Tasty (16 page)

Bjarnarhöfn, a remote spot on the sea near a field of magma formations, is one of a handful of places in Iceland where
hákarl
is made. Kristján Hildibrandsson runs an operation that processes about a hundred shark carcasses a year, and a small museum dedicated to the tradition. Hildibrandsson's father and grandfather used to troll for sharks in a twenty-foot dory, but now they are purchased from giant trawlers at the dock. He compresses the meat in wooden crates for four to six weeks, then hangs and air-cures the mottled orange-­yellow-gray bolts of flesh in a shed behind the museum for three to five months. A potent ammonia odor cloaks the shed for a radius of about fifty feet, even in the rain. Hundreds of years
ago, semirotted shark meat may have been the only thing around in wintertime to sustain Viking colonies; today, it's eaten in bite-sized chunks with a snort of
brennivín
(Icelandic herbal schnapps), during Þorrablót, a midwinter festival dedicated to the Norse god Thor. Hildibrandsson invites visitors to sample small chunks of
hákarl
, accompanied by pieces of brown bread. “Some people like to have it right afterwards, to kill the taste,” he said helpfully. The ammonia-rot aroma hits twice—once as the fish is brought out, and again when it's chewed—and overwhelms everything.

The rules that govern what is disgusting and what is a delicacy have no biological rationale; they are a product of complex societies that provide a variety of foods and have the luxury of drawing such lines based on tradition. “Almost all animal products are disgusting, and they are the most nutritive of all foods,” Rozin said. “So why should you be so negative about something that is such a good package of nutrients and calories as meat is?”

The sources of disgust are endless. Rozin found that the fear of contamination is the most persistent. Once something is seen as contaminated, it may transfer that quality to everything it comes into contact with. The impurity may be metaphorical, but to the brain, it's quite real. Research shows that people with psychological conditions such as obsessive-­compulsive disorder have an overdeveloped sense of disgust, leading them to take repetitive steps, such as hand washing, to dispel this sense of contamination. Having developed such an avid and promiscuous disgust sense, societies had to find ways to manage it. Hebrew laws regarding kosher food, for example, explicitly define what is contaminated and what isn't. In the Bible, God decrees that the Jews may eat only those land animals that have cloven hooves and chew cud, and
only fish with scales; this excludes pigs, rabbits, and shellfish, among other things. Animals to be eaten must not be diseased, and must be ritually slaughtered by a single cut across the throat.

Disgust is also corruptible. It can become a cultural force that divides nations and peoples. “I believe disgust is an extremely dangerous emotion,” Paul Ekman said. “It motivates genocide. When you believe people are repulsive, it dehumanizes them. Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's chief propagandist, wrote that the Jewish people were like lice, a disease. Those are disgust words.”

Consider Charles Darwin's encounter with the Yahgan and the meat tin once again. Darwin was an archetypal humanist, seeking universal scientific explanations that transcended culture. But his reaction, and the tribesman's, reflected the impossibility of communication between them. Each lived in a different world, his perceptions of the meat tin defined by distinct childhood experiences and the rules of his respective society. Their reactions capture an inflection point in the long arc of flavor itself, as the rising modern world and its strange food inventions encountered the vanishing natural one that had forged human tastes.

To Darwin, the Yahgan man's touch was akin to contamination: whatever ineffable quality made the natives dirty was transferred to the meat. The fact that this was the touch of a human, and not an animal, made it worse. “I declare the thought,” Darwin wrote in a letter to a colleague in 1862, “when I first saw in Tierra del Fuego a naked, painted, shivering, hideous savage, that my ancestors must have been somewhat similar beings, was at the time as revolting to me, nay, more revolting, than my present belief that an incomparably more remote ancestor was a hairy beast.”

Darwin's reaction was a product of its time. The British Empire was in ascendance, and in once remote parts of the world men with backgrounds similar to his own were encountering tribal peoples and devising ways to subdue and “civilize” them. A parallel cultural obsession of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was “wild children” who had lived all or part of their lives apart from society, scrounging for survival. They lived astride the divide between nature and civilization, and traveled back and forth across it. Wild children, to put it in twenty-first-century terminology, had food issues. Lucien Malson, a French psychologist, gathered information on fifty-three feral children over six centuries, from 1344's “Hesse wolf-child” through 1961's “Teheran ape-child,” identifying common themes in their stories.

Wild children usually lived off the land, eating nearly inedible foods. An Irish “sheep-boy” found in 1672 “was completely insensitive to the cold and would only touch grass and hay,” Malson wrote. A girl discovered in 1717 in the woods outside Zwolle in the Netherlands had been kidnapped at sixteen months old and later abandoned. “She was dressed in sacking and living on a diet of leaves and grass.” When they reentered society, their tastes appeared as alien as the Yahgans' had to Darwin. They rejected normal foods, devoured horrifying stuff, and didn't mind things other people find repellent, such as blood, feces, or filth. They had lived without human interaction, and thus had no behavioral immune systems or cultural cues to tell them how to react.

The wild boy of Aveyron was the most famous of these cases. Around 1800, Jean-Marc-Gaspard Itard, a young doctor, was working at the National Institution for Deaf-Mutes in Paris when a wild child arrived. Hunters had captured him naked in the woods in Lacaune, in the French Pyrenees, in
1797. He escaped, but was recaptured fifteen months later. The boy was initially diagnosed as an “idiot” with no chance of rejoining society. But Itard believed that wildness could be cured. He and the boy spent hours together as Itard attempted to socialize him. He named the boy Victor and kept a detailed record of everything they did. It was one of the earliest applications of the scientific method to psychology.

At first, the only thing that drew Victor's attention was food. He ignored all sounds except for the crack of a walnut being opened. He also ate acorns, potatoes, and raw chestnuts. Victor let Itard feed him warm milk and boiled potatoes. He spat out everything else. His senses were discombobulated. Sometimes he'd reach his hand into the boiling water for a potato without showing pain. Gradually, his sensibilities evolved. Within months he would eat nothing but cooked food. He took table manners to their logical extreme. Itard wrote: “The articles of food with which this child was fed, for a little time after his arrival at Paris, were shockingly disgusting. He trailed them about the room, and ate them out of his hands that were besmeared with filth. But at the period of which I am now speaking, he constantly threw away, in a pot, the contents of his plate, if any particle of dirt or dust had fallen upon it; and after he had broken his walnuts under his feet, he took pains to clean them in the nicest and most delicate manner.” Victor's sense of disgust had become so robust, Itard wondered if he'd gone too far.

• • •

The tribesman squatting beside Darwin at the campfire, meanwhile, was repelled by the preserved meat's look and clammy feel. He couldn't tell for sure if it was food at all:
it bore only a passing resemblance to animal flesh, raw or cooked. At the time, many Europeans had never seen it either, and would have reacted the same way.

The meat tin was a new invention. In 1795, the French government, then a post-revolutionary council known as the Directory, had faced a problem. Its armies were fighting insurrectionists at home and, led by General Napoleon Bonaparte, foreign enemies in Italy and Austria. Smoking, curing, salting, and other ancient methods of preserving food had failed: convoys of rations spoiled, and entire armies starved. The Directory offered a reward to anyone who could devise a reliable method of preserving food. The effort would ultimately take fourteen years; the Directory would exist for only four.

Nicolas Appert, a forty-five-year-old confectioner and former revolutionary who had founded a Parisian sweet shop named Fame, accepted the challenge. Working with sugar, syrups, and preserved fruits (Appert also invented peppermint schnapps for use as an ice cream topping) had showed him that some foods could last indefinitely, depending on the method of preservation. He wondered if there was a single approach that would work on everything. A well-known method for preserving wines involved heat. He started there, experimenting with different bottles, jars, and tins. He found that if he placed food in a jar; sealed it with cork, wire, and wax to make it airtight; and then heated it in water for five hours, the food was edible weeks or months later.

This method killed the microbes that cause rot and prevented new ones from growing by cutting off the oxygen supply. Appert was unaware of this invisible process, but his approach obviously worked. Paris's chefs loved it. No longer slaves to the seasons, now they could have whatever they wanted year-round. “The peas above all are green, tender, and
more flavorful than those eaten at the height of the season,” one gastronome raved about the bottles in the Fame shopwindow. Appert packed up bottles of peas, partridges, and gravy and shipped them to the French military. Later, the navy field-tested the technique and embraced it. In 1810, then emperor Napoleon gave Appert the promised reward of 12,000 francs (about $32,000 today). Appert wrote a book,
The Art of Preserving All Kinds of Animal and Vegetable Substances for Several Years
, and opened a bottling factory. But bottles break. Peter Durand, an English businessman, won a patent in 1810 for a similar technique using iron cans covered with a layer of tin to prevent rust. A few years later, the British Navy adopted this method to preserve meat. By the time of the
Beagle
's voyage, it was standard shipboard fare.

The rise of canning was part of a major shift in the world's eating habits and tastes. In a matter of decades, new technologies and farming techniques and the advent of railroads and steamships would make meat, especially beef, available to far more people than ever before. Scientists, meanwhile, began to use animal flesh as a template for experimentation in nutrition, form, and flavor.

Justus von Liebig, a brilliant chemist and contemporary of Darwin's born in Germany in 1803, helped bring this sea change about. Liebig performed a series of groundbreaking studies in organic chemistry, and invented nitrogen-based fertilizer after identifying the element as crucial to plant growth: agriculture was transformed. Next, Liebig turned his attention to food. His aim was to use science to manipulate nature, which he believed was highly inefficient at providing nutrition. Eventually, he hoped, new technologies would allow people to synthesize all the food they needed. He began to engineer food and formulate flavor based on scientific principles.

Liebig theorized that the juices contain a meat's most essential nutrients, and that searing is the best and only way to keep them from burning off. Hence the cook's nostrum that browning meat before cooking it seals in the juices. Liebig's idea contradicted centuries of kitchen practice—cooks tended to roast a meat some distance from the flames, then quickly brown the outside at the end—but by the mid-­nineteenth century cooks were aggressively charring it instead. Liebig turned out to be wrong. Juice isn't that nutritious; brown meat too much and it quickly dries out. (Browning meat in moderation does make it taste better, releasing a wave of umami and Maillard chemicals; this is why it's still standard practice.)

Liebig's most important achievement in this area was the invention of a new kind of food. Even before he began his career, what Appert and other food preservers were doing had been not just unprecedented but fundamentally strange. Preservation involves stopping processes, such as fermentation, that create flavor, arresting the flow of time. Liebig went a step further: he made meat even more abstract, eliminating its pesky, frightening physicality. He boiled meat down to its essence, preserved it in a cube, and used the cubes to make broth that he believed could feed the world. Liebig's extract of meat, first developed in the 1850s and manufactured in a South American beef tallow plant, became a sensation. Liebig bouillon cubes are still manufactured in Britain. Flavor was not among their strengths; nor, despite Liebig's ambitions, was nutrition. But like many manufactured foods today that trace their lineage back to it, its uniform blandness was predictable and reliable.

As Darwin's Yahgan compatriot examined this strange, squishy substance, he could have no idea that he was seeing
the future of food and flavor. The civilized world had judged the process of hunting, killing, cutting up, and eating animals, which had helped mold the human body and brain, and which his tribe still practiced, to be disgusting. These practices were a mark of savagery. Now technology had invented ways to make them virtually disappear. The less people knew about where food came from, the better.

CHAPTER 7

Quest for Fire

A
t the start of the twenty-first century, a coterie of amateur horticulturalists around the world began an unusual competition. Toiling in backyards, trading seeds, and seeking tips on the Internet, they pursued a goal that seemed more the domain of food science labs: cultivating the hottest chili pepper in the world. They were trying to dethrone the
Guinness Book of World Records
champion since 1994, the Red Savina, a smooth-skinned chili about the size of a Ping-Pong ball, and two hundred times as hot as a jalapeño.

For growing numbers of enthusiasts, sampling the superhot burn of such chilies was both an exercise in culinary appreciation and a test of mettle. The gardeners believed that the potential of chili heat had barely been tapped. To unlock it, they cross-pollinated existing hot pepper plants or grafted one onto another, hoping to get offspring consistently hotter than either parent. To enhance pungency, some exposed their plants to heat lamps and underwatered them. Prospective record-setting chilies were sent to labs that assessed their concentrations of capsaicin, the chemical responsible for the burning sensation. The goal was to surpass the Red Savina's rating of 577,000 Scoville heat units, the scale that measures hotness.

There were setbacks. In 2006, the Red Savina, a strain of habanero, was finally beaten by farmers in India. Guinness named a new record-holder, the Bhut Jolokia, commonly known as the “ghost pepper” for its pale, milky color. It had grown widely for decades in northeastern India's Assam region. Its hotness hovered around 1 million Scoville units. But the hobbyists persisted, and soon they had a series of breakthroughs. In 2010 and 2011, the Guinness title changed hands three times in four months.

The first new record-holder was the Infinity Chili (1,087,286 Scoville units), bred in Lincolnshire, England, by a gardener named Nick Woods. It was quickly overtaken by the Naga Viper (1,359,000 Scoville units), grown by Gerald Fowler, a pub owner in Cumbria, England. “Hot enough to strip paint,” he declared. Next was the Trinidad Scorpion “Butch T,” grown by Australian planter Marcel de Wit (1,463,700 Scoville units). When de Wit took his first batch to Melbourne to make hot sauce, the cooks put on chemical protective gear to shield themselves from fumes and accidental splashes.

Meanwhile, a mortgage banker living in South Carolina named Ed Currie was also pursuing the Guinness record. He tended to hundreds of chili plants in greenhouses he had built in his yard from two-by-twos and white plastic sheeting. He had a growing hot sauce business, but craved the recognition and cachet of being a world record-holder. Currie believed he had a chili so hot it might hold the title for years. He named it Smokin' Ed's Carolina Reaper. It was a cultivar of the pepper species
Capsicum chinense
, known for its explosive heat; its wrinkled, blazing-red chilies were about an inch long and shaped like fists. A nearby university lab verified that Reapers scored consistently above 1.5 million Scoville units; some surpassed 2 million. Currie had submitted the paper
work to Guinness, but its world record verification process was known to take months, sometimes years. So he waited, and kept working to make his chilies even hotter.

Biologically, chili heat is neither a taste nor a smell, but a visceral, intrinsically unpleasant burning sensation. Animals hate it; humans embrace it with gusto. There are several unsatisfying scientific explanations for the chili's ubiquity in cuisine, and for why some people endure severe—though harmless—pain to savor the hottest. One theory is geographical: chilies are a common ingredient in the tropics, and eating them makes people sweat, which helps them stay cool. But this fails to account for the chili's expanding popularity in colder climates. Another theory is sensual: food science writer Harold McGee suggests that by inflaming nerves in the mouth and on the tongue, chilies make the palate temporarily more sensitive to touch and temperature, and flavors more vivid and pleasurable. But some scientific evidence shows that the burn actually obscures these sensations.

Chili heat makes no biological sense. It is a flavor koan. Sweet, bitter, sour, salty, and umami tastes predate humanity by hundreds of millions of years. But chili heat is a new sensation for
Homo sapiens
. The chili pepper evolved far from the East African Rift Valley where modern humans first appeared, in an area in the Andean highlands of South America spanning present-day Peru and Bolivia. Humans first tasted the chili only about twelve thousand years ago, while migrating south into the Americas from Asia; it has become a fixture in global cuisine in only the past five hundred years. Humans have always tested and embraced new flavors. The rise of chili heat shows that the flavor sense is expanding its range further still, incorporating new kinds of sensations. This has strange implications. The senses of taste and smell have deep con
nections to human physiology, playing roles in metabolism, emotion, and social interactions. What happens when a new type of flavor comes along, barraging brains and bodies with a powerful, mysterious neurochemical signal over hundreds or thousands of years? Like the flood of dietary sugar that it has paralleled in the past few centuries, the spread of chili heat is as much a massive experiment in human physiology and behavior as a culinary trend—except that chili may prove to be a boon, not a curse.

• • •

Like the bitterness of broccoli, the chili burn is, in essence, a weapon. As dinosaurs died out about sixty-five million years ago, flowering plants, then relatively obscure members of the plant kingdom, developed elaborate defenses to survive in a world of proliferating threats from the changing climate and newly dominant mammals. Roses developed thorns; chilies, capsaicin.

Chili peppers belong to
Solanaceae
, the nightshade family. Nightshade and mandrake are notorious for their toxins. Jimson weed produces hallucinations. Most domesticated
Solanaceae
plants, such as potatoes, tomatoes, and eggplant, had such noxious substances bred out of them in the past few thousand years. But a few, such as chilies and tobacco, are grown specifically to heighten the effects of their active ingredients, a class of chemicals called alkaloids. Besides capsaicin and nicotine, they also include caffeine and the active ingredients in heroin and cocaine. Alkaloids are also a fixture in the most vividly flavorful foods. Chocolate contains a suite of them, including phenethylamine, a mild amphetamine, and anandamide, the human neurotransmitter that stimulates the hedonic hotspots, prodding pleasure.

Why did chilies develop this powerful defense? The burning sensation deters animals. But some wild peppers are hot and others bland; if capsaicin were solely a mammal repellent, the bland ones would have no protection. Biologist Jonathan Tewksbury of the University of Washington studied this question, focusing on a wild species growing in the Bolivian highlands,
Capsicum chacoense
, that produces both hot and mild peppers. Bugs with pointed proboscises infect the chilies with a fungus that rots them and kills their seeds. Hiking through verdant Andean valleys, Tewksbury tasted peppers, studied their skin for bug puncture marks, and looked for signs of infection. He found the fungus was doing far more damage to bland chilies than to hot ones; capsaicin seemed to repel the bugs, kill the fungus, or both.

This did not explain why some chilies were bland, but as Tewksbury mapped the disease, another twist emerged. Bland chilies produced more, and hardier, seeds, and they predominated on higher, colder slopes. This might mean too much capsaicin somehow impaired their ability to reproduce, and that it was not essential at high altitudes, where the risk of fungus was low. The hottest chilies grew in warmer valleys. The maps also suggested that over thousands or millions of years, as chilies spread down mountainsides to lowlands, they grew hotter.

Birds, which cannot sense capsaicin, expanded the chili's range by eating the fruits and spreading the seeds in their droppings. By the time humans arrived, pepper plants were growing across South America, the Caribbean, and all the way to North America. People first tasted capsaicin's heat somewhere in Mexico. It was, almost certainly, a disappointing experience. But not for long.

Linda Perry, a paleobotanist at the Smithsonian Institu
tion, was piecing together evidence collected from archaeological sites around the Americas in 2005, looking for clues about prehistoric tastes, when she found something she could not explain. Perry's method is similar to Patrick McGovern's search for the chemical signatures of ancient beverages; she looks for evidence of the ancient meal. Many plants store carbohydrates in microscopic ampules called starch grains. These are like fingerprints: they vary in size and shape depending on the plant that makes them. They pass through the human digestive tract and fossilize. To find them, paleobotanists painstakingly scrape detritus off tools and kitchen implements excavated from prehistoric homes. They pick apart fossilized feces. The different starch grains provide a vivid portrait of the meals, snacks, and diets of a particular place and time.

As Perry examined microscopic traces from sites across Latin America, a mysterious kind of starch grain popped up repeatedly alongside those from staples such as corn, potatoes, and manioc root. This was puzzling, Perry thought; all the major starches in ancient American food had already been accounted for. Then she had a chance encounter.

“I was at a party, and they had these chili pepper hors d'oeuvre things, and a guy was explaining to me in rather gruesome detail that he couldn't eat them because they caused him distress,” Perry said. “Probably not the best party in the world, but anyway. And I thought, that's strange, because these grains are usually left by undigested starch, and pepper doesn't have starch. But maybe it does.” She extricated herself from the conversation and returned to her lab. Some quick research revealed that chilies did indeed contain starch grains. Images of modern ones matched her ancient mystery starches.

Suddenly, the understanding of ancient American diets
changed. Before Perry's discovery, botanists believed that chilies had been cultivated in many places across the Americas. But there was little archaeological evidence, which usually rotted away. The biggest finds were caves in the highlands of central Mexico, where excavations of eight-thousand-year-old garbage heaps uncovered dozens of intact fossilized chilies. The evidence showed that people had first collected them wild, and had started to cultivate them six thousand years ago. The assortment included ancestors of today's jalapeño, ancho, serrano, and tabasco peppers. They also farmed maize, beans, squash, and avocado, all still used in Mexican cuisine.

Perry's starch-grain discovery proved that chili peppers had been in use across the Americas. They were an ancient craze to rival the modern one. Chili peppers were the best, most available source of spice to liven up diets heavy on bland, mushy maize, squash, and roots. The starch-grain traces stretched back six thousand years, to a village near the coast of Ecuador. Perry deduced that cooks there had chopped chilies up, pulverized them on grindstones, mixed this mash up in bowls and cooking vessels, and scattered the remains. About two thousand years later, rocoto peppers, a round red chili with a bite, were kept in the larder of a house two miles above sea level in the Peruvian Andes. Fishermen-farmers on San Salvador in the Bahamas apparently used a manioc grater to slice up chilies about a thousand years ago. And in coastal Venezuela sometime between
ad
1000 and 1500, chilies were paired with ginger to liven up corn, arrowroot, and another tuber called
guapo
.

• • •

In 1492, Christopher Columbus arrived in the Caribbean on his first voyage to the New World. Making his way through
the Bahamas to Cuba and then Hispaniola, he sampled the native cuisines, dining on yams and corn, a bread made from manioc, conches, and a six-foot iguana, which, he noted in his log, “tastes like chicken.” The red, hot chilies the Indians mixed with sweet potatoes and corn caught Columbus's eye. After misidentifying the Caribbean as the Far East and the people living there as Indians, he added another misnomer to the list, calling the chili plant “pepper”—
pimiento
in Spanish—after black pepper,
pimienta
, an unrelated plant that produces a similar, though less powerful, sensation. Columbus believed it would make a profitable export. “There is also much
aji
, which is their pepper and is worth more than our pepper, no one eats without it because it is very healthy,” he wrote in his log, using the Taino term for them. “Fifty caravels can be loaded each year with it.”

But the chili pepper turned out to be virtually worthless to traders. The big-money spices of the day were relatively scarce: cloves and cinnamon grew only in the South Pacific; sugar production depended on mills and refineries. Chilies could be grown by anyone in a mildly warm climate; only seeds were required. They spread as a poor person's spice, traded hand to hand. Over a few decades—a blink of an eye from the perspective of human evolution, and even culinary history—chili heat blazed from one side of the world to the other.

The
Pinta
was likely carrying the first chili pepper seeds to reach Europe when it returned to Spain, landing at the port of Bayona on March 1, 1493. Word of the new spice spread quickly. Six months later, Pietro Martire d'Anghiera, a prominent Italian historian at the Spanish court in Barcelona, noted that Columbus had discovered a pepper “more pungent than that from the Caucasus.”

Monasteries along the coasts of southern Europe collected many kinds of pepper seeds, and monks experimented, breeding both hotter and milder kinds. Hungarians embraced paprika as their national spice. In Germany, chilies appear in a 1543 guide to herbs by the professor of medicine Leonhard Fuchs, who carefully rendered them in woodblock prints (though he mistakenly thought they originated in India, calling them by the name “calicut” pepper, after Calcutta). Portuguese sailors used them to spice their food, and brought them to ports of call around the world. Chili peppers traveled to West Africa, and then to the Congo, by 1498. They appeared on the Chinese island of Macau, and inland in Szechuan. By 1542, three types of peppers were being cultivated in India. Curries, previously spiced with black pepper, suddenly flared with heat. Purandara Dasa, a composer of the time, wrote a song devoted to the red chili, calling it the “savior of the poor”: “I saw you green, then turning redder as you ripened. Nice to look at and tasty in a dish, but too hot if an excess is used.”