Some Like It Hot

Some Like it Hot!

Jon Donlon

According to Vichit Mukura, chef of Sala Rim Naam in The Oriental Bangkok, foreign visitors are slowly acquiring a taste for the famously hot cuisine of what has become one of the world’s prime tourist destinations. Food authority Victor Borg speculates that the growing adoration for the hot and spicy may be because the burn triggers “a flush of endorphins.” The continued confidence in health benefits inherent in succulent chilies and savory hot sauces – to say nothing of lingering belief in their efficacy as tasty aphrodisiacs – hardly puts a damper on sales.

Whether introduced to hot chili laden delights amidst a groaning table of Hunan or Sichuan offerings, or given the wonderful opportunity to choose from Thai curries (or the spectacularly hot yam salads), or in the habit of shaking the diamond-labeled Tabasco bottle over your vittles, you have the Portuguese to thank for waking the world to this viticulture. Chilies grow easily in tropical regions – such as Thailand or South Louisiana – but are native to Bolivia and Brazil.

Portuguese travelers carried the plants to Southeast Asia in the 16th century. Similar if more potent than peppercorns and galangal, the flavor and aroma immediately clicked. One popular pepper, pri kee noos, is literally translated as “mouse dropping chillies.” A chef noted that for yam salads and som tam, notoriously hot Thai dishes, the traditional fare is perhaps 5 to 10 chillies; the adjustment for foreigners: 2 to 3 pri kee noos. Still, there has been an enormous change in the way people eat over the last few decades.

Several factors have lead to rapid change is food ways. In the United States and elsewhere, a proliferation of cable channels has lead to wide-spread availability of specialty programming. Documentaries about other cultures and travel programming has helped to inform consumers and to challenge providers. At the same time, economic competition has worked to compel recent immigrants to open ethnic restaurants in ever smaller communities, allowing consumers to sample some versions of novel foods prior to having a travel experience. And, last, cut-throat competition in the travel industry has driven a remorseless search for new destinations and engaging settings.

Thailand, with a welcoming reputation and a sound infrastructure, is fast becoming this year's destination of choice. Thai restaurants have been well established in the chief donor nations, so travelers are eager to try the “authentic” cuisine. Bellying up to a table spread with red or green curries, hot salads, and chilled beer, burnished the education started with those cable television documentaries and teaches the traveler to love it in the heat.

Meanwhile, Tabasco, South Louisiana’s long-time bad boy of fermented hot sauces, and Panola, North Louisiana’s relative newcomer, have been joined in a burgeoning American and international marketplace with dozens, or perhaps hundreds, of other peppery products. In some ways, this diffuse range of offerings underscores Louisiana’s role as compass rose to all things hot and splashable on food.

Often recipes call for a particular brand of Louisiana hot sauce; other times it’s simple enough to direct consumers to any Louisiana hot sauce. Indeed, screen writer Peter Viertel writes in his memoir of Hemingway describing success in the culinary arts, "First,” he’d say, “you take Tabasco sauce . . .” Sometimes, it was the only bright spot on a relentlessly dreary meal in a Soviet InTourist restaurant, other times, the bow on the box, sitting on starched white tablecloths on elegant steam train dining cars, cutting smoothly across the veldt in Southern Africa.

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