MAY 2021 - AudioFile
Food historian Dave DeWitt offers listeners the ability to travel the globe through their earbuds with this comprehensive volume on those brightly-colored plants that add spice to life—commonly known as chiles. It’s all here: botanical classifications, history, varieties, and uses—from the lowest to the highest on the Scoville heat scale. Gary Tiedemann provides a well-paced, intimate narration. His low-key style allows listeners to nearly taste the serranos and habaneros. DeWitt’s words combined with Tiedemann’s performance gently guide listeners through the treacherous heat and many bewildering varieties. As often happens, recipes read outright make for some tedious listening and, indeed, recipes are peppered throughout the volume and occupy a great deal of the final section. Nonetheless, listeners who keep their taste buds in mind will have fun. W.A.G. © AudioFile 2021, Portland, Maine
From the Publisher
"Author Dave DeWitt takes readers on a personal tour of the chile-growing and chile-eating countries of the world."—Sandra Dallas, Denver Post
"The book . . . is a culmination of DeWitt's decades researching the fruit. . . . In some ways, the recent book is a capstone project that captures the highlights of his spicy career."—Jason Strykowski, Santa Fe New Mexican
"Folklorists who work in food and foodways will find much of interest in this well-written and ambitious attempt to put chiles in world perspective, including the history of chiles, the development of chile cuisines, the botany of chiles, and the celebration of chiles in festival."—William Hansen, Journal of Folklore Research
"In his delicious new book, veteran Albuquerque author / food historian Dave DeWitt takes readers on journeys around the world to explore and meet the multitude of chile varieties that exist."—David Steinberg, Albuquerque Journal
"DeWitt's magnum opus book of the spiciest proportions."—Alex De Vore, Santa Fe Reporter
"Food historian Dave DeWitt carries serious chile cred."—Kate Nelson, New Mexico Magazine
"An impressively comprehensive and informative study tracing the domestic cultivation of wild chile to the development of heat indexes and ratings for the chile, and so much more."—Susan Bethany, Midwest Book Review
"Dave DeWitt is one of America's most scientifically literate journalists, and reading of his travels is always an adventure."—Gary Paul Nabhan, author of Why Some Like It Hot: Food, Genes, and Cultural Diversity
"Fascinating, very informative, and a delight to read. I wanted to rush to the kitchen to try all the recipes, too."—Sharon Hudgins, author of T-Bone Whacks and Caviar Snacks: Cooking with Two Texans in Siberia and the Russian Far East
MAY 2021 - AudioFile
Food historian Dave DeWitt offers listeners the ability to travel the globe through their earbuds with this comprehensive volume on those brightly-colored plants that add spice to life—commonly known as chiles. It’s all here: botanical classifications, history, varieties, and uses—from the lowest to the highest on the Scoville heat scale. Gary Tiedemann provides a well-paced, intimate narration. His low-key style allows listeners to nearly taste the serranos and habaneros. DeWitt’s words combined with Tiedemann’s performance gently guide listeners through the treacherous heat and many bewildering varieties. As often happens, recipes read outright make for some tedious listening and, indeed, recipes are peppered throughout the volume and occupy a great deal of the final section. Nonetheless, listeners who keep their taste buds in mind will have fun. W.A.G. © AudioFile 2021, Portland, Maine
Kirkus Reviews
★ 2020-06-16
A richly illustrated guided tour of chile peppers and their uses in cuisines around the world.
Food historian DeWitt, the author of more than 50 books and a leader in the study of chiles, has an obvious love for food plants laden with capsaicin—and, he notes early on, “all capsicums are New World plants.” More specifically, he cites plant geographer Barbara Pickersgill, who locates the ground zero of chile peppers near the area where Paraguay, Argentina, and Brazil meet. Birds distributed those peppers widely, eating the fruits and then expelling the seeds, so that they “spread all over South and Central America long before the first Asian tribes moved east and settled the New World.” When those tribespeople made their way to Mexico, the feast began, and wherever chiles grew, DeWitt writes, they became essential components of Indigenous diets—and in some places even units of currency. The author explains the bewildering variety of chiles, from the tiny berry called the “chiltepín” to the much larger jalapeño. “Because chiles cross-pollinate,” writes DeWitt, “hundreds of varieties of the five domesticated chile species were developed by humans over thousands of years in South and Central America.” From there, they traveled first to Spain and Portugal, where they figure only incidentally in the local cuisine; eastward to places such as Hungary, which took its time to develop the fiery paprika that is now central to that nation’s diet; and East Asia, where peppers entered the cuisine of Szechuan and other regions. Indeed, writes the author, “Bangkok is…in the running for the title of hottest city in the world. This city is populated not only by the chile-loving Thais and Chinese but also by other ethnic groups that use them heavily in their cuisines: East Indians, Pakistanis, and Malays.” The text is handsomely designed and typeset and—beg pardon—peppered with superb photography and, better still, lots of recipes.
If you’re a fan of the hot stuff, you’ll definitely want this deep-diving work of natural and food history.
