The capsaicinization of American food
<p>Consider spicy-hot food &mdash; and consider how recent it is as a<br />
mainstream phenomenon in the U.S.  In 2002 many of us cheerfully chow<br />
down on Szechuan and Thai, habaneros and rellenos, nam pla and sambal<br />
ulek.  Salsa outsells ketchup. But it wasn&#8217;t always that way.</p>
<p>In fact it wasn&#8217;t that way until quite recently, historically<br />
speaking.  I&#8217;ve enjoyed capsaicin-loaded food since I was a pre-teen<br />
boy in the late 1960s; I acquired the taste from my father, who picked<br />
it up in South America. In those days our predilection was the<br />
peculiar trait of a minority of travelers and a few immigrant<br />
populations.  The progression by which spicy-hot food went from there<br />
to the U.S. mainstream makes a perfect type case of cultural<br />
assimilation, and the role and meaning that the stuff has acquired on<br />
the way is interesting too.</p>
<p>(Oh.  And for those of you who don&#8217;t understand the appeal?  It&#8217;s<br />
all about endorphin rush, like a runner&#8217;s high.  Pepper-heads like me<br />
have developed a conditioned reflex whereby the burning sensation<br />
stimulates the release of opiate-like chemicals from the brainstem,<br />
inducing a euphoria not unlike a heroin buzz. Yes, this theory has<br />
been clinically verified.)</p>
<p>Baseline: Thirty years ago.  The early 1970s.  I&#8217;m a teenager, just<br />
back in the U.S. from years spent overseas.  Spicy-hot food is pretty<br />
rare in American cuisine.  Maybe you&#8217;d have heard of five-alarm chili<br />
if you&#8217;d lived in Texas, but chances are you&#8217;d never have actually<br />
eaten the stuff.  If you&#8217;re from Louisiana, you might have put Tabasco<br />
sauce on your morning eggs.  Aside from that, you wouldn&#8217;t have<br />
tasted hot peppers outside of a big-city Chinatown.</p>
<p>It&#8217;s actually a little difficult to remember how different American<br />
cooking was then.  Those were the years when Kool-Whip was cool and<br />
the casserole was king, an era of relentless blandness well-skewered<br />
by James Lileks&#8217;s <a href="http://www.lileks.com/institute/gallery/"><br />
Gallery of Regrettable Food</a>.  Mom didn&#8217;t know any better.  Well,<br />
most moms didn&#8217;t, anyway; mine had acquired a few clues overseas.</p>
<p>But most Americans of that day inherited the pale hues of British<br />
and German cooking.  What zip there was in our cuisine came from<br />
immigrants, especially (at that time) Italians.  Thai, Vietnamese<br />
and Ethiopian had not gained a foothold.  Chinese was on educated<br />
peoples&#8217; radar but only eaten in restaurants; nobody owned a wok<br />
yet.</p>
<p>Indeed, Chinese food had already caught on in a few leading-edge<br />
subcultures by the mid-1970s: science-fiction fans, computer hackers,<br />
the people who would start to call themselves `geeks&#8217; fifteen years<br />
later.  But most of what was available was Americanized versions of<br />
the blander Shanghainese and Cantonese varieties; restaurants that<br />
made a point of authenticity and advertised Szechuan and Hunan cooking<br />
to round-eyes were not yet common.</p>
<p>This all began to change in the early 1980s.  The yuppies did it to<br />
us; experimentation with exotic and ethnic foods became a signature<br />
behavior of the young, upwardly mobile urban elite, and the variety of<br />
restaurants increased tremendously in a way that both met that demand<br />
and stimulated it.  More importantly, cooking techniques and<br />
ingredients that hadn&#8217;t been traditional in European cuisine started<br />
to influence home cooking &mdash; white people started buying<br />
woks. And Szechuan fire oil.</p>
<p>The first vogue for Cajun cooking around 1984 was, as I recall,<br />
something of a turning point.  Chinese cooking was popular but still<br />
marked as `foreign'; Cajun was not. Spicy-hot gumbo joined five-alarm<br />
chili on the roster of all-American foods that were not only expected<br />
but <em>required</em> to deliver a hefty dose of capsaicin zap. I<br />
remember thinking the world was changing when, in 1987 or &#8217;88, I<br />
first saw spicy Cajun dishes on the menu of a white-bread roadside<br />
diner.  In Delaware.</p>
<p>This diner was never going to show up in Michelin&#8217;s or Zagat&#8217;s; in<br />
fact, it was the next thing to a truck stop.  Something else was going<br />
on in the 1980s besides yuppies buying woks &mdash; and that was the<br />
embrace of spicy-hot food by the small-town and rural working class,<br />
and its coding as a specifically masculine pleasure.</p>
<p>This probably evolved out of the tradition, going back at least to<br />
the late 1940s, of defining barbecue and chili as what an<br />
anthropologist would call a &#8220;men&#8217;s mystery&#8221;.  Despite the existence of<br />
male professional chefs and men who can cook, most kinds of domestic<br />
cooking are indisputably a female thing &mdash; women are expected to<br />
be interested in it and expected to be good at it, and a man who<br />
acquires skill is crossing into women&#8217;s country.  But for a handful of<br />
dishes culturally coded as &#8220;men&#8217;s food&#8221;, the reverse is true.<br />
Barbecue and chili top that list, and have since long before spicy-hot<br />
food went mainstream.</p>
<p>For people who drive pickup trucks, spicy-hot food went from being<br />
a marked minority taste to being something like a central men&#8217;s<br />
mystery in the decade after 1985.  I first realized this in the early<br />
1990s when I saw a rack of 101 hot-pepper sauces on display at a<br />
gun-and-knife show, in between the premium tobacco and the jerked<br />
meat. There&#8217;s a sight you won&#8217;t see at a flower show, or anywhere else<br />
in women&#8217;s country.</p>
<p>The packaging and marketing of hot sauces tells the same<br />
story. From the top-shelf varieties like Melinda&#8217;s XXX (my favorite!)<br />
to novelty items like &#8220;Scorned Woman&#8221; and &#8220;Hot Buns&#8221;, much of the<br />
imagery is cheeky sexiness clearly designed to appeal to men.</p>
<p>Nor is it hard to understand why the association got made in the<br />
first place.  It&#8217;s considered masculine to enjoy physical risk, even<br />
mostly trivial physical risks like burning yourself on a sauce hotter<br />
than you can handle.  Men who like hot peppers swap capsaicin-zap<br />
stories; I myself am perhaps unreasonably proud of having outlasted<br />
a tableful of Mexican college students one night in Monterrey,<br />
watching them fall out one by one as a plate of sauteed habaneros<br />
was passed repeatedly around the table.</p>
<p>There&#8217;s a sneaky element of female complicity in all this.  Women<br />
chuckle at our capsaicin-zap stories the same way they laugh at other<br />
forms of laddish posturing, but then (as my wife eloquently puts it)<br />
&#8220;What good is a man if you rip off his balls?&#8221; They leave us capsaicin<br />
and barbecue and other men&#8217;s mysteries because they instinctively grok<br />
that a certain amount of testosterone-driven male-primate behavior is<br />
essential for the health of Y-chromosome types &mdash; and best it<br />
should be over something harmless.</p>
<p>This gastronomic pincer movement &mdash; Yuppies pushing spicy food<br />
downmarket, truckers and rednecks pushing it upmarket &mdash;<br />
coincided with the rise in cultural influence of Hispanics with a<br />
native tradition of spicy-hot food.  In retrospect, it&#8217;s interesting that<br />
what mainstream America naturalized was jalapenos rather than<br />
Chinese-style fire oil.  Tex-Mex assimilated more readily than<br />
Szechuan, as it turned out.</p>
<p>We can conveniently date that mainstreaming from the year salsa<br />
first passed ketchup in sales volume, 1996. Perhaps not by<br />
coincidence, that&#8217;s the first year I got gifted with a jar of<br />
homegrown habaneros.  They came to me from an Irish ex-biker, a<br />
take-no-shit ZZ-Top lookalike who runs a tire dealership in the next<br />
town over.  He&#8217;d be a great guy to have with you in a bar fight, but<br />
nobody who would ever be accused of avant-garde tastes.  I guess<br />
that was when I realized spicy-hot food had become as all-American<br />
as apple pie.</p>
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