Review…
A mildly hot find
I WAS IN the Permaculture Interpretive Garden in Randwick, in Sydney’s Eastern Suburbs one fine, mid-winter day. Emma was there too — Emma Daniell, a horticulturist and gardening educator who taught gardening and did garden maintenance here.
“Hey… come and look at this”, she called to me. “The shrub is laden and they’re ripe”.
I went to where Emma stood, spade in hand, in front of a bush maybe a metre in height. She was pointing to the small red fruit that decorated the shrub like brightly-coloured decorations on a christmas tree.
“I think they’re pretty hot”, she said.
“Yep. Eaten them before. I don’t find them all that hot, though”, I replied.
I picked the bell peppers, squat little chillies of the shape suggested by their name. We call these bell peppers but that is just a common name. They are likely to be known by some other common name elsewhere. That’s the thing with common names of plants, they are often regional. It is why we use the botanical names — genus and species — because any plant will be known by the same botanic name anywhere in the world.
Origins
Peppers of the World, a guidebook to these spicy little fruits, suggests those in the garden are one of the shapes that the Capsicum baccatum species takes.
It puts their origin around 2500 years ago in Peru. According to archeological evidence, farmers of the pre-Inca civilisation improved the species from its wild state. Like most of the foods we eat (Australian bush foods excepted), chillies are the product of traditional farmers engaging in selective breeding over thousands of years. Our food is not as it originally appeared in nature. It has been selected for drought, pest and disease resistance, size, taste and hardiness to specific ecological conditions. Our food is in large part a human artefact, a product of farmers working with nature to improve it for human use.
The book
It was years ago that I picked up my copy of Peppers of the World — an identification guide, by Dave DeWitt and Paul W Bosland. It was not money wasted. I’ve made use of it over the years to identify different fruit of this amazingly diverse, wonderfully and sometimes uncomfortably hot genus.
Peppers of the World was published in 1996. If you are a chillie aficionado you probably have a copy of it or a book like it already. If you are interested in chillies and can’t find Peppers of the World in your local bookshop, Amazon have it listed as a print edition. There appears to be no digital version.
The book is a US publication and, unfortunately, the measurements are only in the imperial scale rather than the international metric system used by all but three countries. A calculator or a conversion app should fix that.
Clear colour photos assist identification. Chapters cover the peppers of the world and their identification and breeding, wild species and more.
For each variety there is a colour photograph accompanied by its USDA (United States Department of Agriculture) assession number, botanical name, common name, centre of diversity (where the variety comes from), seed source, pod length, pod width, immature colour, comments about the variety such as whether it is found in the wild, its heat, whether a spreading habit, colouration, flower colour, pungency and so on.
The bell peppers, the chillies on that bush in the Permaculture Interpretive Garden, keep well in or out of the refrigerator. You can also dry them. My partner dried a different variety and crumbled them into a powder. They keep a long time in an airtight container and are easy to add to cooking.
Anyone have other ideas on preserving chillies?
Peppers of the World — an identification guide; 1996, Dave DeWitt, Paul W Bosland. Ten Speed Press, USA.
Amazon paper copy.(no ebook): https://www.amazon.com/Peppers-World-Identification-Dave-DeWitt/dp/089815840
