The Quilt Inn Country Cookbook

Aliske Webb

Hunka Hunka Burning Love

We had a special guest drop by the other day. Bill Parker was passing through

town and needing a place to stay, was recommended to The Quilt Inn by Horace the

pump jockey down at the Service Station across from the Cheese Shoppe. We’re

always delighted to learn new and interesting things from our visitors but Bill’s

comments on sitting down to one of our home-cooked meals, set us back a bit.

“Not very spicy,” he said, adding more pepper from the pepper mill. “Do you

have any Tabasco Sauce or better yet, Sauce From Hell?” The latter, I learned, is a

local specialty in his town. It’s prime ingredient is chiles and of course this led to a

conversation about these fiery little devils.

Bill travels out of his native State a great deal and was well prepared for the

relatively bland tastebuds of “foreigners”. He had some Habenero peppers in his carry

bag which he generously offered to share with me. One taste and the heat was so

intense I nearly fainted. With a gasp, I asked Michael for three things. “Water! 911! Last

rites!”

Most people would avoid such incendiary peppers. Not Bill and his asbestos-

lined fellow gastronomes. Some crave the wave. They crave the heat.

Once I had recovered, Bill explained that a true pepper fiendwouldn’t even flinch

at the ordinary Jalapeno, considering it child’s play.

“Myself, I particularly like the Scotch Bonnet,” said Bill, a native of Louisiana

where his mother had introduced him to the taste of spicy food. I’m rather fond of an

occasional drink,and the image of a “Scotch bonnet” produced a vision of Bushmill’s

neat in a glass with a paper hat on it. It turns out that the Scotch Bonnet is a pepper, a

close cousin to the Habanero, related in the same way as the Hatfields and the

McCoys, who incidentally at this very time were having a war of their own in my

stomach. These two peppers are kings of the Scoville Scale, a system that rates

peppers based on capsaicin content, the compound that makes chiles hot.

At the bottom of the Scoville is the green bell pepper, with 0 Scoville Heat Units,

or “H.U.” The Jalapeno, Bill said, smokes in around 2500 to 5000 H.U.’s. The

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Country Cooking