The Best American Travel Writing 2019

by Jason Wilson

  At Goldteeth’s Jerk Centre, I found the pork of my dreams: juicy, smoky, deeply seasoned. The pepper burn was even, slow, never overwhelming. And that’s the point: peppers are just one element of a complex marinade, yet utterly indispensable.

  “In a jerk, that is the most important thing,” said George “Goldteeth” Wilson, who’s been getting up at 4 a.m. running this joint for 20 years. He can remember when pig’s blood was a regular component of the marinade, which balances the pepper heat with scallions, garlic, ginger, allspice, and thyme. These days he uses traditional wild bird peppers, not Scotchies, but they work the same unifying magic. “The peppers bring everything out,” he told me.

  But as powerful as peppers are, as both spice and symbol, Jamaica’s pepper industry is in deep trouble. Sure, you might visit Coronation Market, the Caribbean’s largest farmers’ market, and see mountains of green and yellow Scotchies for sale. Sometimes, though, in the winter or if the weather’s been rough, you’ll see molehills.

  Taji Alleyne, who oversees the local produce supply network for the $400 million GraceKennedy Group, a huge conglomerate, one wing of which distributes food, told me by phone that Scotch bonnet pepper crops have “traditionally been plagued by virus, pest infestation, and adverse climatic conditions.” As a result, two things happen: supply is inconsistent, and the price erratic.

  To maintain supply, many farmers grow a more resistant pepper known as the West Indian Red, spicy like a Scotchie but flat-tasting, without that addictive sweetness. Hot-sauce makers (whose 2017 exports totaled nearly $20 million) have even had to buy pepper mash from Costa Rica and Peru. Yes, Jamaica, home of the matchless Scotchie, can’t meet its own demand for its beloved native(ish) son. Farms like Soldier’s are not enough.

  There are some signs of hope. In Clarendon Parish, west of Kingston, 300 acres of hip-high bushes stretch across a hill-bounded plain, bright orange and yellow Scotch bonnets nestled under their gold-green leaves. They are the work of Gary Coulton, who’s taking Soldier-style self-reliance into the future with techniques he developed during decades of farming in Florida, using a custom irrigation system and imported fertilizer. His Scotch bonnet seeds, meanwhile, are extra hardy. “It’s a good, pure seed,” he said. By the end of the year, he plans to have 120 acres under cultivation, for a potential annual yield of 90 tons. That’s a lot of Scotch bonnets in a world, Coulton believes, that truly needs them.

  “Scotch bonnet pepper is a great ambassador,” he said. One day in Florida, he explained, a home inspector came to examine the house he was building and noticed Scotch bonnets growing out back. “He picked a pepper, smelt it, bit it—it burned him—but he was so impressed that he encouraged me to do it more,” he said proudly. “To be honest, he spent more time talking about the Scotch bonnet pepper than he was inspecting! It just preached that it opened the door for dialogue between me and a total stranger.”

  Hungary

  In which our adventurer gives his scorched taste buds a rest in the land of sweet and smoky paprika

  In the middle of our deeply traditional dinner at a restaurant just outside Budapest, Ádám Bóday, a researcher described by a mutual friend as a “man of mystery,” did something deeply mysterious. We had been eating hearty classics of Hungarian cuisine at a cozy spot called Nosztalgia Étterem—stuffed peppers, fatty-chewy tripe in a tomato-paprika sauce, ratatouille-esque lecsó—while discussing the gradations of paprika, the sun-dried, finely ground, relatively mild chile pepper that is Hungary’s national spice. The way quality is measured, Bóday was explaining, is by dissolving it in acetone, which extracts the crimson pigment, then shining a 640-nanometer-wavelength beam of light through the liquid.

  “The less light that comes through, the higher the ASTA value is,” he said, referring to the American Spice Trade Association’s grading guidelines. A value of 120 and up is the highest quality; below are two lesser grades.

  Then Bóday pulled four small bottles of acetone from his bag, and the trim, mustachioed restaurant owner, Jeno˝ Boross, brought four foil packets of paprika from the kitchen, where they’re stored away from the light. “The Hungarian expression is ‘The paprika gets blind,’” Bóday explained about the storage. “Of course, because the pigments are photosensitive.”

  Carefully, I spooned one gram of paprika from each packet into the acetone bottles, then sealed and shook them gently. Bóday tapped on his smartphone’s flashlight and shined it through the acetone. Refractions danced on a white piece of paper below, one molten gold, another lava red. Even though we didn’t have a professional spectrophotometer on hand, we could see: one was a deeper red than the others! Clearly, this paprika was best! Satisfied, we returned to our dinner, and our wine.

  This may seem like a fabulous effort to go through to grade paprika, but the spice is more than just Hungary’s favorite flavoring. It’s an emblem that adorns everything from market stalls, in the form of dried-chile garlands, to T-shirts (I♥BUDAPEST with red peppers forming the heart). It’s a luxury export, demanded by New York delis and the Kremlin alike. It’s the fire in the forge of Hungarian identity, a taste that for over 300 years helped unify a nation as kingdoms and empires rose and fell and new forms of government took hold and were then displaced.

  “We cannot live without paprika,” Eszter Palágyi, the head chef at Costes, the first restaurant in Budapest to win a Michelin star, told me over espresso one afternoon. She estimates that 60 to 70 percent of the cuisine contains the spice in some way. The powder can be sweet or spicy(ish)—the upper bounds of paprika heat are a few times that of a jalapeño, but those are less common strains—lending an umami-like richness that helps bind dishes like goulash. Chile pastes bear colorful colloquial names: “Strong Stephen is Erős Pista, and Sweet Anna is Édes Anna,” Palágyi said. “So the girl is the sweet one, the man is the hot one.” These, I was told, are also the two sides of the Hungarian character—on the one hand delicate and refined; on the other, hard and headstrong.

  Palágyi is young—just 30—but she’s a serious student of food history, with a collection of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century cookbooks that have given her a window onto her cuisine’s evolution. Hungarian gastronomy, she said, always borrowed freely from its neighbors—and its occupiers. The Ottoman Empire was one of the latter, ruling most of Hungary during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and leaving behind a fondness for thermal baths, a deep and lasting bitterness over the conquest, and, of course, peppers.3

  To get from Turkish peppers to the Hungarian paprika we know today is, however, a journey of another 200 years—or, as it turns out, a 100-mile drive south from Budapest to Szeged, Hungary’s third-largest city and the historic heart of paprika production. The center of Szeged is grand and lovely, dominated by a university, full of intricate Art Nouveau buildings, and cradled by the Tisza River—a wealthy city, much of it built on paprika.

  “This was a holy crop here,” Albert Molnár told me through his translator, marketing director Anko Reijnders, as we sipped coffee in the offices of PaprikaMolnár, the growing and processing company he’d founded in Szeged in 1992. “Every second family was working in paprika, either on one side or the other side of the continuum,” he added, “from growing to processing.” At the industry’s height, in the early twentieth century, 10,000 people farmed paprika around Szeged, and hundreds more processed the spice.

  We got up and walked through the factory, past the red-dusted machinery and workers in head-to-toe red, with Molnár—close-cropped white hair, checked shirt, sun-lined face—leading the way to his beloved paprika museum. Black-and-white photos lined the walls, showing families stringing peppers into garlands to dry in the sun, or hauling them to market. Until about a century ago, Molnár said, Hungarian paprika was actually quite spicy and could only be toned down by carefully plucking out the seeds and membrane, which contained most of the capsaicin. Although Hungarians liked their food spicier than anyone else in Europe, they still didn’t like it that spicy. (Intensive
cross-breeding after World War I resulted in even sweeter strains, which helped create a massive export market in countries that really couldn’t take the heat.) Then, after sun-drying the peppers for weeks, they’d pound them to powder in foot-driven wooden mortars called kulu, a couple of which were on display.

  Even today, “we do everything with hands,” said Agota Hodi, another paprika maker, whose spice is used at Costes (and sold at Zingerman’s here in the US). At her suburban Szeged house, where the paprika scent spilled wonderfully into the street, Hodi, 40 and lively, served me slices of bread smeared with lard and dusted with paprika (“You can taste paprika the best in fat or in oil,” she told me) and explained the process: Yes, a machine dries the peppers, but first they need a couple weeks in the sun. Yes, machines grind them, but Hodi must add water to maintain the ideal 8 percent moisture. “If not enough water,” she said, “then the color is not so red.”

  Harvesting peppers requires human beings—machines clip too many unpalatable leaves—so each September 50 to 60 laborers come, many from Romania, and get paid $30 for a thousand hours of work to clear the 20-acre farm. Most laborers, she said, won’t do that kind of work for that kind of money.

  And that’s one of the reasons why Hungarian paprika is dying.

  Yes, dying. Already, only 10 percent of the paprika consumed in Hungary is produced in the country, said Hodi, who worked at the Ministry of Agriculture before turning full-time to paprika.4 The rest comes from abroad, mostly China. Even at PaprikaMolnár, many of the peppers processed are grown abroad, in Serbia. Farming peppers, which get a single annual growing cycle, is expensive and risky, and many Hungarians seem willing to put up with substandard paprika as long as it’s inexpensive. While Jamaica is striving to modernize pepper farming in the face of climate change, Hungary, challenged by economic shifts, is letting its fire go out.

  The standard economic solution to this would be to import cheap labor instead of cheap paprika. But immigration in Hungary has become one of the hottest-button issues in the country—and Szeged, in fact, was a flashpoint for the migration crisis back in 2015, when hundreds were crossing the Serbia-Hungary border daily, not far from Molnár’s and Hodi’s operations. The government reacted harshly, erecting a double-layered, razor-wire-topped electrified fence along the border. It’s an imposing creation, a harbinger of isolationism and a throwback to the days of Hungarian-Soviet communism.

  The chance of Hungary accepting migrants to prop up the paprika industry is zero. The government currently allows a mere two asylum seekers per day into its temporary “transit zones,” and, as is the case throughout much of Europe these days, xenophobia is in the air. At a cathedral in Szeged, where I’d gone to see a bell adorned with pepper imagery, I met a man who spoke of the need to safeguard “white, Christian Europe.” (This Jew was unmoved.)

  That Hungary’s signature flavor was brought to this country by Turkish Muslims only deepens the already long-running and sad ironies.

  So it was heartening to meet Márk Bogár, a 24-year-old who lives in Tetétlen, a village of 1,500 in eastern Hungary, and who represents another path of pepper possibility. Alongside his parents, Bogár is growing tons of the world’s spiciest chiles—ghost peppers, Trinidad Scorpions, Carolina Reapers—and turning them into sauces, sold under the name “Sárréti Chilifarm,” that are getting attention from local fans and Hungarian TV, and winning awards.

  When I stopped in to visit, Bogár and his friends and family were in the backyard, enjoying home-grown jalapeño poppers and grilled chicken wings with a dozen Sárréti sauces, from kiwi-habanero to apple-horseradish to one called Csak Norris, after the Walker, Texas Ranger star. (Csak means “only,” the implication being that only Chuck Norris could handle the heat.) Kids of varying ages were running around, grown-ups were pouring pálinka, and soon my mouth was aflame in a way I’d never expected here in Hungary.

  As Bogár talked about his love for seriously spicy peppers—no “ish” necessary—it gave me hope. Hungarian cuisine took centuries to get where it is now; maybe another hundred years will see paprika morph again, reinvigorated by Sárréti’s strains, and make today’s Strong Stephen look like Sweet Anna by comparison. Maybe traditional paprika didn’t need to survive. Maybe, I suggested to Bogár, Hungary had erred in breeding out the heat a century ago?

  “This was a mistake!” he laughed.

  I began to feel my head spin—not from chile-fed endorphins or pálinka but from the delicious sense of history repeating itself. Now, though, the chiles were hotter, the influences American, and yet all was still very Hungarian. As Goldteeth had said, “The peppers bring everything out.” Everything, yes—and everywhere, too.

  Thailand

  The final chapter of our journey, in which our hero’s mouth, and mind, are set aflame with the possibilities of a globalized, chilefied world

  Finally, my face was on fire. My lips burned. My tongue burned. My throat burned. Sweat beaded on my cheekbones, under my eyes. This wasn’t just heat—this was electric. My mouth pulsed with incalculable voltage. Pain and pleasure blurred, the distinction irrelevant. I breathed deeply. I smiled like a twelfth-century Buddhist god-king carved in sandstone. I picked up my spoon and my fork, and prepared to take another bite.

  For weeks, I had been looking forward to Thailand, the most thoroughly chilefied country in the world, where peppers are everywhere (everywhere!), in everything (almost!), pounded into curry pastes and papaya salads, sliced into stir-fries, soaked in vinegar or fish sauce, and placed upon seemingly every dining table. And now I was at Err, a cool, comfy restaurant near Bangkok’s Grand Palace that specializes in “urban rustic” drinking food, which tends to be spicier than non-drinking food, which, let’s be clear, is decently spicy already. Before me were tart ribbons of shaved green mango dusted with ground chiles; a flash-fried egg buried in chiles, shallots, and mint; and a sour and fiery pork-rib curry, plus the house cocktail, made with rum, fresh passion fruit, and—of course!—skinny red chiles.

  Together, they lit me up—but they didn’t push me over the edge. My palate didn’t collapse. I could taste the lush, semiliquid egg yolk and the pork’s savory roughness—could taste them even more acutely, I imagined, than if the heat had been dialed down. The chiles were inextricable.

  Except, of course, that technically, historically, they are entirely extricable. Because if you went back in time about 500 years, you’d find no chiles in Siam, as Thailand was then known. You’d find ginger and galangal, and black, green, and white pepper, and makhwaen, a cousin to Sichuan peppercorn. You’d find cinnamon and cloves and other dried spices, and a panoply of pungent herbs. You’d find coconuts and citrus. You’d find rice and fermented fish and shrimp. You’d find mango and durian. In short, you’d find nearly everything you’d need to make recognizably Thai food today—except that without the chiles, it would be unrecognizable.5

  As with the story of peppers elsewhere in the world, I knew the shorthand version of how they got to Thailand: the Portuguese. Arriving in Siam in 1511 after capturing Malacca, up the Gulf of Thailand, the Portuguese likely brought chiles, along with guns, cannons, and other items for trade.6 But what happened next remains mysterious. How did chiles so thoroughly take over?

  “Thai cuisine, you know, it’s supposed to hurt a little,” Pim Techamuanvivit, the chef at San Francisco’s Kin Khao and Bangkok’s Nahm, had told me. “But there’s definitely a balance between using chile and allowing the other flavors and the true nature of the ingredients to show themselves.” I would have to be careful not to let my quest for fire get in the way of my quest for enlightenment. Any dumb farang—i.e., “foreigner”—could burn his face off; I wanted something more nuanced, to burn with understanding.

  One Sunday morning, a quick ferry ride across the Chao Phraya River from Err, the Church of Santa Cruz was alive with activity. A pale-blue sky hung over the century-old Italianate church—peachy yellow with pink accents and a red-domed steeple—while inside dozens of worshi
ppers sang hymns in Thai and listened to a priest’s sermon from the gold-adorned chancel. They were young and old, some dressed up, most casual, all members of the 200 or so families that make up the surrounding community—a community that is not only Catholic, with crosses and images of the Holy Family adorning their homes, but Portuguese.

  Historically, anyway. This neighborhood was Kudichin, and it was about as close as I was going to get to envisioning the first contacts between Thailand and the Portuguese. The neighborhood was created in 1769, when King Taksin granted land to three groups that had aided Siam in a war with Burma. It was a war that Siam basically lost: The Burmese looted and burned the royal capital, Ayutthaya, 50 miles north, where the Portuguese and other foreigners had encampments. Siam’s leaders retreated to Bangkok, and the Portuguese, along with the Chinese and a group of Muslims, now had land to call their own, here on these flood-prone mudflats.

  Two and a half centuries later, the community has managed to preserve some Portuguese culinary traditions. At the airy café of the Baan Kudichin Museum, I snacked on sappayak, a light and yummy baked Portuguese bun stuffed with sweet minced pork, potatoes, curry powder, and red flecks of mild chiles. And after Sunday mass, a street stall behind the church sold a very Portuguese beef stew with potatoes and tomatoes (both New World crops!), as well as sweet, Chinese-influenced pork, braised with soy sauce, tofu, and hard-cooked eggs, and a fiery Thai curry of ground pork and pea-size eggplants that popped with tart astringency. Eating all three together felt like communion with history, as if the groups that had created modern Thai cuisine were right there at this folding metal table at the edge of the street.

  The exact moment chiles arrived in Siam may have been lost to history. Foreign visitors’ accounts offer tantalizing threads. Portuguese apothecary Tomé Pires visited Siam around 1514 and wrote of rice and pepper, and a 1688 account by the French Jesuit Nicolas Gervaise mentions pepper but not peppers. (He also berates Siam’s “stupid cooks” and their shrimp paste, “which has such a pungent smell that it nauseates anyone not accustomed to it.”)