Published: October 29, 2009 09:01 pm      

People craving the pleasure and pain of chili peppers

Point Blank column

You bite into that cheesy quesadilla slathered in hot salsa and then what happens?

Pow! Jalapeno hits your tongue, jolting the nerve cells in your mouth to life. Endorphins kick in and you start to sweat, but you love that hot pepper rush.

Our nation — on the rebound from its long affair with comfort food — apparently has a hot new love: chili pepper.

Once worshipped by the Incas, the chili is now revered by surging numbers of Americans with heat-seeking palates and by food marketers who are keen to stimulate them.

Together, they’ve made chili the second-most-craved flavor in the United States after chocolate. Demand for the increasingly popular item reportedly is up more than 20 percent in the last decade alone.

It seems that an increasing number of people profoundly crave the chili experience. They find eating hot peppers — with all the attendant tearing, sweating and runny noses — to be far more intense than eating anything else.

Chili peppers, meanwhile, mainly belong to the styles of cooking known as Mexican, Tex-Mex and Southwestern.

These internationally popular styles often overlap: sometimes it can be hard to tell which style a particular dish belongs to.

We’re lucky to have a selection of Mexican-style restaurants in the Beckley area. All of the diners offer their own unique blend of the Mexican-Southwestern cuisine.

The different traditions and geographic locations of the inhabitants of Mexico and of the Anglo-American settlers in the Southwest have resulted in subtle, flavorful differences between foods featured in Mexican and Southwestern cuisine.

And yet, many of the traditions of Southwestern cooking grew out of difficult situations — cowboys and ranchers cooking over open fires, for example.

Chili, which can contain beans, beef, tomatoes, corn and many other ingredients, was a good dish to cook over a campfire because everything could be combined in one pot.

Dry foods such as beef jerky were a convenient way to solve food storage problems and could be easily tucked into saddlebags.

In Mexico, by contrast, fresh fruits and vegetables such as avocados and tomatoes were widely available and did not need to be dried or stored. They could be made into spicy salsa and guacamole.

Meat of various kinds is often the centerpiece of both Mexican and Southwestern tables.

And though beef, pork and chicken are staples in both traditions, they are often prepared quite differently.

Fried chicken rolled in flour and dunked into sizzling oil or fat is a popular dish throughout the American Southwest.

In traditional Mexican cooking, chicken is often cooked more slowly, in stews or baked dishes, with a variety of seasonings, including chilies, garlic and onions.

When I was in Albuquerque a few years back, some of the restaurant owners told me that the food they cooked was as much Mexican as it was Southwestern.

And in our area the food lovers who sample those regional delights will note — and savor — the contrast between the spicy, fried or grilled, beef-heavy style of the Southwestern food and the richly seasoned, corn and tomato-heavy style of Mexican food.

In Southwestern cooking, steak — flank, rib eye, or sirloin — grilled quickly and served rare is often a chef’s crowning glory.

In Mexican cooking, beef may be combined with vegetables and spices and rolled in a fajita or served ground in a taco.

For a Mexican food purist, the only true fajita is made from steak — though in our area, diners can order chicken or steak fajitas, both of which are quite popular.

Whatever the season, Mexican-Southwestern style cuisine offers something for everyone.

And at least half a dozen quaint Mexican-style restaurants in the Beckley area are eager to serve up their spicy cuisine whenever you drop in.

But be forewarned: the enjoyable sensations of a runny nose, crying eyes and dragonfire-like mouth are clearly not for the timorous. Watch out especially for the chili peppers.

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Top o’ the morning!

— Blankenship is a columnist for The Register-Herald. E-mail: jabbb@suddenlink.net