The Hot Sauce Cookbook (2 page)

The health-giving and flavorful ingredient was turned into all kinds of sauces and condiments. In those parts of the world where chile peppers grow year-round, it was the flavor and convenience of those sauces that made them appealing. But in parts of the world like North America, where the peppers are harvested in the late summer and hard to find for the rest of the year, making hot sauce was one of several methods of preservation.

Most North American chile peppers are descendants of the tiny chile pequín. Some ten thousand years ago, the wild chile spread to all of Central America, most of Mexico, and the tip of South Texas. The chile pequín was a tolerated weed, and its human cultivation was due more to benign neglect than active nurture. Its Latin name,
Capsicum annuum
var.
aviculare
says a lot about it. In Latin,
annum
means “annual,” and
aviculare
refers to birds. Like most of the wild peppers, chile pequín advertises itself to passing birds by growing erect from its stem and turning a bright shade of red when it is ripe. The digestive tract of the bird softens the seeds of the chile, and the excretion provides a rich fertilizer. And since birds usually defecate while perched on the branch of a tree, the seeds are planted in the shade where pepper plants prefer to grow.

Early human preference for one wild chile strain over another encouraged mutations that produced fatter chiles, or ones that grew larger by virtue of hanging pods rather than an upright ones since these were better hidden from the birds. And these mutations evolved into the many cultivars we eat today. The cultivars got local names that were different from place to place.

In the 1980s, the rise of Southwestern cuisine in the United States set off an explosion of interest in indigenous ingredients and chile peppers in particular. American chefs, gardeners, home cooks, food manufacturers, and cookbook writers clamored for reliable reference materials. But scientists had despaired of keeping the many strains of peppers straight.

“The tremendous variation in fruit size, shape, and color … make it impossible to devise a practical system of classification that would cover the large numbers of forms known to be cultivated,” wrote chile pepper authority
Paul G. Smith, professor emeritus of the University of California in 1987.

But while a scientific guide to chiles might have been out of the question, a practical guide was still sorely needed. In the late 1970s, Dr.
Paul Bosland of New Mexico State University was one of
the first to start organizing chile pepper nomenclature for nonscientists. An Albuquerque writer named
Dave DeWitt documented Bosland’s efforts and founded
Chile Pepper
magazine in 1987.

In the early 1980s, Dr.
Jean Andrews also began working on her book
Peppers, the Domesticated Capsicums,
in Austin, Texas. (
Capsicum
is the name of the biological genus that chile peppers are a part of. There are twenty-something species in the genus
Capsicum
, five of which are domesticated.) Though Andrews was an avid gardener and lover of hot and spicy food, her doctorate wasn’t in horticulture or plant genetics, it was in art history. For her book, she grew chile peppers from seeds and then painted elegant watercolor illustrations of the plants, the flowers, and the pepper pods.

Early on Andrews enlisted Texas greenhouse owners and horticulturalists to assist in the challenge of growing some of the more difficult peppers.
Peppers, the Domesticated Capsicums
remains the definitive work for laypeople on chile pepper history and ethnobotany. It also includes some great recipes. While there are only fifteen pepper paintings, they include all five of the domesticated species. The efforts of Jean Andrews continued to reverberate long after the book was published in 1984. When I first met Andrews in the late 1980s, she took me to the Penn Brothers Sunset Farm just outside of Austin on Lake Travis. There, thanks to the encouragement of Jean Andrews,
Robert Penn was successfully growing all five domesticated species of the
Capsicum
family.

The five domesticated species are
Capsicum frutescens
and
Capsicum chinense,
the peppers common to the Caribbean;
Capsicum baccatum
from central South America;
Capsicum pubescens,
which grows in the Andes Mountains; and the
Capsicum annuum
of North America. With the exceptions of the Tabasco pepper and the habanero, nearly every other pepper we eat in North America and Europe, including bell peppers, Anaheims, jalapeños, and serranos, as well as poblanos, guajillos, and cascabels, comes from the
Capsicum annuum
species.

The word
chile
comes from the prefix
chil
in the Nahuatl language and was the name adopted by the Spanish to describe the peppers of Mexico and Central America.
Chilmole
was the Nahuatl name for chile sauces,
chilpotle
(which Andrews always insisted was the correct spelling) was the name given to smoked jalapeño peppers. C
hiltecpin
, which means “flea chile,” was the name for tiny pepper we call the pequín chile.
Aji
is the word for a chile pepper in most of South America.

I have witnessed a great many emotional confrontations over the names of chile peppers in my career. In some cases, it’s a matter of pride. Jamaicans get irate if you call a Scotch bonnet a habanero, no matter how close in flavor and size the two may be. Residents of Mexico City become furious over the name jalapeño, which would seem to imply that their favorite chile originated among the residents of rural Jalapa. Instead,
cuaresmeño
is the preferred term in Mexico City. And the beloved long red chile of Hatch and Chimayo, New Mexico, becomes just another guajillo when you cross the border into Mexico.

Chile pepper nomenclature became somewhat standardized in the cookbook world with the publication of several guidebooks. In 1990, DeWitt published
The Whole Chile Pepper Book
with an extensive chile pepper glossary and photo guide.
Mark Miller published another authoritative photographic guide to peppers titled
The Great Chile Book
in 1991. That was followed by the Great Chile Posters, by Miller, one for green chiles and one for dried chile peppers. The effort to standardize chile pepper names culminated in 1992, when Dr.
Bosland founded The
Chile Pepper Institute at New Mexico State University, which is now recognized as the center of chile pepper identification, horticulture, and agricultural studies in the United States.

But the names used for specific chiles still vary from region to region in Latin America and, in some cases, we have imported the confusion to the United States. Exactly what an ancho or a pasilla looks like is a complicated subject. The big green poblano chile and its dried form, the ancho, are accepted names in Central Mexico and the central part of the United States. But the same pepper is confusingly called a pasilla or ancho in both the fresh and dried form on the Pacific Coast of Mexico.

Many Mexican-Americans in Southern California come from the Pacific states of Mexico, hence their nomenclature is used in Los Angeles. And since grocers on the Eastern Seaboard buy their chiles from the Los Angeles Union Terminal Market, food stores in LA, New York, Boston, and Washington DC often use the Oaxacan nomenclature for chile peppers rather than the Central Mexican names. This makes it very difficult to write cookbooks that everyone can use.

In 1999, after I inherited the job of editor-in-chief of
Chile Pepper
magazine from
Dave DeWitt, I took a trip to the LA produce terminal. With the various guidebooks and posters in hand and
accompanied by executives from Melinda’s Produce Company, I attempted to negotiate an agreement on nomenclature with the chile pepper importers. The effort was a lesson in humility. I learned that if your grandmother called it a
pasilla,
nobody is going to convince you it should really be called a
poblano.

FRESH CHILES (listed from mild to hot)

What follows is a short reference guide to a few common chile peppers, mainly the ones called for in the recipes in this book. A photo identification guide appears
here
and
here
.

Anaheim Chile or Long Green Chile

This chile was hybridized in the early 1900s to provide New Mexicans with a mild version of their native chile that could be eaten as a vegetable. It has a pleasant flavor and ranges from slightly warm to medium-hot. Anaheims are generally roasted and peeled before they are used. The name comes from a chile cannery opened in Anaheim, California, in 1900 by a farmer named Emilio Ortega, who brought the pepper seeds to California from New Mexico.

In New Mexico, the long green chile is further subdivided by region of origin. The two most common names encountered are Hatch and Chimayó. Hatch chiles are grown in the southern part of New Mexico (around the town of Hatch) from certified seed sources and are graded according to heat.

Chimayó chiles are the older, more traditional chiles grown in the northern part of the state (around the town of Chimayó) from seeds that have been saved from the last harvest. Chimayó chiles are treasured for their superior flavor and unpredictable heat, but they are becoming increasingly rare. The Santa Fe Farmers’ Market is one of the only reliable places to buy them.

Poblano Chile

Fatter and wider than the Anaheim, the poblano is a darker green and has a richer flavor. It is one of the most commonly used chiles in Central Mexican cooking, both in its fresh and dried forms (see “
Ancho Chile
”). Poblanos are named after the Mexican city of Puebla. They are
generally slightly hot and are usually roasted and peeled before use. While some people use the term “ancho” to refer to a fresh poblano, in this book, “ancho” refers only to its dried form. Roasted and peeled poblanos are often cut into half-inch strips, which are called
rajas
.

Padrón Pepper

These small to medium-size peppers are served fried in olive oil and lightly salted as a bar snack in the Spanish region of Galicia. They are increasingly popular in the United States. There is a popular rhyme that explains their heat level:
“Los pimientos de Padrón, unos pican y outros non,”
which translates “Peppers of Padron, some of them hot, and others not.” You can substitute the similar-looking Fresno peppers if you can’t find the Spanish variety.

Jalapeño Chile

Hot, green, and bullet-shaped, the jalapeño is the classic American hot pepper and one of the world’s best-known chiles. The Spanish named this chile after Jalapa (or Xalapa), a town in the state of Veracruz where it is grown. But the name is unpopular in Mexico due to the fact that the pepper is also grown in many other places. It is also known as a
cuaresmeño
,
huachinango,
or
chile gordo
in Mexico. The fresh jalapeño has a strong, vegetal flavor to go with the heat. The jalapeño is most widely consumed in its pickled form.

Serrano Chile

The Spanish found this pepper in the mountains of Puebla and Hidalgo, so they named it
serrano
, referring to the Sierra mountains where it grew. Similar to the jalapeño, the serrano is hotter and smaller. Most Mexicans claim that serranos have a fuller, more herbaceous flavor. Since the vast majority of jalapeños are pickled, the serrano is actually the most widely used fresh chile pepper in Mexican hot sauces.

Chile Pequín

Also known as
piquìn
,
chilipiquin,
or
chiltepìn
, this tiny chile grows wild throughout southern Texas and northern Mexico. Although “pequín” seems to be a corruption of the Spanish
pequeño
,
meaning “small,” the Spanish name itself is probably a corruption of
chiltecpin
, a Nahuatl word meaning “flea chile,” a reference to both its size and sting. In northern Mexico, they are collected in the wild and sold in markets, where they fetch more than almost any other kind of chile. They are sometimes dried and preserved for year-round use. A pequín bush can often be found growing wild in backyards and vacant lots across the southern United States. Because they are not grown commercially, they are seldom found in restaurant cooking or in grocery stores. They are available in Mexican markets, however.

Padrón
,
Thai
,
Pequín
,
Poblano
,
Serrano
,
Jalapeño
,
Habanero
,
Anaheim