CHILE PEPPERS

A richly illustrated guided tour of chile peppers and their uses in cuisines around the world.

Food historian DeWitt, the author of more than 50 books and a leader in the study of chiles, has an obvious love for food plants laden with capsaicin—and, he notes early on, “all capsicums are New World plants.” More specifically, he cites plant geographer Barbara Pickersgill, who locates the ground zero of chile peppers near the area where Paraguay, Argentina, and Brazil meet. Birds distributed those peppers widely, eating the fruits and then expelling the seeds, so that they “spread all over South and Central America long before the first Asian tribes moved east and settled the New World.” When those tribespeople made their way to Mexico, the feast began, and wherever chiles grew, DeWitt writes, they became essential components of Indigenous diets—and in some places even units of currency. The author explains the bewildering variety of chiles, from the tiny berry called the “chiltepín” to the much larger jalapeño. “Because chiles cross-pollinate,” writes DeWitt, “hundreds of varieties of the five domesticated chile species were developed by humans over thousands of years in South and Central America.” From there, they traveled first to Spain and Portugal, where they figure only incidentally in the local cuisine; eastward to places such as Hungary, which took its time to develop the fiery paprika that is now central to that nation’s diet; and East Asia, where peppers entered the cuisine of Szechuan and other regions. Indeed, writes the author, “Bangkok is…in the running for the title of hottest city in the world. This city is populated not only by the chile-loving Thais and Chinese but also by other ethnic groups that use them heavily in their cuisines: East Indians, Pakistanis, and Malays.” The text is handsomely designed and typeset and—beg pardon—peppered with superb photography and, better still, lots of recipes.

If you’re a fan of the hot stuff, you’ll definitely want this deep-diving work of natural and food history.