Posts Tagged ‘Spices’
“Hot, Hot, Hot”*…
Chili peppers thrive in hot and dry conditions. But, as Katherine J. Wu explains, even they have their limits…
For more than a year, life for many sriracha lovers has been an excruciating lesson in bland. Shortages of red jalapeños—the key ingredient in the famous hot sauce—have gotten bleak, in particular for the ultra-popular version of the condiment made by Huy Fong Foods. Grocery stores have enforced buying limits on customers. Bottles on eBay, Craigslist, and Amazon are selling for eye-watering prices—as much as $50 or more. A few Americans have grown so desperate for their flavor fix that they’ve started pilfering the sauce from local restaurants.
A big part of the shortage can be blamed on Huy Fong’s fragile supply chain. The red jalapeños that give the sauce its citrusy-sweet heat are finicky about temperatures and are usually laboriously picked by hand. A huge portion of the peppers are also grown in particularly dry parts of northern Mexico, where many fields are irrigated with water from the Colorado River—itself a strained and highly contested resource. But all of that was just a teeing up, experts told me, for a final climatic blow: the punishing drought that has gripped Mexico in recent years, draining reservoirs so low that even water destined for agriculture has largely been cordoned away.
The sriracha shortage is hardly the worst crop crisis that’s being fueled by climate change. For years, Michigan cherries have been suffocating in too-high temperatures, while Florida citrus have been obliterated by hurricanes; India’s wheat crops have roasted, while rice around the world has been double-teamed by floods and heat waves. But to now see peppers in peril is its own special burn. Bred in some of the world’s warmest regions, chilis have long been a poster child of heat tolerance. They, more than so many other plants, were supposed to be okay. Now, though, as temperatures get more scorching and droughts continue to parch the planet, “I think we are going to see this more often,” Guillermo Murray-Tortarolo, a climate scientist at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, told me. Sriracha’s troubles may turn out to be a bellwether for even more flavorless times to come…
“The Sriracha Shortage Is a Very Bad Sign” (or here), from @KatherineJWu in @TheAtlantic.
* Buster Poindexter (David Johansen)
###
As we savor the sauce, we might note that today is National Fajita Day.
… The term fajita means “little band” or “little belt”. The meat was probably labeled this way by a butcher who was selling skirt steak and, because this cut is typically rather tough, it was precut into small strips. But the way this little cut of meat made its way into the heart of Tex-Mex cuisine culture has an interesting background story.
Probably created around the late 1930s, fajitas were introduced by vaqueros and Mexican workers on ranches in the Texas Rio Grande Valley. These workers were often paid their wages in meat, sometimes the less wanted parts of the animal. So these workers learned that if they marinated the meat in certain juices, it would become more tender and flavorful, and could easily be eaten on tortillas.
Probably due to convenience, the popularity of fajitas increased in the 1940s. It developed into a sort of backyard, easy to eat, on the go dish that was passed down from one generation to the next.
It wasn’t until the 1960s that fajitas began to make their way into restaurants. One of the first may have been in 1969 when a meat market manager at a grocery store set up a fajita stand at a summer festival. Fajitas gained even more traction in the 1970s and the recipe changed a bit, using finer cuts of meat. With the launching of On the Border, Chili’s and other chain restaurants in the US that boasted Tex-Mex cuisine, the idea of the sizzling fajita served on a grill platter right at the table became an attractive – and delicious – experience…
National Fajita Day
“Have you ever bitten a red hot ice cube? That’s curry”*…
Sir Joseph Paxton, “Capsicum ustulatum,” Paxton’s Magazine of Botany and Register of Flowering Plants, 1838
In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue and the entire world changed: slavery, war, disease, colonization, and an immense transfer of wealth to Europe. And with that wealth too came New World nightshades—potatoes, tomatoes, tobacco, peppers of all kinds. It took some time for these fruits and vegetables to plant themselves into European cuisine. The tomato, for example, wasn’t widely used in Italian cuisine until the eighteenth century. But what about food further out from Europe? What about India?
Soon after Columbus’ first expedition, the treaties of Tordesillas and Saragossa divided the oceans of the newly-known world. The Portuguese effectively took the Atlantic and Indian oceans, while the Spanish took the Pacific. With that, the Portuguese established forts and trading posts along India’s Malabar coast. In time, aloo (potato), tamātar (tomato), and mirchī (chilies) were available on the western coast of the Indian subcontinent. Later, the English set up their first trading posts in India in the eastern Gangetic plain, bringing these same staples into North India.
So what was curry like before Columbus? Well, curry didn’t exist…
The pre-history of one of the world’s most– if not in fact the world’s most– popular family of dishes: “Curry Before Columbus.”
* Terry Pratchett
###
As we dig in, we might recall that it was on this date in 1922 that the Hollywood Bowl opened (after a few years of operation, in a less-finished state, as the “Daisy Dell.” It’s shell-shaped amphitheater set into a hill, against the backdrop of the Hollywood Hills and the famous Hollywood Sign to the northeast, it has been the summer home of the L.A. Philharmonic and host to hundreds of other musical events each year.
“He who controls the spice controls the universe”*
Spices were among the first engines of globalization, not in the modern sense of a world engulfed by ever-larger corporations but in the ways that we began to become aware, desirous even, of cultures other than our own. Such desire, unchecked, once led to colonialism. After Dutch merchants nearly tripled the price of black pepper, the British countered in 1600 by founding the East India Company, a precursor to modern multinationals and the first step toward the Raj. In the following decades, the Dutch sought a monopoly on cloves, which once had grown nowhere but the tropical islands of Ternate and Tidore in what is today Indonesia, and then in 1652 introduced the scorched-earth policy known as extirpation, felling and burning tens of thousands of clove trees. This was both an ecological disaster and horribly effective: For more than a century, the Dutch kept supplies low and prices high, until a Frenchman (surnamed, in one of history’s inside jokes, Poivre, or “pepper”) arranged a commando operation to smuggle out a few clove-tree seedlings. Among their ultimate destinations were Zanzibar and Pemba, off the coast of East Africa, which until the mid-20th century dominated the world’s clove market.
The craving for spices still brings the risk of exploitation, both economically, as farmers in the developing world see only a sliver of the profits, and in the form of cultural appropriation. In the West, we’re prone to taking what isn’t ours and acting as if we discovered it, conveniently forgetting its history and context. Or else we reduce it to caricature, cooing over turmeric-stained golden lattes while invoking the mystic wisdom of the East. At the same time, a world without borrowing and learning from our neighbors would be pallid and parochial — a world, in effect, without spice…
From turmeric in Nicaragua to cardamom in Guatemala, nonnative ingredients are redefining trade routes and making unexpected connections across lands: “How Spices Have Made, and Unmade, Empires.”
* Frank Herbert, Dune
###
As we go deep on dash, we might recall that this is National Buffet Day. The concept of the buffet arose in mid 17th century France, when gentleman callers would arrive unexpectedly at the homes of ladies they wanted to woo. It was popularized in 18th century France and quickly spread throughout Europe. The all-you-can-eat buffet made its restaurant debut in 1946, when it was introduced by Vegas hotel manager Herb MacDonald. By the mid-1960s, virtually every casino in Las Vegas sported its own variation. Today, of course, buffets are regularly available not only in any/every Vegas casino, but also in thousands of Indian and Chinese restaurants and ubiquitous chains of “family restaurants.”
Spice is the variety of life…
Source: The Presurfer (to whom, ToTH)
From Allspice to Vanilla, all one could want to know– “The Spice Encyclopedia.”
A veritable treasure trove. For instance, while your correspondent has consumed enough coriander to consider himself an expert, he did not know that:
Coriander is probably one of the first spices used by mankind, having been known as early as 5000 BC. Sanskrit writings dating from about 1500 BC also spoke of it. In the Old Testament “manna” is described as “white like Coriander Seed.” (Exodus 16:31) The Romans spread it throughout Europe and it was one of the first spices to arrive in America…
Coriander is not interchangable with cilantro, although they are from the same plant…
They’re all there.
As we’re remembering the difference between and teaspoon and a tablespoon, we might remember that Butterfly McQueen was born Thelma McQueen in Tampa, Florida on this date in 1911. While she enjoyed a long career as an actress, she is surely best-known for her first role, as Prissy in Gone With the Wind, and for her immortal line, “I don’t know nothin’ ’bout birthin’ babies!”
You must be logged in to post a comment.