When Columbus brought chilli back from the New World, the British were indifferent. Strange, really, when our taste for horseradish and mustard was keen, and when we later found a love for Marmite, stilton and Pickled Onion Monster Munch. A culture shaped by drizzle should have been an early adopter. Instead, that part of our culinary soul which prizes macaroni cheese for its inoffensiveness prevailed.
Kedgeree had been here for a century, spiced with nothing hotter than pepper, when we started developing more fiery tastes. Students showing off to each other would compete to eat a vindaloo or a phall.
There are attitudes that youth and inexperience make forgivable. There are probably still people out there who think the chilli sauce on doner kebabs is hot, just as there are those who think communism has failed only because so far no one has properly read the instructions on the box. Past the age of 30, such beliefs become less forgivable. By that age curry-house bravado – probably through habit – should have become simple appreciation. As a nation we first learnt to survive chilli, then to enjoy it.
We came to love garlic, too, over roughly the same period. That was partly taught to us by the supermarkets – the arrival of garlic bread on the shelves was an unrecognised coup in the history of the British soul – but the supermarkets lagged when it came to heat. In many parts of the country supermarkets still don’t sell chillies that are hot. The huge Tesco in Wick, like the Asda in King’s Lynn, sells only those large red and green chillies that never aspire to heat beyond tepid. More people have learnt to enjoy eating chillies than cook with them.
If we had more wisely spent our money on levelling-up, HS2 would never have started. Instead, armies of missionaries would have spread the joy of higher culture, including the letters of Keats, Beethoven’s late quartets, the advantages of Maine Coon cats and chilli. Postmen, like doctors, would have gone from house to house, delivering glad tidings and Scotch bonnets.
But perhaps no fantasy should expect government intervention to be effective. The free market, of ideas and of ready meals, is inefficient but not, eventually, ineffective. Two cheers for capitalism, as Irving Kristol might have said. In Sainsbury’s a product called Flaming Korean Fire Chicken is genuinely hot. In M&S the Hot Chicken Tikka Masala is actually that. I accept that there will be people who deny this, but if a meal that is meant to be spicy is lacking in spice, I will add a small pile of raw bird’s-eye chillies. I am not, in the average scheme of things, chilli shy.
As a nation we first learnt to survive chilli, then to enjoy it
A rational world would do better, of course. Supermarkets would not sell chillies that are pallid disappointments, nor would they shock people with products marked ‘hot’ that actually are hot. In a properly run world, Scovilles – the unit of chilli heat – would be displayed, and Chris Whitty would appear on television advising people to know their limits.
But then in a rational world that nonsense about removing the seeds from your chillies would never have left the echoing skull in which it first emerged. You do not remove the seeds so that you can taste the chilli; the chilli is not a unit of taste to begin with, but of heat, and if you want less heat then use less chilli. You’ll save yourself the pointless faff of scraping the seeds out and you’ll also avoid the risk of touching the seeds with your fingers and still having some on them when you wipe your eyes or go to the toilet. Hygiene won’t help; capsaicin is fat soluble, meaning it’ll have soaked into your flesh. But then, if you don’t like heat, you’re probably scared of flavour overall, not to be trusted with the care of a cat, suspicious and miserly when you add garlic, and won’t have read Keats, or admired his bafflingly mad account of trying to accentuate the pleasure of claret by covering his tongue with chilli before taking a sip.
Civilisations rise and fall, and occasionally they rally – around small things like flags or ideas or flavourings. I like to think our love of garlic and chilli are green shoots. If only we hadn’t spent the money on HS2.
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