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Peppers of the Americas

The Remarkable Capsicums That Forever Changed Flavor [A Cookbook]

Author Maricel E. Presilla

Hardcover

$37.50 US

Clarkson Potter/Ten Speed | Lorena Jones Books

8.28"W x 10.26"H x 1.1"D | 51 oz | 10 per carton

On sale Aug 01, 2017 | 352 Pages | 9780399578922

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Winner of the 2018 International Association of Culinary Professionals (IACP) Cookbook Award for "Reference & Technical"

A beautiful culinary and ethnobotanical survey of the punch-packing ingredient central to today's multi-cultural palate, with more than 40 pan-Latin recipes from a three-time James Beard Award-winning author and chef-restaurateur.

From piquillos and shishitos to padrons and poblanos, the popularity of culinary peppers (and pepper-based condiments, such as Sriracha and the Korean condiment gochujang) continue to grow as more consumers try new varieties and discover the known health benefits of Capsicum, the genus to which all peppers belong. This stunning visual reference to peppers now seen on menus, in markets, and beyond, showcases nearly 200 varieties (with physical description, tasting notes, uses for cooks, and beautiful botanical portraits for each). Following the cook's gallery of varieties, more than 40 on-trend Latin recipes for spice blends, salsas, sauces, salads, vegetables, soups, and main dishes highlight the big flavors and taste-enhancing capabilities of peppers.

“Maricel is such an inspiring chef, and is so dedicated to understanding as much about the ingredients she uses as possible. This book is an amazing achievement and a resource that I will be using for years.”
—José Andrés, chef/owner, minibar by José Andrés and ThinkFoodGroup

“Maricel Presilla’s Peppers of the Americas is a deeply researched, eye-opening, beautiful guide to one of the world’s most intriguing foods.”
—Harold McGee, author of On Food and Cooking

“Maricel Presilla—the planet’s foremost authority on the cuisines of Latin America—has written the most definitive guide to peppers ever created. It is an essential book for every cook who cares about flavor.”
—James Oseland, author of Cradle of Flavor and Top Chef Masters judge

“In this thorough work, Maricel Presilla brings her fine scholarship to an ingredient that virtually all Americans use, deftly traveling a great distance and wresting clarity from complexity. A truly impressive book.”
—Deborah Madison, author of Vegetable Literacy and In My Kitchen

“Presilla is both “botanical sleuth” and chef, presenting a scholarly and stunning visual guide to peppers in this definitive guide.”
—PW Starred Review

"Our test kitchen's go-to chile pepper resource!"
—Martha Stewart Living

"Like Betty Fussell’s The Story of Corn, Presilla’s work is essential to our understanding of an ingredient that’s native to the Americas. It’s also absorbing and just plain fun: a hot summertime read for pepper people everywhere."
—Atlanta Journal-Constitution

“There’s an astounding amount of information here—historical, botanical, and even linguistic. It almost accidentally functions as a crash course in food archaeology, and contains an explainer on the hot hot heat of capsacin, the compound that makes food spicy. And somehow Presilla manages to present the vast majority of this potentially very dry subject matter almost conversationally, as though she is walking you through her backyard pepper pots, glass of wine in hand, telling you anecdotes about each. … The whole package is enough to make me reconsider single subject cookbooks. While I still think some can veer flabby, afterthoughts of publishers’ trying to plug up gaps in their catalog, Peppers of the Americas is different. Scholarly, even. And anything that manages to be well-researched and charming will always have a spot on my bookshelves—especially when it’s a book as spicy as this one.”
—Paula Forbes, Food52

"You don’t expect a botanical ethnography on peppers to send shivers up your spine, but Peppers of the Americas does just that. With academic rigor, Presilla examines the Capsicum genus’ pre-Hispanic origins, delving headlong into the epic collision between the Old and New World that sent peppers across the globe."
—NBCNews.com

"For the chile lover, the pepper obsessive and the cook who wants to learn everything there is to know about a single subject, this is the book."
—NPR's Here & Now Best Cookbooks of 2017

MARICEL E. PRESILLA is a culinary historian, author, and chef specializing in the cuisines of Latin America and Spain. She studied medieval Spanish history at Spain’s University of Valladolid and at New York University, where she received her PhD. Formally trained in cultural anthropology, she has done extensive research on the food crops of the Americas and taught at New York University and Rutgers University.

Presilla is a frequent contributor to Saveur, Food & Wine, and Gourmet, and also writes the Miami Herald’s “Cocina” column. A recognized authority on all aspects of chocolate as well as on Spanish and Latin American culinary history, she has given numerous seminars, tastings, and lectures to culinary groups nationwide and has been featured in the country’s top food publications. She is a member of the advisory committee for the Culinary Institute of America’s Latin American program and was recently named one of the “Ten innovators who will influence food in the U.S. for the next 30 years” by Food & Wine.

Presilla is the president of Gran Cacao, a food marketing company specializing in chocolate research and the heirloom cacao bean trade. She has been a consultant for several food companies including the Venezuela-based Chocolates El Rey C.A., whose premium chocolates she helped introduce to the United States. She is the co-owner and chef of two restaurants in Hoboken, New Jersey: the small pan-Latin Zafra and the more formal South American Cucharamama. The restaurants have earned Presilla repeated nominations for the James Beard Foundation’s Best Chef Mid-Atlantic award. In September 2009, she was awarded the prestigious Silver Spoon Award by Food Arts magazine for her multifaceted contributions to the culinary arts.

Presilla is the author of three illustrated books on various aspects of Latin American culture and a forthcoming book on Latin American cooking. Her newest venture is the food store and cooking atelier Ultramarinos in Hoboken. She divides her time between her New Jersey restaurants, Miami, and Latin America. View titles by Maricel E. Presilla

A PEPPER EPIPHANY

At the end of September 2009, I was winding up a trip to Peru with a visit to Cusco, the great capital of the Inca Empire. As I walked through the Temple of the Sun, musing about the trappings of ancient royal power, my phone rang. It was someone in Washington, DC. At first I thought it might be a prank, but after some confusion, I gathered that the White House was asking me to cook for the first presidential Fiesta Latina, a salute to Latin American culture and music.

When I returned home to New Jersey and continued the conversation, I realized that I was to be responsible for the entire menu with less than two weeks’ notice. The household staff was expecting me to settle innumerable details for a 400-guest event (even down to the flower arrangements). I knew this was the opportunity for peppers, the great staple food of the New World, from the Caribbean and Mesoamerica to the Andes, to tell their story. When the staff in Washington asked what kind of flowers I wanted to order, I replied, “No flowers . . . peppers!” And that was the sight that eventually greeted guests as they entered the Blue Room on the evening of the Fiesta Latina: tall cylindrical glass vases holding glowing rainbows of green, yellow, ivory, lavender, purple, orange, and red New World peppers in every shape.

The Fiesta Latina was a pivotal moment in my relationship with peppers—or capsicums, chiles, “chillis,” or ajíes, depending on one’s culinary culture. When I picked up the phone in Cusco, I was already deep into a personal pepper exploration that had begun decades earlier in Latin America and continues to this day. This book—not an encyclopedic catalog, but a highly subjective record of my own garden and kitchen encounters with these remarkable plants—is one result of that decades-long fascination.

The story of my backyard pepper laboratory begins in the summer of 2002, when an overnight thunderstorm sent a giant Norway maple tree crashing down into my backyard in Weehawken, New Jersey. I mourned the old shade tree but rejoiced that it and its shade-producing companion, a massive wisteria vine draped around its branches, would no longer block my dreams of a sunny backyard kitchen garden.

Unwisely rushing to plant all the sun-loving herbs that I’d longed for, I soon found that I’d created my own little shop of horrors, an aromatic menace with mint, lemon balm, and epazote dominating every inch of my yard and even sprouting from cracks in the brick-paved patio. Plan B was to concentrate on something less invasive. I instantly thought of hot peppers, which I had been gradually discovering during years of travels and explorations while researching Gran Cocina Latina, my book on the cuisines of Latin America, not from my own less fiery Cuban culinary heritage.

My upbringing in Cuba had been a great help in talking to non-Latin cooks about the full diversity and excitement of New World peppers—not because I grew up knowing all about peppers, but because I didn’t. My maternal aunts, the marvelous cooks in our family, scarcely ever ventured beyond the perfumed but sweet ají cachucha, the gentle bell pepper, and a few other mild varieties, either fresh or canned, though my father simply adored cooking with a tiny, very hot wild pepper called ají guaguao. Living in Miami and New York City as a refugee, and later as a citizen, I discovered the cuisines of Mexico and India, two important countries for peppers. This is when I truly began to appreciate the magic of hot peppers in cooking, which my father had so well understood when we lived in Cuba. It took many more years for me to thoroughly explore the pepper map of the Americas.

Contents

A Pepper Epiphany vii

The Silent Gardeners 1

Pepper Anatomy and Heat 13

The Capsicum Clan 24

Peppers into Words 41

The World Travels of Peppers 66

Gallery of Fresh Peppers 81

Gallery of Dried Peppers 195

Into the Pepper Garden 219

Cooking with Peppers 227

Resources 330