Hot Lover
Farmers' market customers who love chiles smile. They know exactly what I mean. Thus prompted, they might buy three peppers for a dollar, which still leaves me a lot of peppers to sell. Other shoppers who don't eat chiles murmur to wives or boyfriends, "I wouldn't know what to do with them."
My ears twitch. I seek out the chile novice, give my spiel on how to use chiles and tuck a free pepper in with their zucchini or lettuce.
Why am I so passionate about converting people to chiles? Lots of people don't know how to cook eggplant, which I also love, but I let them live in peace. Why am I so determined to evangelize the chile?
I could explain that the pleasure is not merely in the heat, but in the flavor. It's true: some chiles are smoky; others suggest leather, tobacco or mint. The many flavors of the chile cause me to crave this native American vegetable and to devise dozens of ways to consume it.
How do I love to eat chiles? Let me count the ways. For a snack, I go to the garden and pick a Garden Salsa, a blue-red pepper like a mild cayenne, and bite off the tip right before the hot pith starts. It's delicious to eat with a crisp apple. In the kitchen, there are dozens of jars of ground chiles and hot sauces, strings of whole peppers and baskets of fresh ones. In the fridge, there's a jar of apple cider vinegar with cut-up hot peppers for collard greens, soups or fish. Olive oil spiked with fresh chile sits on the counter. I love a side dish of anchos sauteed in butter and olive oil-more butter and olive oil than they need. (Chicken fat is also good.) I pour the warm hot-pepper fat on rice, arugula... anything.
Peppers are not out of place in breakfast, either. With my morning egg, I have a side dish of hot peppers fried in butter, and I like a fresh chile, split-open, in peppermint tea. Roasted jalapeno butter is terrific on hot sweet corn, which I mention here only because I grew up eating corn for breakfast.
Why limit hot peppers to savory foods? I ate summer's last white peaches sprinkled with a scorching but sublimely fruity sauce made of savina peppers and sweet potato. I once made a wonderful mango and habanero frozen yogurt. If you can taste anything beyond the intense heat, the boxy habanero and its West Indian cousin, Scotch Bonnet, have the flavor of tropical fruit.
I do suffer for all this pleasure. After an incautious meal, my lips are cherry-red and swollen. I used to wear medical gloves to keep the burning oil from soaking into my fingertips. But lately I'm too impatient for gloves. When I've been elbow-deep in chiles, I take out my contact lenses with my pinky. Or go to bed in tears.
What drives me to these small dangers, as an addict to drugs, is desire. The capsaicin in chile releases endorphins, natural painkillers akin to morphine. First chile gives me a little head rush, then a flooding sensation of something even better than warmth through my whole body. Then, a pleasant numbness. I sigh, settle in, feel less anxious. Of all the food-drugs, chile is my favorite. Dark chocolate makes me feel cozy and pampered, but it ends up on your hips. Wine's gift-elation, chattiness, expansiveness-is nice, but eventually, wine takes the elation back. Exercise produces endorphins too, but running is work.
Apart from being short-lived-only minutes-the chile high has no downsides. As addictions go, it doesn't wreck my health, cost a fortune, worry my mother or make my girlfriends feel superior, jealous or both.
But every addiction masks something-usually sadness. When I eat alone, I want more chiles and hotter ones. I think I know why.
Recall that after-dinner, warm-hearted, blissful feeling you get, even when you didn't touch the wine? It could be another drug-the hormone oxytocin-that makes you feel that way. Where there is love, bonding and intimacy, there is oxytocin. French obstetrician Michel Odent calls it the 'hormone of love.' Oxytocin surges in the mother's body during breastfeeding to seal the bond between mother and baby. Conversely, when oxytocin is blocked in animal brains, mothers neglect their babies. And it is no surprise that oxytocin is also secreted during the most primal bonding activity, sex.
But oxytocin turns up in public, too. According to oxytocin expert Dr Joseph Verbalis at Georgetown University, studies in animals and people show that oxytocin rises during the most ordinary activity: when we eat. So the concept of feeding as a surrogate for love and sex has the ring of biological truth. Moreover, when we share a meal with others-feeding and bonding at the same time-perhaps still more oxytocin floods our brains, creating the fraternity of the table.
Perhaps most intriguing, giving animals capsaicin, the chile drug, causes a massive release of oxytocin, far more than the oxytocin surge from eating just any food.
With friends and lovers, we reap the pleasures of oxytocin. With hot peppers, the rewards are endorphins as well as oxytocin. Chile: the Cupid of vegetables. Could this be my new sales pitch?
[ back to top ]
