Port-of-Spain, Trinidad - A hot sauce safari - it seemed like a good idea at the time. But at the moment I am suffering from a bad case of heat-induced
allergic reactions. Lying in my air-conditioned hotel room in Port-of-Spain, popping allergy pills, I am alternately sweating and shivering while occasionally breaking out in full body hives. But with only two days left on this month-long trip, I am determined to see my mission through to the end.
You'd think that 20 years of Texas summers would make you immune to heat stroke. As I remember, it was 100 degrees in the shade the day I got so caught up with Caribbean hot sauces to begin with. It was five years ago and the first annual Austin Hot Sauce Contest was in full swing on a Sunday afternoon in August. The other judges and I had been sweating our way through 300 hot sauces all morning.
After getting through all the Mexican-style red sauces, made with jalapeños, tomatoes, onions, and garlic, the Caribbean salsas were quite a shock to my taste buds. The yellow and orange hues of habanero and Scotch bonnet peppers, papaya, mango, and pineapple made these homemade sauces look as vibrant as they tasted. And the savory blends of fresh herbs, ginger, allspice, and mustard rounded out the tropical flavor of the fruits and peppers wonderfully.
I had tried cooking with habanero and Scotch bonnet peppers before, but I had never really been pleased with the results. Once I discovered these Caribbean hot sauces, I was hooked. I began looking for them in mail-order catalogs and specialty stores. I invented my own recipe for mango salsa. Then my hot sauce fanatic friends started telling me about rare bottled brands from the Carribean like Dragon's Breath and Pineapple Sizzle. Until I'd tasted these, they told me, I hadn't tasted hot sauce.
And if the commercial sauces were so good, then what about the homemade hot sauces in the teeming markets of Kingston and Port-of-Spain? I wondered. In five trips to the Caribbean over the last four years, I learned all I could about the different styles of hot and spicy Caribbean cooking. On this trip, I am concentrating on the peppers and the hot sauces made from them.
Like I said, it seemed like a good idea at the time.
So when Aaron Henry calls my hotel room to ask me if I'd like to see his pepper farm out in the Trinidadian countryside, I can't very well refuse. These aren't just any peppers, these are Trinidad's famous Congo peppers. So I pull my shorts on over my hives, swallow an extra allergy pill, and jump into his truck for a ride in the country.
Now, as we walk up the hill, squinting through the heat haze, all I can see is a steep slope covered with dark greenery under the blue oven of a tropical sky. As we get closer, I can make out shiny leaves on the knee-high plants. The sun is directly overhead; the palm trees that surround the jungle clearing are dead still. I am dripping with sweat and breathing hard as we hike uphill. I have come a long way to see the famed Congo peppers of Trinidad. But so far, I haven't seen anything but leafy bushes.
"Well, what do you think?" chortles Aaron Henry, who leases this hillside plot in Cunupia, a half hour's drive from Port-of-Spain.
"Where are the peppers?" I want to know. Pulling back the foliage on a large bush, Aaron Henry smiles as he reveals the secretive crop. Completely hidden under the leaves of every bush are dozens of fat, ripe Congo peppers.
Congo is Trini slang for big. I start picking a few of the prettiest specimens to admire their shapes. One is a bright red boxing glove; another a yellow shrunken head. Aaron Henry offers to take my picture with a handful of them, so I primp for the photo by taking off my Panama and wiping the sweat from my forehead with my hand. Bad move because my forehead begins to burn immediately. I try to smile for the photo, but I'm in agony as the pepper burn begins to spread across my face and into my eyes. After a few minutes my hands begin to tingle. Then they too begin to burn.
I have been cooking with chile peppers for years and I know the pain that careless handling can cause, but never before have I gotten such an intense burn from peppers that weren't even cut open. Back at the storage shed where we parked, I scrub myself with dish detergent and swear my undying respect to the cruel mistress that is Capsicum chinense.
Most of the peppers we cook with in North America, from bell peppers to jalapeños, come from the Capsicum annum species. My early experiments with habaneros were unsuccessful because cooking with the intensely hotCapsicum chinense species requires a completely different approach.
The Capsicum chinense species was spread from South America up through the Antilles by the sea-going Arawak and Carib Indians, the original inhabitants of the Caribbean. The peppers eventually came to the Yucatan from Cuba and so they were called habanero peppers there. (Habanero means "from Havana" in Spanish.) This Mexican name is now the one most commonly used in the United States.
Habaneros and their Caribbean cousins are the hottest peppers in the world. While they may be the most incendiary peppers under the sun, their distinctive flavor, with hints of apricot, peach, and citrus, has also made Caribbean peppers one of the world's most popular.
Aaron Henry explains that very few pepper farmers irrigate their fields, so the peppers disappear from the markets in the dry season. "So what do most people do for peppers in the dry season?" I ask Aaron Henry. "Pepper sauce!" he says, looking at me like I've lost my mind.
I never really thought of making pepper sauce as a way of preserving peppers because in Texas, peppers are available all year long. But on this trip I have learned a lot about the agricultural patterns of the Caribbean and how they affect the way people eat.
The islands of the Caribbean are blessed with enough sunshine to grow peppers throughout the year; it is rainfall that's the problem. In the Virgin Islands, there weren't any peppers at all this year due to a drought. Aaron Henry's pepper crop is being harvested as I watch. When these peppers are gone, there will be no more until next year. The humidity here makes it impossible to preserve peppers by drying them the way they do in Mexico. So when the rains end and peppers are no longer available in the market, Caribbean cooks rely on pepper sauces for all of their hot and spicy recipes.
I climb into Aaron Henry's truck and turn the air conditioner on full blast. "Do you want to take some home?" He asks holding out a handful of Congo peppers.
"No, I think I'll stick with pepper sauce," I say, wincing at the sight of those fiery little devils. On our way back to the city, we talk about the different kinds of pepper sauce that are popular in Trinidad. Many home cooks here, I have learned, prefer a simple mash of peppers and vinegar with no flavorings at all. These "pure" pepper mashes are much too hot to eat on a sandwich or sprinkle on eggs, but they aren't intended for table use anyway. These preserved peppers are like home canned tomatoes.
If you've ever had a garden, you know that the most practical way to put up tomatoes is to cook them slightly and put them in a jar with a minimum of other ingredients. They don't taste very good this way, but it gives you the flexibility to decide whether to use them later on in a soup, a stew, or a spaghetti sauce. Likewise, many extremely hot Caribbean pepper concentrates are popular not because they taste good, but because they give cooks the flexibility to use them in a soup or a stew or to make their own homemade table sauces by blending the pepper concentrate with fresh ingredients.
This philosophy explains a lot about Caribbean hot sauces. While the different strains of Caribbean peppers are pretty much interchangable for cooking purposes, the different varieties of hot sauce are not. Some Caribbean hot sauces are made with nothing but peppers and are used for cooking or making table sauces. Milder sauces, made with fruits and herbs and other flavorings, are the bottled equivalents of the homemade table sauces.
Back in my hotel room, I admire all the little bottles of hot sauces I've collected as I pack my bags for the trip home. My hot and spicy safaris have convinced me that pepper sauces are more than just a condiment in the Caribbean. They are part of a system of cooking and preserving foods in the tropics that goes back to the Amerindians.
In the markets and roadside stands of Trinidad, pepper mashes and homemade hot sauces have always been offered for sale in baby food jars and old mayonnaise bottles. The Caribbean hot sauce industry is just an updated version of this old tradition. Commercial versions of Caribbean hot sauces were originally intended to be sold in local grocery stores as a convenience for home cooks. But these commercial enterprises had unintended ramifications. They made it possible for foreigners to pack up a bottle of Caribbean pepper sauce in their suitcase and take it home with them.
All those little bottles of pepper sauce got people in other countries excited about the Caribbean peppers they read about on the labels of those little bottles. And they began to ask for habaneros and Scotch bonnets at their grocery stores. And that's how hot sauce fanatics spread the gospel of Caribbean hellfire all over the world. n