SpiceLines

Wasabi isn’t exactly a cutting-edge flavor, especially now that most supermarket delis sell boxes of ready-made sushi with a dab of the fiery green Japanese horseradish paste. But, says today’s New York Times, diners at Eat’n Park, a chain of 78 restaurants in Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Ohio, balked at ordering trendy wasabi-encrusted salmon.

In “Wasabi to the People: Big Chains Evolve or Die,” (Wednesday, July 11, 2007, Dining In, pp. D1 and D4), Micheline Maynard says senior vice president Brooks Broadhurst was perplexed by customers’ reaction, “although he did wonder whether the fish, with its pale green coating and pale green sauce, looked unappealing on the laminated multipage menu, especially next to the sundaes and pies covered in whipped cream.”

Americans crave exotic, ethnic flavors, and mainstream restaurant chains are under growing pressure to come up with dishes that use trendy ingredients that appeal to palates piqued by Top Chef and other venues for celebrity cooks. But there’s a fine, often unpredictable line between “cutting edge” and “unacceptable.” At Atlanta’s Bread Company, goat cheese salad bombed, but a Cuban roast pork loin sandwich was a winner with Hispanic customers. Meanwhile Panera Bread is serving a grilled salmon salad with Meyer lemon dressing at its 1,000 restaurants.

Two articles caught my attention this week:

After 13 years in America, Gelareh Asayesh returned to Iran to join her family for the saffron harvest in the crocus-studded fields of the northeast province of Khorasan. In “Season of the Flower,” (Gourmet, August 2007, pp. 32-34, 112) Asayesh vividly recalls the stripping of the precious red gold stamens from the purple flowers: “During visits for tea and conversation, housewives would haul out cloth bundles, unknotting them to spill forth flowers still cool from the night. Each blossom would be ruthlessly stripped while we talked. Everyone in the family seemed adept at this task, their hands moving nimbly, stripping petals away from stamens that would join the growing bundles held between fore and middle fingers…It was the one time of the year when the garbage smelled sweet.”

Asayesh also describes Persian dishes in which saffron is a key ingredient: “…pale yellow hand-churned bastini-e-akbar mashti—saffron ice cream dotted with thick clots of cream…aromatic lamb stews simmering in heavy stone pots in dimly lit kitchens…[and] roasted melon seeds and pistachio nuts flavored with the spice.” She includes a recipe for gheimeh, Persian beef and split pea stew flavored with saffron, cinnamon, allspice and dried Omani lemons.

In last week’s New Yorker, Nobel Prize winner Orhan Pamuk recalls how American hot dogs, hamburgers and grilled cheese sandwiches transformed Istanbul’s fast food street fare during the 1960’s—despite edicts against eating meat of unknown origin. In “Forbidden Fare,” (The New Yorker, July 9 & 16, 2007, pp. 48-50), Pamuk describes his ecstatic early encounters with the illicit frankfurter: “We’d gaze through the glass at the dark-red sauce that had been simmering all day and select one of the frankfurters wallowing in it like happy water buffalo in the mud…” For the writer, eating American street food was a major break with Islamic tradition and a step towards the “solitary individualism that modernity so often involves.”

Where would mushroom foam, bacon and egg ice cream, and blow-torched, deep-fried, caramelized cinnamon sticks with Meyer lemon be without Herve This? Or, more precisely, what would Ferran Adria, Heston Blumethal and Grant Achatz be cooking if this eminent French chemist hadn’t once ruined a cheese soufflé by tossing in all the egg yolks at once? The culinary disaster inspired This to spend the next 27 years collecting and testing “cooking precisions”—culinary rules that explain what does—and doesn’t—work in the kitchen.

In “Ion Chef” (Wired, August 2007, p. 58), Sally McGrane Interviews Herve This at a Paris bistro over an airy chocolat chantilly conjured in a jar to his own scientific formula. The article is a nice introduction to the man who, along with late Oxford physicist Nicolas Kurti, invented the field of molecular gastronomy—dubbed by Harold McGee as ‘the scientific study of deliciousness.” McGrane writes that after decades of research, This “came up with a formal system of classification for what happens when foods are mixed, baked, whipped, fried, sautéed in lime juice and so forth.” The system permits “the creation and pairing of billions of novel, potentially tasty dishes.” As an example, This “randomly generated a formula describing the physical microstructure of a previously nonexistent dish, then asked chef Pierre Gagnaire to plug real ingredients into it.” The result--a bitter orange, scallop and smoked tea combination--wowed Gagnaire’s customers.

Now This plans to investigate “the role that love—of the cook for the diners, the diners for the cook and of everyone for each other—plays in determining tastes.” That’s true alchemy, for which, I suspect, there is no formula.

I’ve been eyeing This’ book, Molecular Gastronomy, for a couple of years. After reading this article, I finally ordered it.

Sometimes the world seems awash in greenish extra-virgin olive oil.

Everyone, from the big box discounters to the chicest artisanal gourmet shops, is hawking it, at prices ranging from a few dollars to upwards of $40 a liter. The U.S. market alone is worth $1.5 biliion, and is growing at the rate of 10 percent a year.

Where does it all come from? Can it possibly be the real thing?

In “Slippery Business,” (The New Yorker, August 13, 2007, pp. 39-45), Tom Mueller reports that the international olive oil business is indeed rife with fraud. “Adulteration is especially common in Italy, the world’s leading importer, consumer, and exporter of olive oil. (For the past ten years, Spain has produced more oil than Italy, but much of it is shipped to Italy for packaging, and is sold, legally, as Italian oil.”

But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Mueller recounts how shipments of Turkish hazelnut oil and Argentine sunflower oil were imported into Italy as Greek olive oil and sold, sometimes mixed with the real thing, to Nestle, Uniliver, Bertolli and Oleifici Fasanesi “who sold it to consumers as olive oil and collected about twelve million dollars in E.U. subsidies intended to support the olive-oil industry.” Ultimately this hurts the small, premium producers “who struggle to make a living in a market awash in cheap, counterfeit oil.’

But it is possible to differentiate the good from the bad, if only you know what you’re doing. Mueller sits in on an olive oil tasting of five premium oils organized by the Corporazione Mastri Oleari, a private olive oil association attempting to combat widespread fraud in the industry. “The Mastri Oleari panelists were remarkably consistent, agreeing not only on the subtle flavors—artichoke, fresh-cut grass, green tomato, kiwi—suggested by the oils but also on their intensity….Even the most creative criminals have difficulty outwitting a properly trained tasting panel.”

Incidentally, next month I’ll be taking a course in the Sensory Evaluation of Olive Oil at U.C. Davis. The two-day class will include blind tastings of oils from California and Europe, as well as Africa, South America, Australia and New Zealand--and by the end, if I haven't floated away on a sea of oil, I'll know a little about a lot of topics including "the multitude of flavor attributes...and the subtleties of complexity, depth and harmony in olive oil." Can't wait....

Are you put off by the idea of irradiated food? I am. But I confess that I’m also a little leery of eating raw spinach and other leafy greens after the last fall’s deadly E. coli debacle.

Now there’s hope for extreme germaphobes and all the rest of us who’d like to be sure that our food is safe to eat.

In “Edible Films with Superpowers” (The New York Times, August 29, 2007, Dining Out, pp. 1 and 5), Kim Severson reports that chemists are developing edible films and powders that make use of the “natural pathogen fighters found in everyday food." “If their work pans out, thin films woven with thyme derivative that can kill E. coli could line bags of fresh spinach,” Severson writes. Yesss!

Invisible films, made from ingredients such as fibers from crab and shrimp shells mixed with lysozyme, “a protein found in both eggs and human tears,” may be impregnated with molecules from bacteria-zapping spices and herbs—among them, cloves, thyme and oregano, all of which have powerful anti-microbial properties. “The result is a film that could coat fruit or meat or even become an edible yogurt lid.”

It’s not all about bacteria, though. Scientists are also working on films with flavor. The article mentions curry-like smells wafting from the Rutgers University Food Science Department, and “a company called Origami Foods now wraps sushi…in carrot film” invented by Tara McHugh. a food researcher with the Department of Agriculture in San Francisco. There are a lot of hurdles to overcome—from the films’ sensitivity to humidity to potential allergic reactions to eggs and shellfish—“but food scientists believe the potential for using these everyday ingredients to make a safer food supply is huge.”

Spices have a long history as germ fighters—especially food-borne bateria. To read more, see “Darwinian Gastronomy: Why We Use Spices,” by Cornell University scientists Paul W. Sherman and Jennifer Billing in the June 1999 issue of Bioscience, Vol. 49. No. 6, pp. 453-463.

There are a lot of spicy nuggets in Clifford A. Wright’s article, “The Medieval Spice Trade and the Diffusion of the Chile,” which appeared in the Spring 2007 issue of Gastronomica (No. 72, pp. 35-43).

The chile, he writes, “is the world’s most used spice,” especially in “the fourteen culinary cultures [that] can be characterized as highly piquant. These cultures”—among them West Africa, Algeria, Tunisia, Ethiopia, Yemen, the Indian subcontinent, Thailand, Indonesia, and the Sichuan region of China—“have absorbed the chile into their local foodways and use it abundantly.” All were stops along the trail as the chile traveled from its home in Mexico and South America to other parts of the globe. But what happened to Europe where the market for spices was insatiable?

Wright tackles a question that has long perplexed food historians: “Did the arrival of the New World chile in the Old World contribute to or cause the dramatic decline in the spice trade that occurred in the mid-seventeenth century?” From the eleventh to the sixteenth century, pungent spices like black pepper and ginger were the backbone of the highly lucrative trade between Europe and the far off countries where they were grown. Yet just as the fiery chile pepper—the Marquis of Langle described it as a “fruit” which “leaves your mouth burning, and your breath on fire for the rest of the day”--made its way into Spain, Italy and Portugal, European demand for traditional spices began to wither.

Wright concludes that the two events were coincidental: “…the plant does not seem to have had a dramatic, instantaneous, or measurable effect on the East-West spice trade which was dominated by black pepper, ginger, cloves, nutmeg and cinnamon. Although the rapid introduction of the chile around the world coincided with the diminishing of the spice trade, the phenomenon can be equally attributed to changing tastes: western Europe became less interested in highly spiced foods and more enamored of the sophisticated cooking emerging in France in the mid-seventeenth century, especially after La Varenne published La Cuisine Francois in 1652.”

There are many other tantalizing side trails in Wright’s article, among them a succinct analysis of the lingering effects of the Dutch stranglehold on the spice trade in Indonesia. “The Dutch policy was to plant and then destroy crops through mass uprooting. This policy…certainly kept prices high in Europe, but its local cost was the cruel treatment of the indigenous peoples, including thousands of deaths, the destruction of incomes, bankruptcies, rebellions and starvation—leading to endemic poverty and, some would argue, an easy acceptance of Islam.”

This last was the subject of Nathaniel’s Nutmeg, Giles Milton’s extraordinary tale of the fierce battle between the Dutch and the English for control of the island of Run. Clifford A. Wright is the author of A Mediterranean Feast, a sweeping, scholarly history (with 500 recipes) of the birth of the cuisines surrounding the Mediterranean Sea. In a later book, Some Like It Hot, Wright lets his hair down and celebrates the chile in all its culinary guises.

In “To Burundi and Beyond for Coffee’s Holy Grail,” (The New York Times, September 12, 2007, Dining Out, pp. D1 and D8) Peter Meehan writes about “coffee hunters” who “will go almost anywhere, do almost anything and pay almost any price in pursuit of the perfect cup of coffee.” This handful of globe trekkers—Meehan talked with four of them—mostly work for small coffee roasters that “buy their beans directly from the farms and cooperatives that grow them, not brokers.” According to Connie Blumhardt, publisher of Roast, in some circles, coffee hunters are worshipped as “megagods.”

Vivid, out-of-the mainstream flavor is the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow for these coffee hunters. George Howell, who heads George Howell Coffee Company in Acton, Massachusetts, told The Times, “We’re finding flavors we’ve never ever tasted before, different fruit and floral flavors from really pristine, clean coffees. These are flavors that have been lost or diluted in the old methods of blending coffee down to an average product.”

Among the coffee roasters mentioned in the article is Counter Culture Coffee in Durham, N.C. which supplies many restaurants and gourmet shops in our area, as well as Café Grumpy and Ninth Street Espresso in New York, described by The Times as two of the city’s “most highly regarded cafes.” Counter Culture’s co-owner and coffee hunter, Peter Giuliano, often speaks at 3 Cups in Chapel Hill; his comments are a regular feature in the shop’s weekly newsletter.

But Will They Drink Pumpkin Spice Lattes?

Starbucks currently has over 14,000 outlets in 43 countries. That’s a lot of skinny lattes and mocha chip frappucinos.

Last week the world’s biggest coffee company got a little bigger. In “After Long Dispute, a Russian Starbucks,” Andrew E. Kramer reported that Starbucks opened its first coffee shop in a mall in Khimki, a small city outside Moscow. (The New York Times, September 7, 2007, Business, p. C3) The opening was a triumph for Starbucks, which had refused to pay a “trademark squatter” to “yield the Starbucks name in Russia.” The company eventually won in court.

But it will cost Russians plenty to enjoy a venti mocha: New Yorkers pay $4.71 for the drink; Russians will have to fork over a stunning 230 rubles, or $8.96. Prices, notes Kramer, “are a reflection of the oil-driven economic boom here.” Russian stores will offer the same coffee drinks as Starbucks everywhere, but sandwiches—mushroom and cheese—will be adapted to “local tastes.”

One thing Starbucks will not offer, I imagine, is Russian atmosphere. In June B and I rose early every morning for the fabulous strong coffee served in the bar of St. Petersburg's Hotel Astoria. Around 6:40 our first morning, we observed an Ivana Trump lookalike and a flashily dressed rube drain a bottle of wine and lurch to their feet. She began to lean dangerously backwards and when her friend reached out to steady her, she punched him in the face. They then tottered companionably to the elevator. Our waiter chuckled and said, “Open till the last customer leaves.”

Out of—or Into Africa?

Paying for a café con leche in a Boston Starbucks on Labor Day, I spied Marcus Samuelsson’s wonderful cookbook, Soul of a New Cuisine: A Discovery of the Foods and Flavors of Africa, at the cash register. But was it? The book was awfully slim, and a cover photo of plantain strips had been replaced by one of coffee beans.

Samuelsson, the Ethiopian-born, Swedish-raised chef and co-owner of Aquavit in New York, has teamed up with Starbucks to create new coffee blends—Ubora and Joya del Dia-- and pastries. (See “He Probably Makes a Mean Skim Latte” in The New York Times, September 2, 2007, Business, p. 2). To promote the partnership—the theme is “Coffee is Culinary”--Samuelsson has just finished a 10-city tour “signing cookbooks, offering samples of his chocolate cinnamon bread and probably posing for lots of photographs.” The cookbook, which includes recipes from 5 Starbucks baristas, is a seriously abridged version of the original; the company will donate $1 for every cookbook sold before October 1 to UNICEF.

Although Starbucks has stores in 42 countries outside the U.S., according to the most recent information on its website only one country—Egypt—is on the African continent. As for Samuelsson, he’s about to open a new African-inspired restaurant—Merkato 55—in New York. Could Africa be the next target for the giant coffee company’s ambitious expansion plans? According to The Times, it aims to increase its overseas presence to 20,000 stores.

In Veracruz's Mercado Central, shaggy cinnamon quills, bottles of "virgin" honey,
baskets of chiles, and earthenware pots create a memorable scene--the opposite
of what you'll find at Penzeys' retail spice stores.

I really like Penzeys’ spices. Just inhaling the rich, aromatic scent of the Whole Special Extra Bold Indian Black Peppercorns—only 10 pounds of every ton makes the grade—conjures up fantastic visions of marigold garlands, bright crimson saris and plump pepper berries ripening on leafy vines in the verdant hills and valleys of Kerala. These are the peppercorns I use everyday, whether I’m making a simple vinaigrette for tonight’s salad, or pulling out all the stops with fiery Singapore Black Pepper Crab.

So I’ve been wondering why Penzeys’ retail stores are so banal. The one in Grand Central Station, with its neat rows of hermetically sealed jars, has all the antiseptic allure of a suburban vitamin shop (especially if you recall the wildly exotic Adriana’s Caravan that once occupied the same space.) And why does Penzeys’ catalogue channel Woman’s Day circa-1975 recipes like Tuscan Chicken Bake (chicken, vegetables, tomato sauce and Tuscan Sunset Salt Free Italian Style Seasoning). And why…oh well, you get the picture.

In “Milling Profits from Spice” by Fawn Fitter (Fortune Small Business, October 2007, pp. 65-68), 44-year-old Bill Penzey tells how he built a successful empire—32 stores, 600,000 mail order customers, revenues in the “tens of millions of dollars“—by making spices accessible to the average home cook. Says Penzey: “I’ve heard folks passing by a spice store say, ‘That’s not for me; it’s for gourmets.’” From a survey he discovered that more than 50 percent of his “core mail order customers ate out fewer than six times a month…. We found that our customers are families who were cooking skinless chicken breasts 20 times a month…it was important to remind them of the basics: By using a variety of spices, you can create new meals with essentially the same main ingredients.”

I guess that’s the answer. Like Starbucks, Penzeys has taken an extraordinary product and dumbed it down for a mass audience. That would account for the rapid roll-out of bland retail stores, the resolutely “non-gourmet” approach to recipes, and the profusion of similar spice blends which can be dumped over boneless, skinless chicken breasts 20 times a month. It also accounts for the dismissive comments about celebrity chefs and the media in One, a subscription-only magazine that proudly trumpets recipes and food stories from “real people.”

The irony is that Penzeys’ single spices—incendiary peppercorns from India and Malaysia, fragrant vanilla beans from Mexico and Madagascar, soft, lemony cinnamon from Sri Lanka—find their way into the kitchens of America’s top chefs and the most discriminating home cooks. Such spices are exquisitely fresh, vibrantly aromatic and full of flavor that offers a true taste of the terroir in which they are grown. One whiff of those intoxicating black peppercorns and you understand how the lust for spices propelled men halfway around the world, to endure and inflict almost unimaginable horrors in their quest for shriveled berries, dried roots, hunks of bark and seeds.

There’s nothing wrong with targeting your core crowd. It makes good sense when you're building a business. But for “gourmets”--people who search for excellence and authenticity in the world of food—middlebrow is not good enough. And it shouldn’t be enough for Penzeys either. You can either talk down to your audience, or, like the song, you can take them higher by using a fine product to offer glimpses of the wider world.

A good place to start would be with those retail stores: I’d like to see a Penzeys with brilliant color, as bright and vivid as the open sacks of spices in a Moroccan market. It doesn’t take much: the orange walls at Christina’s in Cambridge would be a start. Next, instead of the unfinished display crates I saw at one Penzeys store, how about “a sniffing bar” like the one at Goumanyat et Son Royaume in Paris? It’s an altar of sorts, where you can inhale the fragrance of sultry golden mace, resinous green cardamon, and a dozen different peppercorns. (Goumanyat, incidentally, is an imagined prince who rules over a world of savory pleasure.) And please, don’t tell me that Aleppo pepper makes “an attractive sprinkle for potato, chicken and tuna salad and deviled eggs too.” Give me pictures and stories of real people who grow and harvest spices. Let them tell me about their world and how spices fit into their lives.

So what’s wrong with gourmets?

Thai bird’s eye chili, also known as prik ki nu, ranks at 50,000 to 100,000 on the Scoville pungency scale. It’s hotter than cayenne and Serrano, but can’t touch the tongue-scorching Scotch bonnet. But if you going to char Thai chilies on the stove, you might want to post a warning on your door.

A London restaurant found this out the hard way. In “Shoppers dive for cover as chef’s eyewatering chilli sauce causes a terror alert,” The Times of London (October 3, 2007) reports that “a mysterious cloud of acrid smoke” caused police to “[seal] off three roads and [evacuate] homes and businesses in the heart of Soho, fearing a chemical attack or a dangerous toxic leak.”

Wearing “specialist breathing apparatus,” police tracked the noxious fumes to their source: the Thai Cottage restaurant in D’Arblay Street. After breaking down the door, they “emerged from the smoke carrying a huge cooking pot containing about 9lb of smouldering dried chillies… which had been left dry-frying.” The chillies were an ingredient in a “six-month batch of nam prik pao, a super hot Thai dip to accompany prawn crackers.”

Chef Chalemchai Tangjariyapoon was bewildered by all the hullabaloo. “To us it smells like burnt chilli and it is slightly unusual. I can understand why people who weren’t Thai would not know what it was. But it doesn’t smell like chemicals.” The chef planned to mix the gargantuan pot of burnt chilies with more than 2 pounds of dried shrimp, 6-1/2 pounds of palm sugar, 2-1/2 pounds of shrimp paste, more than 2 pounds of tamarind and 9 pints of vegetable oil.

A much reduced recipe for home cooks accompanies the article.

How do you describe the searing heat of a jalapeno or any of the hundreds of other fiery capsicums known as chiles (or chillis or chilies, depending on where in the world you are)?

In “Great Pod Almighty” (Gourmet, November 2007, pp. 45-46), intrepid road foodies Jane and Michael Stern sit down with Paul Bosland, “professor of horticulture at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces and the country’s foremost chile breeder,” for a plate of chiles rellenos and some advice on how best to describe the taste of hot peppers.

In an effort to avoid the creeping wine-speak lately used to describe everything from olive oil to honey and chocolate, Bosland (whose license plate reads "Chileman") offers five heat-specific questions to ask when biting into a pungent pepper: 1) How fast does the heat hit the palate? “The speed depends on the balance of capsaicinoids, of which there are at least 15.” 2) “Where does the heat develop?” Tip of the tongue, mid-palate, back of the throat? 3) “Is the heat broad or sharp?” Some Asian chiles “have a pinprick feel,” while New Mexican chiles “paint the tongue like a wide brush.” 4) How fast does the heat fade? In a few seconds, or a few hours? 5) How hot is it? (This you actually have get from a Scoville chart.)

Bosland also attempts to disentangle the spelling dilemma. “In a bowl, it’s with an i. The plant or fruit is e.” (Yes, it’s a fruit, not a vegetable.)

On the other hand, Jean Andrews, author of Peppers: The Domesticated Capsicums and The Pepper Lady’s Pocket Pepper Primer, demurs. She notes that “the spelling chilli was first used in print by Dr. Francisco Hernandez (1514-1578), the first European to collect plants systematically in the New World.” Later, the “spelling was…changed to chile by Spanish-speaking Mexicans.” Andrew comes down on the side of the original chilli which, she says, was Hernandez’s interpretation of the indigenous Nahuatl word for capsicums. Chili is her second choice of spellings to describe the fruit.

Indian cookbook writers tend to agree. Madhur Jaffrey uses chilli, while Julie Sahni, Maya Kaimal and Laxmi Hiremath all use chili.

The debate continues.

Last year The Guinness Book of World Records awarded the title of world’s hottest chili pepper to the bhut jolokia, a “thumb-sized” chili grown in India that tops the Scoville scale at 1,041,427 units.

That’s about 200 times hotter than a jalapeno.

In today’s Wall Street Journal (“The World’s Hottest Chili,” February 2-3, 2008, pp. W1, W5), Stan Sesser reports that the bhut jolokia is the latest rage among chili lovers. According to Ananta Saikia, whose firm, Frontal Agritech, is India’s only exporter of the pepper, annual sales to the U.S., Germany and England are expected to quintuple this year. Hot sauce producers like Dave Hirschkop, who makes Dave’s Insanity Sauce, are jumping on the fire truck: This spring he plans to add the flaming pepper to his $30 Private Reserve Hot Sauce. Tom Beasley, who sells powdered bhut jolokia on his website, www.burnmegood.com, quotes a farmer in India: “It’s so hot, you can’t even imagine. When you eat it, it’s like dying.”

“How sophisticated we all felt back in the dark days of the 1970’s when the moustachioed Italian waiter approached our table with a three-foot-tall, polished-wood pepper mill…” writes Charles Campion in “Real Food: Hot Stuff,” at Independent.co.uk (March 29, 2008). “Black pepper became the mainspring of fine dining and…the ingredients list of every recipe…tailed off with an identical mantra—add salt to taste and freshly ground black pepper.”

Bittersweet chocolate truffles from La Maison du Chocolat on Madison Avenue
are dusted with cocoa and filled with coffee-flavored dark chocolate ganache.

B returned from New York Thursday night, bearing surprise early birthday gifts—forty-eight, to be exact, and all in one box.

The surprise? Oh, just a quarter pound of the most exquisite bittersweet chocolate truffles from La Maison du Chocolat on Madison Avenue. Two layers of handmade cocoa-dusted morsels, filled with unctuous dark chocolate ganache subtly flavored with coffee. Unwrapping the signature cocoa-hued box, tied up with a café au lait-colored ribbon, was almost as delicious.

Susana Trilling's Chile Lovers' Tour is among the culinary
vacations featured in the May 2008 Gourmet. Here, a pail
of rare chilhuacle chiles harvested in the fall. Photo credit:
www.seasonsofmyheart.com

Somehow we wound up at a raucous baptism, drinking shots of mescal and dancing to pulsating music.

A few years ago, I took a summer cooking class in Oaxaca with Susana Trilling. One day there was a surprise invitation to a fiesta. After driving aimlessly around a colonia on the outskirts of town, we heard music and let our ears take us to the party. Susana’s friends welcomed us warmly into their backyard and sat us at a round wooden table. We got to kiss the young man whose baptism we were celebrating—a sturdy, two-year-old riding on his grandmother’s hip.

In Coatepec, Veracruz, Don Ruperto Opoch now
sells Altura coffee to buyers in South Korea. A
post on SpiceLines brought him to their attention.

You’ve heard of the “butterfly effect,” haven’t you? It’s the idea, put forth by Conrad Lorenz, that the whisper soft beating of of a butterfly’s wing may stir up air currents that create a storm thousands of miles away.

Something like the butterfly effect seems to have happened in Veracruz. And it’s very good news.

Two years ago, I wrote about the plight of Don Ruperto Opoch, a genteel third generation organic coffee farmer whose story nearly broke my heart ("Veracruz: Great Coffee If You Can Find It; a Grower’s Lament"). "We are starving," he told me with simple dignity. After a lifetime of hard work and passion for his craft, he was slowly watching his entire world slip away.

In the Mumbai airport, the mosquitoes were the size of hummingbirds.

Naturally, the DEET repellent was in my checked bag. But in years to come, it seems, we may be slathering ourselves with repellents spiked with pepper-related acylpiperidines to avoid malaria, yellow fever and West Nile virus.

A good thing, too. DEET was no match for India's stealth mosquitoes.