March 9, 2002	atimes.com

Front FINER THINGS One hot little number By Chawadee Nualkhair BANGKOK - The Arabs call them felfel or bisbas. The Chinese, for their part, call them lup-chew. The Finnish name for them is chilipippuri, while the Vietnamese are content with the word ot. The Aztecs even had a special word for the sensation they impart to the tastebuds: huuyub, the sound made when puckering the lips after taking a bite. They're chillies, chiles, peppers, or capsicums - in any case, they're fiery, little, and much in demand. The history of chillies is the history of trade from the New World to the Old. When Christopher Columbus stumbled upon a patch of land after his journey and thought it was India, the small red fruits he tasted reminded him of the black peppercorns back home. Little did he know that those tiny red beads with the peculiar flavor had been part of the human diet since 7500 BC, and are one of the oldest cultivated crops from the Americas, says horticulturalist Paul W Borsland. Christening them "peppers", Columbus was one of the first, but certainly not the last, to muddy the waters of the fruit's antecedents. Yes, fruit. In fact, berry. Although commonly referred to as a "spice", chillies are classified according to their fruit characteristics, such as size, color, shape, and use. Additionally, while they're considered a relatively new food phenomenon globally (thanks in part to the Tex-Mex craze), they have been a diet staple for hundreds of centuries, as evidenced by historical documents detailing the ingestion of chillies in Mexico as far back as 7000 BC and their cultivation there before 3500 BC, according to food historian Alan Davidson. When Columbus made his spicy discovery, the chillies were taken back to Europe, where, unlike tomatoes, they were rapidly integrated into many local cuisines - in Italy by 1526 and of course, in Hungary by 1569. And thanks to the efforts of Spanish and Portuguese traders, it was the chilli that found the grateful palates of Asians, Middle Easterners, and Africans, not vice versa. While a whole lot of people have their own words for it, the term "chilli" itself comes from the New World Nahuatl word for the fruit, and today it is meant to encompass all varieties falling under the genus Capsicum. There are 22 wild varieties, according to Borsland, but only five domesticated types: the generally milder and most popular C annum, of which the jalapeno is a member; C chinense, a more fiery group counting the habanero as a member; C frutescens, generally found in tropical climates such as Southeast Asia's; C baccatum, used widely in South America, particularly in the making of the marinated seafood dish ceviche; and C pubescens, usually found in the mountainous regions of Central and South America and also known by the South American word rocoto. Borsland says the Old World discovery of chillies revolutionized food. No longer was pungent, extravagantly spiced food solely the domain of the wealthy. The poor were privy to dollops of chillies with their starches as well and, perhaps more important, they proved instrumental in giving those who needed it valuable doses of vitamins. According to Borsland, a green (unripe) New Mexico chilli can provide the minimum daily requirement of vitamin C, while that same chilli pod, if allowed to ripen to red, gives double the pro-vitamin A of a carrot. Chillies formed such an important part of South American diets that, after the conquest by the Spanish, Mayan Catholic converts gave up chillies for Lent, says the website halfmoon.org. Yeah, chillies are nutritious and they have been eaten for years, you say, but what about that sting? The "burn" associated with encountering a surprising little green number buried among the rice grains or deep in a coconut-milk curry can be blamed on an oil called "capsaicin", which Davidson describes as an "irritant alkaloid" found in the ribbing where the seeds adhere to the inside of the pepper. Davidson says this nasty compound, which was probably developed as some sort of defense mechanism for the berry, has at least five different chemical elements, with three causing a sensation at the back of the throat almost immediately and the other two giving rise to a feeling of the infamous "slow burn" variety. Because the oil isn't very water-soluble, naturally, drinking cold water after accidental ingestion will do little to put out the flames in your mouth. Others advocate, to varying degrees of effectiveness, plain rice (which unnecessarily heightens the hard sensations of the grains on one's mouth, in my humble opinion), a spoonful of sugar (never tried, since it alters the taste of everything afterward), hot tea (absolute madness), and cucumbers, sometimes sliced in yogurt Indian-style (which works). Total freaks about classifying everything, Americans have come up with a system for measuring the heat produced from eating each chilli. Using "Scofield Heat Units", this test was concocted in 1912 as a way to answer the question "How hot are your chillies?" by an enterprising Parke Davis pharmacist named Wilbur - you guessed it - Scofield. The test measures the amount of sugar that has to be dissolved into a cup of water before the capsaicin no longer affects the panelists' palates. The jury is still out on how these panelists are found, but the hottest peppers, such as the habanero or Scotch bonnet, range between 100,000 and 300,000 Scofield units. The more pedestrian jalapeno scores from 2,500-4,000 units, while bell peppers score nothing at all. According to Indian scientists, the now-hottest chilli in the world is the Tezpur chilli out of Assam that outpowers the habanero in terms of heat. However, Borsland points out, zero-Scofield chillies such as bell peppers are making the biggest dent in people's pockets so far; since growers have developed red, yellow, orange, and brown peppers to go with the ubiquitous green bell pepper, these distinctly unspicy creatures have seen a 75 percent jump in sales and are besting romaine lettuce, artichokes, and yellow beans at the checkout counter. In the West, chillies are usually sold either dried or pickled, while Asians, blessed with warm weather year-around, enjoy abundant stores of the real deal. One of the most lingering paradoxes about chillies is why, if their ingestion is laced with such dread and genuine possibilities for harm (burning digestive tracts can be a big problem for the recalcitrant chilli abuser), are chillies so popular? Halfmoon.org attributes this to that great big villain, capsaicin, which is characterized as a "powerful neurotoxin" that when administered at dosages between 0.025 and 0.075 percent can prevent nerves from producing neurotransmitters. A large dose, the site warns, can cause permanent numbness - the US Food and Drug Administration recommends concentrations of no more than the 0.075 percent threshold. In effect, the chilli is said to be a sort of drug, lulling masochistic addicts into a spiral of intestinal abuse. This is balderdash, says Davidson, who says that while chillies may possess "mildly addictive" qualities, they are probably more valued for the plain, straight reason that they provide some dash and splash to bland food. People in many parts of the world think so too (save those Northern Europeans, who think chillies "mask" the food's real flavor - or lack of it). In Thailand, they are ground with a mix of other fresh spices into a paste used as the basis for many curries, or sliced up raw with fish sauce as a condiment. The southern Chinese appear to avoid too much heat in their food, but in central China they bombard their dishes with copious amounts of garlic and chillies (Hunan native Mao Zedong once famously remarked that the spicier the food, the more revolutionary the region). The Koreans, famous for their fire-breathing kimchi pickles, make generous use of dried chillies, ginger, and garlic, while even the demure Japanese, always wary of overstatement, admit to using a bit of chilli now and then to spice up bland dishes such as fugu, or blowfish, sashimi. Contrary to what may pass as logic (to me at least), the heat produced by chillies is enjoyed predominantly by natives of hotter, more tropical locations. An exception is more-than-mile-high Tibet, prone to mixing its chillies with mold-ripened cheese as a condiment or stewed, green and unripened, in a soup with yak cheese to produce a famous dish called hemadatsi. Cheese and chilli - a potent combination, if there ever was one. I take it the toilets in the region are in fine working order. For more, very detailed information on chillies, visit www.hort.purdue.edu. ((c)2002 Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact ads@atimes.com for information on our sales and syndication policies.)

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