122 lines
8.4 KiB
Plaintext
122 lines
8.4 KiB
Plaintext
The capsaicinization of American food
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<p>Consider spicy-hot food — and consider how recent it is as a<br />
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mainstream phenomenon in the U.S. In 2002 many of us cheerfully chow<br />
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down on Szechuan and Thai, habaneros and rellenos, nam pla and sambal<br />
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ulek. Salsa outsells ketchup. But it wasn’t always that way.</p>
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<p>In fact it wasn’t that way until quite recently, historically<br />
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speaking. I’ve enjoyed capsaicin-loaded food since I was a pre-teen<br />
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boy in the late 1960s; I acquired the taste from my father, who picked<br />
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it up in South America. In those days our predilection was the<br />
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peculiar trait of a minority of travelers and a few immigrant<br />
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populations. The progression by which spicy-hot food went from there<br />
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to the U.S. mainstream makes a perfect type case of cultural<br />
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assimilation, and the role and meaning that the stuff has acquired on<br />
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the way is interesting too.</p>
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<p>(Oh. And for those of you who don’t understand the appeal? It’s<br />
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all about endorphin rush, like a runner’s high. Pepper-heads like me<br />
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have developed a conditioned reflex whereby the burning sensation<br />
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stimulates the release of opiate-like chemicals from the brainstem,<br />
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inducing a euphoria not unlike a heroin buzz. Yes, this theory has<br />
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been clinically verified.)</p>
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<p>Baseline: Thirty years ago. The early 1970s. I’m a teenager, just<br />
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back in the U.S. from years spent overseas. Spicy-hot food is pretty<br />
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rare in American cuisine. Maybe you’d have heard of five-alarm chili<br />
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if you’d lived in Texas, but chances are you’d never have actually<br />
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eaten the stuff. If you’re from Louisiana, you might have put Tabasco<br />
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sauce on your morning eggs. Aside from that, you wouldn’t have<br />
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tasted hot peppers outside of a big-city Chinatown.</p>
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<p>It’s actually a little difficult to remember how different American<br />
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cooking was then. Those were the years when Kool-Whip was cool and<br />
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the casserole was king, an era of relentless blandness well-skewered<br />
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by James Lileks’s <a href="http://www.lileks.com/institute/gallery/"><br />
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Gallery of Regrettable Food</a>. Mom didn’t know any better. Well,<br />
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most moms didn’t, anyway; mine had acquired a few clues overseas.</p>
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<p>But most Americans of that day inherited the pale hues of British<br />
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and German cooking. What zip there was in our cuisine came from<br />
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immigrants, especially (at that time) Italians. Thai, Vietnamese<br />
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and Ethiopian had not gained a foothold. Chinese was on educated<br />
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peoples’ radar but only eaten in restaurants; nobody owned a wok<br />
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yet.</p>
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<p>Indeed, Chinese food had already caught on in a few leading-edge<br />
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subcultures by the mid-1970s: science-fiction fans, computer hackers,<br />
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the people who would start to call themselves `geeks’ fifteen years<br />
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later. But most of what was available was Americanized versions of<br />
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the blander Shanghainese and Cantonese varieties; restaurants that<br />
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made a point of authenticity and advertised Szechuan and Hunan cooking<br />
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to round-eyes were not yet common.</p>
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<p>This all began to change in the early 1980s. The yuppies did it to<br />
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us; experimentation with exotic and ethnic foods became a signature<br />
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behavior of the young, upwardly mobile urban elite, and the variety of<br />
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restaurants increased tremendously in a way that both met that demand<br />
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and stimulated it. More importantly, cooking techniques and<br />
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ingredients that hadn’t been traditional in European cuisine started<br />
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to influence home cooking — white people started buying<br />
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woks. And Szechuan fire oil.</p>
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<p>The first vogue for Cajun cooking around 1984 was, as I recall,<br />
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something of a turning point. Chinese cooking was popular but still<br />
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marked as `foreign'; Cajun was not. Spicy-hot gumbo joined five-alarm<br />
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chili on the roster of all-American foods that were not only expected<br />
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but <em>required</em> to deliver a hefty dose of capsaicin zap. I<br />
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remember thinking the world was changing when, in 1987 or ’88, I<br />
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first saw spicy Cajun dishes on the menu of a white-bread roadside<br />
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diner. In Delaware.</p>
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<p>This diner was never going to show up in Michelin’s or Zagat’s; in<br />
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fact, it was the next thing to a truck stop. Something else was going<br />
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on in the 1980s besides yuppies buying woks — and that was the<br />
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embrace of spicy-hot food by the small-town and rural working class,<br />
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and its coding as a specifically masculine pleasure.</p>
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<p>This probably evolved out of the tradition, going back at least to<br />
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the late 1940s, of defining barbecue and chili as what an<br />
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anthropologist would call a “men’s mystery”. Despite the existence of<br />
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male professional chefs and men who can cook, most kinds of domestic<br />
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cooking are indisputably a female thing — women are expected to<br />
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be interested in it and expected to be good at it, and a man who<br />
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acquires skill is crossing into women’s country. But for a handful of<br />
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dishes culturally coded as “men’s food”, the reverse is true.<br />
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Barbecue and chili top that list, and have since long before spicy-hot<br />
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food went mainstream.</p>
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<p>For people who drive pickup trucks, spicy-hot food went from being<br />
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a marked minority taste to being something like a central men’s<br />
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mystery in the decade after 1985. I first realized this in the early<br />
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1990s when I saw a rack of 101 hot-pepper sauces on display at a<br />
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gun-and-knife show, in between the premium tobacco and the jerked<br />
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meat. There’s a sight you won’t see at a flower show, or anywhere else<br />
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in women’s country.</p>
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<p>The packaging and marketing of hot sauces tells the same<br />
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story. From the top-shelf varieties like Melinda’s XXX (my favorite!)<br />
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to novelty items like “Scorned Woman” and “Hot Buns”, much of the<br />
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imagery is cheeky sexiness clearly designed to appeal to men.</p>
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<p>Nor is it hard to understand why the association got made in the<br />
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first place. It’s considered masculine to enjoy physical risk, even<br />
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mostly trivial physical risks like burning yourself on a sauce hotter<br />
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than you can handle. Men who like hot peppers swap capsaicin-zap<br />
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stories; I myself am perhaps unreasonably proud of having outlasted<br />
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a tableful of Mexican college students one night in Monterrey,<br />
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watching them fall out one by one as a plate of sauteed habaneros<br />
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was passed repeatedly around the table.</p>
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<p>There’s a sneaky element of female complicity in all this. Women<br />
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chuckle at our capsaicin-zap stories the same way they laugh at other<br />
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forms of laddish posturing, but then (as my wife eloquently puts it)<br />
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“What good is a man if you rip off his balls?” They leave us capsaicin<br />
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and barbecue and other men’s mysteries because they instinctively grok<br />
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that a certain amount of testosterone-driven male-primate behavior is<br />
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essential for the health of Y-chromosome types — and best it<br />
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should be over something harmless.</p>
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<p>This gastronomic pincer movement — Yuppies pushing spicy food<br />
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downmarket, truckers and rednecks pushing it upmarket —<br />
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coincided with the rise in cultural influence of Hispanics with a<br />
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native tradition of spicy-hot food. In retrospect, it’s interesting that<br />
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what mainstream America naturalized was jalapenos rather than<br />
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Chinese-style fire oil. Tex-Mex assimilated more readily than<br />
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Szechuan, as it turned out.</p>
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<p>We can conveniently date that mainstreaming from the year salsa<br />
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first passed ketchup in sales volume, 1996. Perhaps not by<br />
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coincidence, that’s the first year I got gifted with a jar of<br />
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homegrown habaneros. They came to me from an Irish ex-biker, a<br />
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take-no-shit ZZ-Top lookalike who runs a tire dealership in the next<br />
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town over. He’d be a great guy to have with you in a bar fight, but<br />
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nobody who would ever be accused of avant-garde tastes. I guess<br />
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that was when I realized spicy-hot food had become as all-American<br />
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as apple pie.</p>
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<p><a href="http://enetation.co.uk/comments.php?user=esr&commentid=83836377">Blogspot comments</a></p>
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