The Devil's Dinner
A Gastronomic and Cultural History of Chili Peppers
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Stuart Walton's The Devil's Dinner looks at the history of hot peppers, their culinary uses through the ages, and the significance of spicy food in an increasingly homogenous world.
The Devil's Dinner is the first authoritative history of chili peppers. There are countless books on cooking with chilies, but no book goes into depth about the biological, gastronomical, and cultural impact this forbidden fruit has had upon people all over the world. The story has been too hot to handle.
A billion dollar industry, hot peppers are especially popular in the United States, where a superhot movement is on the rise. Hot peppers started out in Mexico and South America, came to Europe with returning Spanish travelers, lit up Iberian cuisine with piri-piri and pimientos, continued along eastern trade routes, boosted mustard and pepper in cuisines of the Indian subcontinent, then took overland routes to central Europe in the paprika of Hungarian and Austrian dumplings, devilled this and devilled that… they've been everywhere!
The Devil's Dinner tells the history of hot peppers and captures the rise of the superhot movement.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this ruminative history, Walton (In the Realm of the Senses) traces the evolution of chili peppers. He first lays out a taxonomy of some of the 50,000 pepper varieties ranging from the tears of fire, which will "make you weep ardently" and is measured at 30,000 Scoville heat units (SHUs indicate how pungent food is Tabasco sauce is a modest 2,500 SHUs) to the mysterious megahot "Pepper X," with three million SHUs. He tracks how chilis "poured forth" from the Americas after Columbus, following slave trade routes through Africa and into Asia, bringing fire to Indian and Chinese cooking (he writes that Mao was "as sworn to hot chilies as he was to revolutionary strategy"). Walton then turns his attention to the strange attractions of today's competitive hot-chili-eating culture, noting that its "sheer gratuitousness" feels "specifically male." He explains that even though the burning sensation caused by eating chili peppers developed as an evolutionary defense mechanism, that hasn't stopped them from becoming a critical culinary and symbolic focal point of human society, "a triumph of alimentary defiance over biological instinct." This is a fascinating overview of the cultural and culinary changes wrought by a fiery little fruit "that was only telling human beings that it didn't want to be eaten."
