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© 2003-2007 Michael C. Berch
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Thu, 15 Jul 2004

The Hotluck

The first thing you need to remember is that I'm not one of those people that tends to like overly spicy ("hot") food. To me it's like pointing a video camera at the sun, or turning the amplifier up past 11: hot peppers simply overwhelm the signal to noise ratio of what I would like to think of as my delicate and highly sensitive taste buds. Hot peppers -- those with a fair amount of capsaicin, the active principle in much spicy food (although horseradish, mustard, and the piper nigrum [black pepper] plant also qualify) are certainly an attractive seasoning, but to me they work best in small or moderate doses, so as not to overwhelm the senses and mask the other flavours.

Needless to say, there are other schools of thought on this. There was a guy I knew in college who actually carried around a bottle of habanero sauce and dumped large amounts in essentially every thing he tasted, complaining about the "damned bland food out here", which was odd, since I think he was from New Jersey. And I once had a roommate whose diet consisted of, so far as I could tell, entirely of tinned Ortega brand jalapeno peppers and Olympia beer, as well as inhaled Dristan. (Really. I'm not making this up.) Both these guys reminded me of junkies who had to shoot up ever-increasing amounts of heroin in order to make up for the amazing tolerance that they had developed.

More reasonably, though, there seem to be a number of people with perfectly good taste buds who like pretty spicy food. I ascribe this to a combination of differing physiology of taste, plus a likely tolerance effect from regular ingestion. (There's also a somewhat overlapping, but not entirely congruent, faction that is primarily interested in spicy food as a producer of a natural, endorphin-driven "high". As an aficionado of endorphins in other contexts, I can't disagree in principle, although it just doesn't work for me with spicy food.)

The natural tendency, however, among spicy-food lovers is to divide the world into wimps and non-wimps, with a smugness about capsaicin tolerance ranging from the slight to the pronounced. Often the word "macho" comes up in this context. (I counter this with a mild smugness about ultra-sensitive and discriminating taste buds, which is usually met with eye-rolling.) So, then, when I was invited to my friends Scott and Roswitha's Hotluck last month, I was definitely honoured, but expected a bit of a rough time. However, I quickly learned that this year's theme was "Educate A Wimp", which meant that (a) there might actually be some easily-edible food as a sop to us sensitives; but (b) there was likely to be major smugness/macho involved.

I'm pleased to say that not only was there a huge variety of foods that were not beyond my palate's pale, but that there was no smugness/macho factor at all, certainly none at all on the part of our hosts. What's more, there were at least two things that were so good that I overlooked the pain factor in order to eat them and indeed go for seconds. Outside, dishes were arranged on three tables: the mild, the medium, and the hot, with little flags (green, yellow, or pink) in or near each dish as a further disclosure (plus the name and any details about the dish). Indoors, desserts filled a large table, but provided no automatic respite from the capsaicin onslaught; one of the spiciest and most painful dishes for me was a slab of dark chocolate bark. (I'm told by those who fancy both hot peppers and xanthine-laden chocolate that spicy chocolate is a serious and highly sensual thrill, and is probably illegal somewhere.)

Things began innocently enough with some non-spicy grilled thai beef made by my friend Eleanor from The Well. The assembled masses fell on it and it was gone in seconds. It was a tasty entrée for things to come.

So I noodled around the Wimp table for a while, where I found some nice chicken enchiladas, coconut chicken, and gruyere cheese puffs. The most interesting thing that had a green tag was an Alsatian cabbage soup with sausages that hit the spot -- and also possessed a bit more fire than its tag led me to believe. (The tag system, as you might expect, reflects both a rather broad spectrum as well as highly subjective perceptions.) There was also a Serbian bean soup, prepared by Roswitha, that had a deep and complex flavour.

I moved on to the Medium table pretty quickly, and at first was led on by an innocent tuna pate, which barely piqued my spice meter, but was followed immediately with an Asian shrimp salad which did. I took some tiny bites of hummus (good, but I'm not really a hummus person), a casserole which I didn't get the title of, and the last piece of some grilled chicken, which was very nice indeed.

But what this was all about lay at the repast's farthest expanse: the Hot table. Now, to be clear, there were some items that I was just not going to attempt, for the aforementioned pointing-the-camera-at-the-sun reasons: this included various dishes made of hot peppers themselves, a couple of Indian dishes, and, making the rounds at the notional dessert table, something called Demon Rum, prepared by a fellow named Mark, which was pure rum flavoured with Red Savina habanero peppers, and left to steep and infuse for an unseemly amount of time. This particular batch was 2003 vintage, meaning that the peppers had been soaking in the rum for over a year. Mark says it tends to lose its punch after a very long time (there was a six year-old vintage present as well), but after a year it was easily able to knock 'em dead. (This was generally considered the spiciest item of the day.)

One intriguing dish was the Pig Newtons, prepared by Scott himself, which looked like a giant fig newton, but is actually smoked pulled pork en croute, the enclosing dough containing ground Red Savina habanero material. Now, it's likely that I could have dealt with the filling, but I didn't get that far, since I just broke off a tiny bit of the croute and tasted it, and it knocked me for a serious loop. (Expectations count for something in the hot world; I was fully prepared for a spicy filling but somehow expected an innocent wrapper.)

After a brief recovery period I tasted the Asian slaw with pork sandwich which was actually a relief after the Pig Newton, and then headed back to the Mild table for a refresher of raita (Indian-style yogurt with onion, tomato, and seasonings) and some cucumber salad. That was a relief!

At this point I was hitting full stride, but I knew the best was yet to come -- there had been a smoker going full-blast since well before I'd arrived, and cooks' helpers were warming some barbecued meats in the oven. Soon they made an appearance. I looked at the smoked ribs, and said to myself, I don't care how hot those are, I'm going to eat them. And probably in signficant quantity. Well, Scott's Burning Ribs were indeed hot, but thankfully not to the point of masking the wonderful flavour of smoked and seasoned meat. The same was true of the Texas-style brisket, which was seriously seasoned and had the wonderful red color of smoked meat. I think I do better with spicy barbecued meat since typically the peppers are in a dry rub, or possibly a liquid marinade, and are thus limited to the surface or near-surface of the meat. Someday, of course, Scott is going to figure out a way to get the Red Savinas into the deep interior of the meat, and then I'm in trouble.

The barbecue pretty much took the remainder of my stamina, so it was time to hit the dessert table. Some items were completely innocent, others were traditional but with an added kick, and one -- the dark chocolate bark mentioned above -- was a complete surprise. It comes from Richard Donnelly Chocolates, and is made with smoked savina powder. Wow!

The point of the Hotluck, of course, is not merely the food, but the serious foodie schmooze. Roswitha and Scott showed food and travel photos on a large screen, provoking discussion about things like the origin of doner kebap and food sanitation in East Asia. And the hosts, besides documenting the event with a nice web page with photos, are also kind enough to supply the recipes. I won't be attempting the Hot Chocolate at home, or even the Pig Newtons, and don't want to even think about the Demon Rum, but I'm anxious to give the smoked meats a shot.

So after all of this I remain pretty reticent about spicy food. It's nice once in a while, but I can't help but think that almost all the dishes I tasted would have been just as good with a lower level of fire. They were almost uniformly delicious, the kind of food I'd line up to taste any day, but I think that's much more a testimonial to the culinary skill of the creators rather than the properties of hot red peppers.

Posted at 19:30 | permanent link

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