Now, it seems so silly. I look at that little dish of peppers and they’re starting to dry and pucker, looking more like cayenne peppers every day.Why did I do that to myself? Why?
I know my peppers fairly well. We have Mark Miller’s “The Great Chili Poster” hanging on our wall — both of them, in fact, Seco (dry) and Fresco (fresh) — beautifully photographed, with country of origin, culinary uses, and Scoville heat units for each pepper listed. All of the little peppers are hot, really hot.
Here’s why .A few days before school started, my son Isaac and I were home alone. He dared me to eat one of the small red ornamental peppers that were sitting on the counter. They’d been plucked from a round wooden planter full of pepper plants given to us by a neighbor whose dog had been eating them and getting sick.”
This is not just a hot pepper, like jalapeno hot,” I said, warming up my didactic voice. “This is cayenne pepper hot, Thai chile hot, the-stuff-they-make-Mace-out-of hot.” I won’t really eat this, I thought. It’s just a teachable moment.I proceeded to dispel the myth about countering spicy food with cold beverages (it simply coagulates the capsaicin oils on the tongue and prolongs the pain). “The best beverage for chasing spicy food is something hot, like tea,” I said to my class of one, warming up a cup of green tea in the microwave to demonstrate.”
When people say hot, it’s not really hot, it’s just spicy, isn’t it Dad?” my pupil asked. I flashed back to my youth, when I was Isaac’s age and my favorite TV show was “Kung Fu.” Ahh, Grasshopper, I thought. You have learned much.” You know you’re right, Isaac,” I said. “But to a lot of people it feels like actual heat.”
The microwave beeped and I removed my hot cup, still staring at the pencil-thick pepper in my other hand. Suddenly I bit it off near the stem and began chewing vigorously, confident that my Zen chile wisdom would save me.
But no, I was banished, it seemed, to Hades, the Eternal Lake of Fire. Now I was Grasshopper in my own searing test, picking up the cauldron of red-hot coals, only instead of using my bare forearms, I used my mouth. The master had become the pupil.
The heat shot quickly to pain, then intense pain, and stayed there for about 5 full minutes. Panicky thoughts chased through my brain — “can’t stand it,” “run around,” “head in water,” “make it stop” as I slurped my hot tea, noting that it only made the hot parts of my mouth hurt more. Saliva poured out of my mouth and after a few minutes, I began sweating. “I’m never doing this again,” I said. Finally the mouth pain level descended to plain old normal, then mild. The perspiration evaporated. It was all over in about 10 minutes.
When Jane got home from work, Isaac felt the need to retell the story.” Why’d you do that?” she said. She’d seen my moth-like attraction to flaming-hot peppers before. “Is it because he dared you?”
“Uh, yeah, I guess, and because … I wanted to?” I said sheepishly. That wasn’t exactly true either.
“You don’t have to take the dare, especially from a kid,” Jane reminded me. Then she laughed, and I breathed, slower and easier with each passing second.
