The Hot Sauce Cookbook (7 page)

In a serving bowl, combine the nopales, xnipec, onion, tomato, and olives. Toss with the cilantro, oil, and vinegar. Garnish with the cheese and serve.

DIY PACE PICANTE SAUCE

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Makes 2 cups
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Pace Picante sauce was invented in 1947 in the back of a liquor store by a young man named David Pace. The young Pace came from a family of Louisiana cane syrup makers. He also made syrups, jams, and jellies in the lab behind the liquor store that he and his wife ran in San Antonio. But it was his picante sauce—made with tomatoes, onions, garlic, and fresh jalapeños—that made him famous. Pace put the stuff on everything, including sandwiches, eggs, and chicken. Pace Picante Sauce was bought by the Campbell Soup Company in 1995.   
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If you want to make a picante sauce that tastes exactly like the bottled stuff at the grocery store, try this recipe. Use it as a table sauce, taco sauce, or chip dip, or as ranchero sauce in dishes such as huevos rancheros.

1 (10.75 ounce) can tomato purée

1 cups water

⅓ cup chopped onion

¼ cup chopped fresh jalapeño chiles with seeds

2 tablespoons white vinegar

¼ teaspoon salt

¼ teaspoon dried onion flakes

¼ teaspoon dried garlic flakes

Combine the tomato purée, water, onion, jalapeños, vinegar, salt, dried onion flakes, and dried garlic flakes in a saucepan over medium heat. Bring to a boil, then reduce the heat and simmer for 30 minutes, or until thick.

Remove from the heat and let cool. When cool, place in a covered container and refrigerate overnight. Store in the refrigerator for up to a week.

From left:
Pepper Vinegar
,
Pepper Sherry
,
“Son of Suchilquitongo” Salsa Verde
, and
Papaya Fire

———CHAPTER 3———

ISLAND HEAT

Like the first sip
of a frozen mango daiquiri on a hot afternoon, the sweet fire of
Caribbean-style hot sauces sends a shudder of delight through your whole body. The tropical fruit and citrusy peppers get perfumed with all manner fresh herbs, ginger, and allspice in the hot sauces of the islands. When this style of salsa started turning up at the Austin Chronicle Hot Sauce Festival in the mid-1990s, we didn’t know exactly what to do with it. These sauces weren’t intended as a dip for tortilla chips, they were made to be eaten on grilled fish or with curries or wrapped up in flatbreads called “rotis.” We tasted them on the tip of a plastic spoon.

The habaneros, Scotch bonnets, and other cultivars of the explosively hot
Capsicum chinense
species may be among the hottest in the world, but the wonderful apricot, peach, and citrus aromas that you smell when you cut one open can change your attitude about hot and spicy food. Caribbean peppers and hot sauces became something of an obsession with me, and I spent a lot of time in the islands. In 1995, I won my first James Beard Journalism Award for a magazine article about my piquant quest—it was titled “Hot Sauce Safari.”

If an obsession with hot peppers sounds a little silly, consider the mindset of the Spanish who bankrolled Columbus. To say that the Europeans were looking for a shorter route to the Spice
Islands doesn’t begin to explain it. In the medieval imagination, pepper, cinnamon, and ginger came from Adam and Eve’s lost paradise, according to German author
Wolfgang Schivelbusch in his book,
Tastes of Paradise
. Europeans were more than a little obsessed with spicy food.

With poetry, art, and historical accounts, Schivelbusch illustrates the absolute frenzy over spices during the Middle Ages. By the fifteenth century, Europe’s entire system of social status and a large part of its economy were defined by spices, and every entrepreneur and adventurer alive was trying to find a new route to the paradise where spices grew.

The early
history of the Caribbean islands was shaped by the spice trade.
Columbus thought he had landed in the East Indies, which is why he called the natives “Indians.” The fiery chile pepper pods that the Caribbean natives called
aji
were renamed “pimiento” by the Spanish after
pimienta,
the word for black pepper. Strangely, they called the fruit of the allspice tree, the other spice they discovered in the New World, pimiento as well. (It wasn’t until the Spanish encountered the Aztecs that they coined the term “chile.”)

Ajis
, or chile peppers, weren’t related to black pepper, but thanks to their hardiness, they spread quickly. Within ten years, the Spanish and Portuguese had carried chile peppers all over the world. Asians, Africans, and Europeans quickly forgot that the chile peppers in their gardens were originally brought from the Americas in the 1500s and came to believe their local peppers were native. When early English settlers came to the United States, they brought European chile peppers with them, along with other plants and seed they thought they might need in the Americas.

Though Columbus failed to reach the East Indies by sailing west, the agricultural products of the New World replaced the spices of the East Indies in economic and cultural importance. Just as black pepper and cinnamon had created immense fortunes in the Middle Ages, chocolate, coffee, and sugar created enormous wealth in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It wasn’t just the utility of these products that made them desirable, Schivelbusch argues. The Caribbean replaced the Spice Islands as the earthly paradise of the European imagination.

PEPPERPOT AND BARBECUE

The Arawaks migrated gradually across the islands from present-day Guyana. Along with the
Capsicum chinense
pepper (
aji
), they brought cassava, pineapple, and maize with them from South America. For some ten centuries, the
Caribbean islands as far north as Jamaica belonged exclusively to these peaceful fishermen and farmers.

The Arawaks lived in villages and had a communal style of cooking. The game they killed ended up in a constantly cooking stewpot. The stew, flavored with peppers and the cassava preparation called
cassareep
, was called
ajiaco
, or pepperpot. The earliest descriptions of Amerindian pepperpots by European explorers noted ingredients like bamboo shoots, buds of trees, and other wild greens.

In the eighth or ninth century, another South American tribe called the Caribs began to invade the Arawak villages in their huge war canoes. By the time the Spanish arrived in the fifteenth century, the Arawaks and Caribs had merged into a single culture with a shared language. From the Caribbean natives, Europeans learned the cooking technique we call “barbecue,” a word that comes from the Taino dialect of the Arawak-Carib language.

Other Arawak-Carib words that entered the English language include canoe, hammock, hurricane, and tomalley. In English, tomalley is a cooking term used to describe the greenish innards of a crab or lobster. Crab tomalley was especially important to the Caribs because it was the main ingredient in their favorite hot sauce, taumalin. If you want to sample some, just mix the warm tomalley from a boiled crab with some minced habanero.

Most Caribbean peppers are descendants of South American
aji
peppers that were brought to the islands by ancient peoples. Americans use the Mexican name habanero, (which means “from Havana” in Spanish) to describe these peppers. The Scotch bonnets of Jamaica, the bullnose peppers of Guyana, the Caribe peppers of Barbados, the
piment
of French-speaking Guadeloupe, and the
bonda man jack
of the jungle island of Dominica are all strikingly similar. All of these chiles are cultivars of the extremely hot
Capsicum chinenese
species. They give hot sauces, callalos, curries, jerks, rundowns, and all the other hot and spicy dishes of the islands their distinctive, flavorful heat. And they are the heart and soul of Caribbean cuisine.

PEPPER CRABS

———
Serves 4
———

This simple method of preparing crabs is very close to the original Amerindian recipe. The Caribs cooked the crabs very briefly; they preferred them underdone. Crabs are the only food the Arawaks and Caribs ever boiled; everything else they roasted.

3 gallons water

1 teaspoon salt

1 tablespoon allspice berries

6 to 8 thyme sprigs

2 to 3 whole habanero-type chiles

8 live blue crabs

3 limes, cut in half

Taumalin Sauce (below), optional

Put the water in a large pot and add the salt, then bring to a boil. Add the allspice, thyme, and chiles, and simmer 2 to 3 minutes. Carefully add the live crabs. Boil them for about 15 minutes until red and cooked through. Remove the crabs from the water and let them cool. Discard the cooking liquid.

Break off the apron (for female crabs) or key (for male crabs), then pull off the top shell. Rub off the feather gills and break the body in two. Reserve the soft yellow-green innards to make taumalin (below). Squeeze lime juice over the exposed meat. Break the shell as you eat, and suck the crab meat out of every joint. Dip the crab meat in taumalin sauce, if desired. Twist off the claws, break them open, and pick or suck out the meat.

You can also pick out the crabmeat from the Pepper Crabs to use in other recipes.

Taumalin Sauce:
Combine ¼ cup of reserved tomalley with ¼ teaspoon of minced habanero,
Caribbean Pepper Mash
, or a habanero-based pepper sauce. Use as a dip for seafood.

CARIB CRAB SALSA

———
Makes about 3 cups
———

The ancient Carib salsa is very close in flavor to crab ceviche. If you want to taste the authentic version, boil your own crabs and combine the yellow-green liver from the inside of the crab shells with some minced habanero. But I think you’ll agree that this tamaulin-inspired crab salsa tastes a lot better with the addition of onion, cilantro, and citrus juice. Serve as a cocktail mixed with chilled boiled shrimp, as a salsa with grilled fish, or over greens or guacamole as a salad.

6
Pepper Crabs
or 1½ cups lump crab meat (8 ounces)

½ cup freshly squeezed lime juice

1 habanero-type chile, minced

¾ cup chopped red onion

4 scallions, white and green parts, trimmed and chopped

1 tablespoon chopped fresh cilantro

¾ cup chopped bell pepper

Salt

Working over a mixing bowl to catch as much juice as possible, twist off the crab claws, break them open, pick out the meat, and put in the bowl. Break off the apron (or key) and rub off the feather gills. Remove the crabmeat from the shells.

Add the lime juice, chile, onion, scallions, cilantro, and bell pepper. Season to taste with salt. Cover and chill for several hours before serving.

Crab Backs

CRAB BACKS

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Serves 6 as an appetizer
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This is yet another dish combining the flavors of crab, lime juice, and Caribbean pepper. Crab backs are popular all over the Caribbean.