I’m one of those crazies who love hot spicy food, especially Indian curries to blow your socks off. But, reading about the ten hottest peppers in the world on AOL recently, I have discovered that I am a piker, a real wimp when it comes to real heat. I can handle the lowly Jalapeno, the occasional Habanero or the Jamaican Scotch Bonnet, which have a heat index of under 200,000 SCHOs (Scovill heat index). But there are a host of others, ranging from a few hundred thousand to a new champion of over 1,400,000 called the Jamaica Moraga Scorpion, which sounds like the h-bomb of chilis. These will gag and hurt you seriously, and, I admit, I’m not macho enough to handle that much heat.
I came from a family of heat lovers. My dad was a good cook and specialized in spicy Indian curries---shrimp, beef or lamb---, and he passed these genes down to his siblings. I developed a taste that could handle the hot stuff readily, adding seeded jalapenos to hamburgers, munching on hot peppers as appetisers and asking for the really hot curry sauce at an Indian restaurant.
Then I met my future brother-in-law in the late sixties when he was courting my wife’s sister. Mike was in the British army, an officer attached to a brigade of Gurkhas, the Nepalese tribesman who fought against and then for the British from the late nineteenth century. They are a tough and hardy breed. One Gurkha won the Victoria Cross posthumously in World War II when he singlehandedly took on a Japanese tank and won, though dying in the process.
Mike took his future wife and my wife and me to a curry restaurant on the Brompton Road in London where a whole string of Indian curry restaurants are located, and he chose The Star of India. Mike asked if we liked hot curries, which we did, and he suggested we order the Madras lamb curry. It was great---and really hot. In those days, as some of you may remember, men wore long hair and sideburns. By the end of the curry, I was wringing out my sideburns and feeling the top of my head similar to a small volcano, plus I was sure my contact lens were fused to my eyes---but I loved it. I asked Mike what he was having, which he was munching on like a chicken wing, and he replied, “I’m having a Bangalore curry---just a bit hotter.” I asked for a taste. It was like a bomb going off in my mouth, and I soon was spluttering, and this time I was sure the top of my head erupted.
Mike had spent time with his troops in the jungles of Malaya in the mid-fifties when Communist insurgents were trying to control the Malay Penisula, and he had learned to eat what they eat; hence, the development of an asbestos mouth. In any case, I declared Mike the undisputed champion of hot food, and I slunk off in thorough defeat.
So, bring on the heat, but I’m not man enough to tackle the Jamaica Moraga Scorpion and its 1.400,000 bits of heat. Maybe I’ll buy one and send it to Mike. If anyone can handle it, he’s the main man!
I used to love hot, spicy food. As I get older I find them harder to tolerate. We have a market in this area that carries spices and hot sauces in hundreds of varieties. You would love it.
ReplyDeleteWe have a couple of Indian stores here who carry serious heat,
ReplyDeleteWell, who would have thought it, you two up on the chimney of the heat index. That brother in law must be something. I remember my dad and his sister and brother in law eating and loving the hot stuff, the jalapenos, the habaneros, the cayennes. I remember not liking hot foods, but as I grew older, I began to appreciate the hot spicier foods, although I don't rank high on the heat index. I never liked Indian foods. Some of them are hot, too hot, I don't like the smell, but I do eat the small Mexican peppers I mentioned and I use Tabasco and Pecante sauce on
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I obviously inherited some of those heat tolerant genes and I discovered while travelling in SE Asia that the more I ate seriously spiced food, the more tolerant I became and by the end of our travels, my tolerance was up there! However, my Sri Lankan god-daughter's family take the biscuit (or the chili as it were!). They make the word hot sound tepid! I once asked my god-daughter's mother how they manage to eat such hot spices, particularly at such a young age. The answer seemed logical and obvious in retrospect, they start them very, very young on relatively mild spices and build it up over the years. Though my own tolerance has increased, I still balk at the super hot...I'm not interested in eating something where I can't actually taste the spices or flavours due to the heat of the spice!
ReplyDeleteYes, Louise dear, you come by those genes naturally! i'm with you on still wanting to be able to taste the flavour beyond ther heat.
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