peppering the knowledge

Some youthful experiences appear to be almost universal. At least, for those of us who share the age burdens of the Boomer class.

Whenever I start reminiscing about our family's first set of encyclopedias, I meet with knowing nods. Especially, when I describe how I opened volume after volume to follow related subjects until most of the set surrounded me on the living room floor as if I were being attacked by high-grade paper bombers.

That bit of nostalgia wandered by while I was reading The Oregonian this morning. Apparently, the queen of the 30-minute meal, Rachel Ray is returning to the Food Network. But that fact is not what triggered my encyclopedia reverie.

Describing how American tastes have broadened in the last thirty years, the article noted: "Today, she is as likely to pull a bottle of gochujang out of the fridge as she is a bag of tater tots from the freezer."

My memory for nouns is not what is was. (Well, it probably is what it always was -- faulty -- but we seniors always think forgetting a word is just one step away from being warehoused for senility.)

Gochujang? I knew I knew the word. But it just hovered in the back of my mind hiding behind gorgonzola, gefilte fish, and giblets.

So, I relied on what now substitutes for my memory. The Internet. And I nearly slapped my forehead when I realized not only do I know what gochujang is, I have almost a half gallon of it in my refrigerator in Barra de Navidad.

It is a fermented chili paste. I use it in a lot of my cooking. Especially, soups.

Of course, I could not stop there. As I read through the article, another fact caught me up short. This one, I have long known. Or I have known it, at least, since 2011 when I read Charles Mann's 1493: The New World Columbus Created (strangers in the garden).

Before then, if you had asked me about chili peppers, I would have assumed that the cuisines most famous for their spicy dishes (Szechuan, India, Thailand) had used chilies for millennia. And I would have been wrong.

As we almost all know now, the DNA in every chili on the face of the planet came from Mexico (though there are some botanists who contend at least one chili, the habanero, originated in the Amazon). With that one possible exception, you can thank the early inhabitants of Mexico, a people about whom we know very little, but who predated the great Mesoamerican civilization, for developing the cultivar version of the chili pepper, as well as maize, beans, and tomatoes. Whoever they were, they may have been the world's most successful developers of new farm crops.

Europe, Africa, and Asia were naive to the existence of the culinary magic of chilies until Columbus took samples home to Spain, where it was grown as a substitute for peppercorns, one of the items that had spurred Columbus to sail west.

The Portuguese were quick to learn the value of chilies as a trade commodity. By the end of the 1400s, they had taken chilies to their colonies in Africa and Asia. The result is that we now think of Thai chilies as being endemic to Asia when they are nothing more than descendants of their Mexican mothers.

On my Australia cruise, most of the food was bland enough to be served in a Manitoba rest home. The only exceptions were the Indian dishes and the occasional Szechuan and Thai stir fries that added layers of taste and tear-certifying piquancy. And for that, I thank Columbus and some anonymous Portuguese traders for distributing the hard work of a series of unknown Mesoamerican geniuses.

As soon as my cold clears a bit more, I will put all of their contributions to good use in my Mexican kitchen. But I need to get there first.