherokee. That son ate chili with us exactly once, and then pleaded that he was full and wanted to take the rest home. He offered it to his father, who declared that it was too hot to eat; my wife likes to point out that I'd made that batch mild because she had a stomach bug.
* She's also wrong. The heat of the chile isn't in the seeds, and isn't removed if you remove the seeds. Usually if you're going to be patronizing on purpose, it's a good idea to make sure you know what you're talking about.
** There's not a universal standard on the spelling. Around here we use "chili" for the meat stew made with peppers we call "chiles," which is eaten whether or not the weather is "chilly." It's actually good in hot weather, as it makes you sweat, another reason that spicy food has long been popular in the South -- it's cooling.
UPDATE:
*** I assumed it was a girl because of the story being about a boyfriend, but I forgot how different San Francisco’s community standards are from the ones we have here.
UPDATE:
Back on the “part of this stereotype is justified” hand, I found this cookbook on the “Free! please take it!” shelf of a used bookstore in Waynesville, North Carolina. Apparently there was limited interest. That is too bad! It’s a fantastic cookbook that has great stuff from around the world. I recommend it highly.
I do enjoy heat and spice in my food, although I suspect that I’m not in your league, Grim. I have a lot to learn and much yet to experience in terms of Asian cuisines, as well as other hot/spicy cuisines. The best ramen I’ve ever had was in Lviv, Ukraine.
ReplyDeleteThai and Vietnamese food is spicier than Chinese food, of which much is quite bland although there are regions such as Sichuan that have spicy cuisine.
ReplyDeleteI guess my interest in it is locally famous enough that a spice store in Highlands once gave me a bunch of Datil pepper (a habanero relative bred in St. Augustine, Florida) to see what I'd do with it. I invented a few recipes. It's really nice, very floral by comparison.
I think a lot of it is what you grow up with. My mother's parents were missionaries and teachers in British Colonial India in the 1920s (she was born there in 1922) and while she likely had a fair amount of non-native food she did develop a taste for curry seasonings. My dad was raised on our farm in Iowa in the same time period and learned to at least tolerate mom's use of spices. One of the few times I've felt a bit homesick was walking into an Indian restaurant here in Louisville for the first time.
ReplyDeleteI am reminded of going out with my cousins to an Asian Fusion restaurant in Tallahassee, Florida. It had a Szechuan dish on the menu, which was labeled in varying degrees of hotness according to the customer's taste. Unfortunately for my taste, no amount of Tallahassee hot came close to Texas hot, or even Texas mildly hot.
ReplyDeleteOne time I was eating at a hole in the wall in a Guatemalan town. It was a bit above the average hole in the wall, as in addition to coffee, black beans, and tortillas, it included a side of beef. I was adding some hot pickled peppers (Cobaneros)to the beans. A fellow customer told me to be careful. No problem, I told him. (I was quite familiar w Cobaneros.) "Ud. es de Tejas," (You are from Texas) he replied.
One summer, my father spent six weeks in India in training teachers. After returning , he remarked that the food in the States seemed mighty bland.
Not everyone has the same tolerance for new foods. One year I invited a friend from Argentina to my parent's Thanksgiving dinner. He wouldn't touch my mother's fresh cranberry relish. Nor would he touch another of our Thanksgiving classics, an oyster dish. Decades later, when I mentioned him to my sister, her reply was that "He refused to try Mom's cranberry relish."
Speaking of food...I suspect that a lot of the people who say they LOVE multiculturalism are basically saying that they like having a choice of Chinese, Mexican, etc. restaurants, and have little if any knowledge of cultures outside the US.
I concur with Grim's "chile" versus "chili" spelling.
My use of hot peppers goes up and down.
Interesting about the seeds. I've used some peppers where I could taste a heat difference with seeds in vs. seeds out. It might be an odd local (southern NM) variant, like the gent who accidentally ended up with poblano-jalapeno cross peppers*. Several of my NM cookbooks advise removing seeds to limit the heat if that is a problem.
ReplyDeleteI like flavorful heat. Fire for the sake of fire is not fun when it comes to food, at least for me, so I leave Carolina Reapers and their friends for the braver of heart.:)
LittleRed1
*He used them for practical jokes, once he got over his initial ire. (His brother-in-law's really hot peppers had pollinated his mild peppers.)
LR1, you summed it up for me. Flavorful heat is what I like.
ReplyDeleteGrim, my experience with Chinese food is limited to what I’ve had in the States. Szechuan is my favorite, and I usually have to ask for the heat. Where I live now, the Szechuan is more sweet than heat.
I spent a month in Bangladesh several years ago, working in a refugee camp. It turns out that what I’ve always thought of as “Indian food” is from there. My current favorite Indian restaurant is in Boone, and they have a heat scale that goes to 5. They won’t serve Anglos above 4, until they know them personally.
I know that Bangladesh, Pakistan, India—80 years ago, it was all India. Still, I was surprised to discover that about the food, and perhaps it was my own ignorance.
ReplyDeleteSo, I thought of another story that kind of cuts against this stereotype, at least for Southerners as opposed to Germans. Down in Atlanta there used to be a Chinese restaurant on the Buford Highway, in an area called Chamblee that the locals called "Chambodia" due to the very large number of Asian immigrants (mostly Vietnamese and Chinese). As a result, that was a good place to go for authentic Chinese cuisine -- or Vietnamese, or Mexican for that matter.
ReplyDeleteThis one restaurant had a 'heat level' menu with up to five stars. All the dishes were from zero to four stars except one five-star hot item, which had a long Chinese name. The name translated to "Stupid White Boy."
The story was that young white guys would often bring their dates there, and would order the hottest thing on the menu to impress their girlfriends (or would-be girlfriends). They noticed that all the white guys with dates ordered only from among the hottest stuff they had. The five-star dish was a joke by the cooks, who would just have a great time concocting the most painful thing they could come up with and then watch him force himself to eat it to show how tough he was.
"Stupid white boy for table three!"
LR1, if you remove the seeds you likely also remove some of the ribs and/or pith, which does have capsaicin. Likely in the process of seeding the pepper, you're stripping out some of the hot stuff. But it isn't the seeds themselves.
ReplyDelete"My current favorite Indian restaurant is in Boone, and they have a heat scale that goes to 5. They won’t serve Anglos above 4, until they know them personally."
ReplyDeleteWhich restaurant is that? I get to Boone now and then.
LR1, the capsaicin is mainly in the pith, ribs, and membranes around the seeds, rather than the seeds themselves. But when people are told to remove the seeds, they usually also scrape the rest out, which is where the idea that the seeds are hot comes from. It's a good trick to know, actually, as you can add nearly pure heat to anything you want that way. We do this with birdseed-- birds can't taste the capsaicin, but mammals can, so if you mix the pith of a very hot pepper (crushed to juice, ideally) into your birdseed, the squirrels, deer, etc. will leave your birdfeeder strictly alone. Also, if you freeze it, it gets much hotter.
ReplyDeleteGrim, my father was also a big pepper aficionado. We always had a jar of peppers in vinegar, and one of peppers in oil, sitting on the table. Nothing finer for dressing vegetables or eggs, saving only bacon fat of course. And then, after a few months, take the peppers out and chop them fine and use them as relish. Mmmm. There were always a lot of post-docs around Dad's lab, and some of the non-US ones would trot out this old wheeze about Americans not liking hot food. So he'd bring some "traditional Virginia pepper sauce" in for the holiday party, and tell them that if they could drink a teaspoon straight, he'd give them the whole bottle. In his whole career, he gave away one bottle. (He also made a variant that he called "Empty Threat Sauce"!)
--Janet
PS: The hottest peppers may be new, but the fascination with hot sauce isn't new at all. Tabasco was brand-named in 1868, but was mentioned in print as early as 1840. It was standard issue for Army mess halls (along with Worchester sauce, vinegar, and salt) by 1870 because it was thought to improve the healthiness of the food. I don't know about that, but it does do a wonder on the blandness, hence why it's been added to modern MREs as well.
Mint Cuisine of India.
ReplyDeleteA German isn't "white" the same way someone from Ohio is, and Cincinnati chili isn't much like Texas red chili, which isn't much like New Mexican red chili.
ReplyDeleteMy late brother-in-law was both German and from Ohio. He emigrated from Germany with his parents and brother to Ohio shortly after World War II. As he spent most of his Ohio time in Cincinnati, he knew Cincinnati chili quite well. As he was a big Tex-Mex fan- I had dinner with him and my siter at Ninfa's in Houston- he knew other chili versions.
Though his English accent reflected much more his 50 years in Massachusetts than it did Ohio or Germany.
Thank you, Larry. I'll be sure to get by there next time I'm in Boone.
ReplyDeleteThe spiciest food I ever ate when we lived in China was actually Pakistani. We had some friends from Pakistan who lived in the same dormitory with a shared kitchen. They would buy birds-eye chiles, fill a skillet with them, and then fry them in oil. That produced a quite spicy chili oil that they used to flavor everything, eating the peppers as well.
ReplyDeleteThere are recipes for chili pepper mead that might be worth trying.
ReplyDeleteCapsomel! I’ve had it. A buddy of mine, also a white Southerner, made a batch out of honey and Ghost Peppers.
DeleteWhat'd you think?
ReplyDeleteI liked it fine.
ReplyDeleteMaybe we can meet for a meal at Mint.
ReplyDeleteI found the second edition of that cookbook on Amazon, and got the Kindle version.
Chile Pepper Institute at New Mexico State University
ReplyDeleteLeaves me near speechless.
Good find, Dad29.
ReplyDeletehttps://cpi.nmsu.edu/
While it’s not wholly devoted to chiles, there are always new cultivars on display at the University of Georgia’s trial gardens. It’s a pleasant stroll on a spring afternoon, if anyone happens by Athens.
ReplyDeletehttps://ugatrial.hort.uga.edu/
We're as Northern European as they come, but have always enjoyed quite hot food. I don't see evidence of a physiological connection, just a cultural one. The mid-West seems to lack much of a culture for pepper. Nor was I raised with it, but once I encountered it I liked it. Hot food appeared in Houston, where I spent most of my life, only after the 70s, when a variety of ethnic choices in food arrived, starting with Vietnamese, followed by Thai, and then by all kinds of world cuisine as Houston got bigger and somewhat more cosmopolitan. Mexican food in the Houston of my childhood was pretty bland and Americanized. We encountered hotter Mexican food when visiting relatives in San Antonio and New Mexico.
ReplyDelete"I found the second edition of that cookbook on Amazon, and got the Kindle version."
ReplyDeleteThat's probably better, actually, because it's searchable. So if you come across a particular chile you want to use -- a cascabel, say -- you can find all the recipes that feature it easily.