Bosland Paul W. - The Complete Chile Pepper Book: A Gardeners Guide to Choosing, Growing, Preserving, and Cooking

A Gardeners Guide to Choosing, Growing, Preserving, and Cooking

Dave DeWitt and Paul W. Bosland

Copyright 2009 by Dave DeWitt and Paul W. Bosland.
All rights reserved.

Mention of trademark, proprietary product, or vendor does not constitute a guarantee or warranty of the product by the publisher or authors and does not imply its approval to the exclusion of other products or vendors.

Published in 2009 by Timber Press, Inc.

The Haseltine Building
133 S.W. Second Avenue, Suite 450
Portland, Oregon 97204-3527
www.timberpress.com

2 The Quadrant
135 Salusbury Road
London NW6 6RJ
www.timberpress.co.uk

ISBN-13: 978-0-88192-920-1

Printed in China

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
DeWitt, Dave.

The complete chile pepper book : a gardeners guide to choosing, growing, preserving, and cooking / by Dave DeWitt and Paul W. Bosland.

-- 1st ed.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-88192-920-1

1. Hot peppers. 2. Cookery (Hot peppers) I. Bosland, Paul W. II. Title.

SB307.P4D49 2009

633.84--dc22

2009006032

A catalog record for this book is also available from the British Library.

Also by Dave DeWitt

The Chile Pepper Encyclopedia
Da Vincis Kitchen: A Secret History of Italian Cuisine
Cuisines of the Southwest

With Nancy Gerlach
The Whole Chile Pepper Book

With Chuck Evans
The Hot Sauce Bible

Also by Paul W. Bosland

Capsicum: A Comprehensive Bibliography
Descriptors for Capsicum (Capsicum Spp.)

With Dave DeWitt
The Pepper Garden
Peppers of the World

With Eric J. Votava
Peppers: Vegetable and Spice Capsicums

Half title: Capsicum annuum Chilly Chili.

Frontis: Jack & Jill fruit crate label.

Photographs by the authors except:

Chel Beeson, 82, 87, 115 (top), 188, 214

Edward S. Curtis, courtesy of the Palace of Governors Photo Archives (NMHM/DCA), #144664, 75 (top)

Courtesy of Dover Publications, frontis, 40

Jim Duffy, 128, 129

Jeff Gerlach, 36 (left), 39 (left), 43 (bottom right), 84, 116, 191

Norman Johnson, 197, 198, 200, 220319 (food styling by Denice Skrepcinski)

Jukka Kilpinen, 130, 131, 132, 149 (top)

Courtesy of Rio Grande Historical Collections, New Mexico State University Library, 22, 25, 33

Harald Zoschke, 27 (right), 32 (top left), 39 (bottom right), 46 (bottom), 55 (top), 60 (bottom), 62 (right), 68, 70, 71 (top), 72 (top), 74 (bottom), 79, 93, 104, 105 (top left, bottom left, bottom right), 106 (right), 144, 145, 146, 151 (left), 166, 167, 189, 190, 202, 203, 204, 205

SPECIAL THANKS TO Harald Zoschke, webmaster of the Fiery Foods and Barbecue SuperSite (www.fiery-foods.com) for many years, who provided significant information for this book and many photographs.

We gratefully acknowledge the support, information, and ideas supplied by the following individuals: Jeff Anderson, Alton Bailey, Jit Baral, Chel Beeson, Chris Biad, Lou Biad, Allen Boatman, Emily Bosland, Judy Bosland, Will Bosland, Mark Bromiley, Marco Budinis, Jeff Campbell, Emma Jean Cervantes, Diane Chamberlain, Danise Coon, Mario Dadomo, LeRoy Daugherty, Beverly Dayton, Cal Dennler, Wang Deyuan, James Ditmore, Jim Duffy, Victor Espinosa, Howard Essl, Jeff Gerlach, Nancy Gerlach, Max Gonzalez, Daphne Gould, John Graham, Wendy Hamilton, Steve Hanson, Cecilia Height, Gene Henderson, Antonio Heras Duran, Annette Hill, Laurent Hodges, Dick Horst, Sharon Hudgins, Jaime Iglesias, Nick Isaac, David Karp, Pat Kiewicz, Jukka Kilpinen, Sanjeet Kumar, Graham Jacks, Ellen Jacobson, Paul Klinger, Ray Lagoe, Chip Leavitt, Jimmy and Jo Lytle, Sebastiano Marrone, Chris Mathews, Dan McCants, Mark McMullan, Scott Mendel, Ariadna Monroy, Eduardo Moscone, Greg Mullins, Dorothy Noble, Mary OConnell, Peter Ogura, Jaebok Park, Ken Patterson, Paul Paulson, Mats Peterrsson, Jim Raney, Glenn Rhodes, Richard Rice, Adrian Rodriguez, Carol Shaugnessy, Robert Spiegel, John and Ann Swan, Lauren Swartzmiller, Ousmane Sy, Arnold Talbott, Betty Terrien, Manju Vishwakarma, Eric Votava, Stephanie Walker, Charlie Ward, Perfecta Wiggins, Mary Jane Wilan, F. P. Williamson, Gerry Wood, Henry Yamaoka, Everardo Zamora, Renate Zoschke, and the NMSU Chile Team.

FOR MORE THAN two decades, chile peppers have ruled our lives. While Paul has specialized in the horticultural aspects of the pungent pods and breeding new varieties, Dave has focused on the food history of chiles and their usage in international cooking. During this time, we have witnessed an explosion of interest in chiles, fueled mostly by the media. Chiles have evolved from being viewed as something to avoid (theyre all too hot!) to being considered a necessity in the larder as people have learned about the different varieties of chiles, their varied heat levels and flavor profiles, and their ability to transform ordinary meals into spectacular ones.

While interest in cooking with chiles has exploded, growing them has become a major hobby. We have chilehead gardening friends all over the world, from Finland to Australia, and we calculate that between us, we have made chile pepper pilgrimages to nearly thirty countries in our quest to learn more about them. When a nursery in New Jersey raises five hundred varieties of chiles to sell as bedding plants via mail order, you know that they have reached the peak of popularity!

Knowledge about chile peppers, is, of course, multidisciplinary, crossing into the fields of botany, horticulture, history, archaeology, medicine, chemistry, and culinary arts around the world. We could not delve deeply into all of these fields in a book of this length, so we focused on horticulture and culinary arts, two of the most popular avocations internationally. That said, we cover the other disciplines thoroughly at our two Web sites, the Fiery Foods and Barbecue SuperSite (www.fiery-foods.com) and the Chile Pepper Institute site (www.chilepepperinstitute.org).

The past decade has seen many advances in the field of chile peppers, and we cover them all in this volume. The new hottest pepper in the world. The technique for juicing chiles. Hydroponic chiles. Bonsai chiles. New flavor profiles. New chile varieties. We hope that our readers have as much fun using this information as we did in researching and writing it!

Pepe dIndia, c. 1577. Drawing by Pietro Andrea Matthioli, courtesy of Sunbelt Archives.

CAPSICUM SPECIES ARE MEMBERS of the family Solanaceae, or the nightshade family, a large, economically important family that also includes eggplant, petunia, potato, tobacco, and tomato. They are not related to black pepper, Piper nigrum