Chile Trivia: Weird, Wacky Factoids for Curious Chileheads by Manno Lois & DeWitt Dave

Author:Manno, Lois & DeWitt, Dave
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rio Grande Books
Published: 2012-03-01T00:00:00+00:00

Part III A Wacky World Tour

People always want it hotter; that's the reason habaneros caught on.

—Habanero grower Jeff Campbell

Chapter 7 Caribbean History, Legend, and Lore

I love the Caribbean islands and just cannot stay away. During the past forty years, I’ve have explored the West Indies by jets, prop planes, seaplanes, cruise ships, yachts, buses, cars, and even on foot in some cases. Of course, I’ve not visited every single island and country, but my favorite hot and spicy culinary memories include:

• Finding a twelve-foot-tall kitchen pepper plant at the Good Hope Great House in Jamaica.

• Carefully trying a goat pepper-infused conch salad in a small restaurant in Nassau, Bahamas.

• Cooking with chefs in various locations in Jamaica while shooting Heat Up Your Life, my three-part video documentary on chiles.

• Catching, grilling, and devouring freshly caught yellowtail snapper with coconut and Melinda’s hot sauce on the tiny island of Ambergris Caye, Belize.

• Examining Congo pepper fields in Trinidad that were adjacent to marijuana fields.

• Getting burned out on flying fish with incredibly hot piri-piri sauce aboard the Jolly Roger in Barbados.

• Tasting the spiced-up beach food at Magen’s Bay on St. Thomas.

• Sampling jerk pork right off the grill at the Double V Jerk Center in Ocho Rios, Jamaica and learning the cook’s barbecuing techniques.

One of my favorite food conversations took place at the Cheapside Market in Bridgetown, Barbados, and it taught me not to make assumptions about racial terms in the islands. At the stand of one grizzled old man, I spotted a jar of small, thin peppers.

“Bird peppers?” I asked the vendor.

“Nigger peppers,” insisted the vendor, who was a black man.

“Not a very polite term,” I observed. The man just shrugged. I bought the jar.

“They’re bird peppers in Trinidad but nigger peppers here,” explained Anne Marie Whitaker later. “Nobody thinks anything about the word.”

Indeed. Later, I asked our driver Emerson, and he just laughed. “Nigger peppers is what they are.” I decided to drop the subject.

Although jerk pork originally led the field, jerk chicken is now the most popular. In Kingston the demand for jerk chicken on the weekends is incredible. The steel drums converted to grills are ubiquitous. They line the streets and, on weekends in certain sections of Red Hills Road, so much smoke emerges from the line of drums that, except for the smell, one could be forgiven for thinking that a San Franciscan fog had come to Jamaica.

—Advice for 19th Century Tourists

Who Wish to Cook Poultry

What is Jerk Sauce?

Jamaican jerk sauces are a combination of spices and Scotch bonnet chiles used as a marinade and baste for grilled meats. The word “jerk” is thought to have originated from the word ch?arki (the question mark is part of the word), a Quecha word from Peru. The Spanish converted the term to charqu, which means jerked or dried meat. In English it became known as “jerk” and “jerky.”

The technique of jerking was originated by the Maroons, Jamaican slaves who escaped from the British during the invasion of 1655 and hid in the maze of jungles and limestone sinkholes known as the Cockpit Country.

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