One of my favorite things that I brought back from Brazil earlier this year was a collection of hot sauce bottles. Some were gifts, but others were for my own enjoyment pleasure.
- I'd been working on a bottle of molho de pimento de cheiro during the past few months. That translates literally as "sauce of fragrant pepper." Pimento de cheiro is a small pepper indigenous to the Amazon region, where I visited. It's not outrageously hot but, as the name suggests, it has a wonderful aroma and flavor.
I dropped the bottle and broke it the other day. I was heartbroken, but it gave me an opportunity to get started on a new variety. Now I'm enjoying some molho de pimenta malagueta. I first encountered the Brazilian malagueta pepper during a very long airport layover, when I saw it on the ingredients list of a packaged snack food. I was familiar with the name "malagueta pepper" from my readings about food history. Known also as "grains of paradise," malagueta pepper was among the exotic spices that medieval spice merchants imported from Africa and India. In fact, the search for this spice (among others) was what sent the Portuguese explorer Pedro Cabral in a wide arc around northwestern Africa in 1500, causing him to unwittingly "discover" Brazil.
Curious about their flavor, I've looked for grains of paradise in spice stores. (I once watched a cooking show where Alton Brown used them to season okra, so I figured they had to be available somewhere.) I was excited to see them on the label of a snack food at the Manaus airport, until my sweetie set me straight, explaining the ingredient on this particular label was actually a variety of Brazilian chile pepper.
I'm curious about how this food indigenous to Brazil came to be named after the spice from the other hemisphere. It's probably no great mystery: the New World chiles were all named after Old World spices as the meaning of the word "pepper" expanded to describe these newly found delicacies.
Speaking of Brazilian peppers, we went out for lunch one day while I was visiting, and there was a little crock on the restaurant table containing hot sauce, with a couple of small, hot chiles sitting attractively on either side of it. My mother in law, who is pushing 90 and not entirely in possession of her faculties, reached for the pepper and popped it in her mouth. My sweetie and her sister, who dote over their mother, flipped out. "Mae! Mae!"
Grinning, the matriarch reached into her mouth and pulled out the perfectly intact pepper. She knew exactly what she was doing. She just wanted to get a rise out of them.
2 comments:
actually, you are confusing the well known spice we call malagueta (aframomum melegueta) with the pepper variety that is used in Brazil and the Caribbean as well. The former is a spice, the latter is a pepper and is used in this hot sauce as well as in various soups and stews. Here is an article in wiki that explains:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malagueta_pepper
Thanks, Jon, I'm actually fully aware that there's a difference between the pepper and the spice. I only meant to point out that it's probably not a coincidence that they share a name, since the pepper was discovered during a wave of exploration aimed in part at finding a more direct source for the spice.
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