This is Jamie Sanders. Welcome to another episode of Eating the Past, as we explore the spices and flavors that enliven our favorite dishes.
I first encountered really spicy foods, and I mean hot spicy, when I traveled to Mexico as a teenager for study abroad in Mérida in the Yucatan peninsula. While there are racial and regional variations, Southern food is not particularly spicy, especially historically.
In Mexico, I discovered all the different flavors and heats chilis can impart. I learned the basics of Yucatecan salsa .Green was mild, of course, if still piquant, and while a gringo might assume red sauce was the hottest, you quickly found out, perhaps the hard way, that nothing matched yellow salsa for searing heat.I delighted in tasting new chiles. And being a young man, I thought there was something a bit macho about being able to not only eat but enjoy spicy food.
This stupidity would get me into trouble now and again later in life. When I moved to Pittsburgh, I had also never really tried Indian food, and had never been introduced to the choose your own adventure system of picking your spice level from one to ten. One night, I went out with two colleagues I had there, one of whom I had a crush on.
I also suspected, somewhat incorrectly I later learned, that I was competing for her affections with the other student. When it came time to pick our spice level for our dishes, I started with a six, but my crush, from West Texas and a lover of spicy foods, picked a seven. The other student picked a seven too. I changed mine to an eight.He did too. We finally settled on a nine.
The food came and it was like a blast furnace. This was not the mild heat of what one of my colleagues calls “Logan spicy,” but the real deal. If the young woman at the table was at all impressed by my daring (and she was not), the effect was ruined by me having to go the bathroom every few minutes due to the gallons of water I was drinking to try to cool my tongue.
By the way, from my time in Mexico I had long learned that salt was a better remedy for a burning mouth than water or beer, but I was desperate.
Anyway, spoiler alert, in spite of my inanity, we ended up getting married.
That was a long time ago. In the ensuing decades, something changed. I slowly, but surely, over time lost much of my tolerance for spicy, hot foods. For some people, this is one of the many indignities of aging. Like failing eyesight or creaky joints, your sensitivity to capsaicin, the chemical in chili peppers that tricks your body into thinking it is burning, tends to reduce over time.
Why is this? Well, as you age, your stomach lining thins, making you more sensitive to capsaicin. Also, for some, the valve between your stomach and esophagus begins to weaken, allowing more stomach acid, activated by capsaicin, into your esophagus, creating heartburn.
Finally, you actually take longer to digest foods as you age, meaning your body has more time to react to spicy dishes.
Luckily, heat or piquancy is just one component of spiciness, and frankly, one of the least complex, gastronomically speaking. As this series on Eating the Past has explored, there is a universe of spices out there: from vanilla to saffron (one of my personal favorites). More than heat, I want to taste cumin, cardamon, and coriander in foods often associated with being spicy. Fresh ginger and garlic. Lemon zest and oregano from my garden.
Why do so many food bros, and they tend to be bros, just associated spiciness with heat?
Making something as piquant as possible is not making it better. That is like saying more salt is always better! As someone who loves salt, and I use way more than most recipes allow, even I know too much salt will spoil a dish. The trick to good cooking is find the sweet spot—to correctly spicing your dish so all the individual elements shine, yet come together as something greater as a whole.
So yeah, I use less chipotle powder, and more ancho powder in my dishes now. Rather than hot sauces, I prefer the more measured heat of chili crisps. And I cast an exasperated side eye at those who equate heat with spiciness.
But, it still makes me sad, longing for a lost past when food was only an adventure.
Thanks for listening. You can find this and other Eating the Past episodes at UPR.org.
Join us next week for more food history and culture, every Sunday at noon, right before the Splendid Table, on your UPR station.
