Excerpt
Peppers of the Americas
A PEPPER EPIPHANY
At the end of September 2009, I was winding up a trip to Peru with a visit to Cusco, the great capital of the Inca Empire. As I walked through the Temple of the Sun, musing about the trappings of ancient royal power, my phone rang. It was someone in Washington, DC. At first I thought it might be a prank, but after some confusion, I gathered that the White House was asking me to cook for the first presidential Fiesta Latina, a salute to Latin American culture and music.
When I returned home to New Jersey and continued the conversation, I realized that I was to be responsible for the entire menu with less than two weeks’ notice. The household staff was expecting me to settle innumerable details for a 400-guest event (even down to the flower arrangements). I knew this was the opportunity for peppers, the great staple food of the New World, from the Caribbean and Mesoamerica to the Andes, to tell their story. When the staff in Washington asked what kind of flowers I wanted to order, I replied, “No flowers . . . peppers!” And that was the sight that eventually greeted guests as they entered the Blue Room on the evening of the Fiesta Latina: tall cylindrical glass vases holding glowing rainbows of green, yellow, ivory, lavender, purple, orange, and red New World peppers in every shape.
The Fiesta Latina was a pivotal moment in my relationship with peppers—or capsicums, chiles, “chillis,” or ajíes, depending on one’s culinary culture. When I picked up the phone in Cusco, I was already deep into a personal pepper exploration that had begun decades earlier in Latin America and continues to this day. This book—not an encyclopedic catalog, but a highly subjective record of my own garden and kitchen encounters with these remarkable plants—is one result of that decades-long fascination.
The story of my backyard pepper laboratory begins in the summer of 2002, when an overnight thunderstorm sent a giant Norway maple tree crashing down into my backyard in Weehawken, New Jersey. I mourned the old shade tree but rejoiced that it and its shade-producing companion, a massive wisteria vine draped around its branches, would no longer block my dreams of a sunny backyard kitchen garden.
Unwisely rushing to plant all the sun-loving herbs that I’d longed for, I soon found that I’d created my own little shop of horrors, an aromatic menace with mint, lemon balm, and epazote dominating every inch of my yard and even sprouting from cracks in the brick-paved patio. Plan B was to concentrate on something less invasive. I instantly thought of hot peppers, which I had been gradually discovering during years of travels and explorations while researching Gran Cocina Latina, my book on the cuisines of Latin America, not from my own less fiery Cuban culinary heritage.
My upbringing in Cuba had been a great help in talking to non-Latin cooks about the full diversity and excitement of New World peppers—not because I grew up knowing all about peppers, but because I didn’t. My maternal aunts, the marvelous cooks in our family, scarcely ever ventured beyond the perfumed but sweet ají cachucha, the gentle bell pepper, and a few other mild varieties, either fresh or canned, though my father simply adored cooking with a tiny, very hot wild pepper called ají guaguao. Living in Miami and New York City as a refugee, and later as a citizen, I discovered the cuisines of Mexico and India, two important countries for peppers. This is when I truly began to appreciate the magic of hot peppers in cooking, which my father had so well understood when we lived in Cuba. It took many more years for me to thoroughly explore the pepper map of the Americas.