Curious Cook

Chilli pungency: Tracking it back

In a second study of chilli pungency in the wild, Tewksbury, Levey, and colleagues summarize current views of the evolution of Capsicum species, and report on several years of surveying chilli populations in the semiarid countryside of southeastern Bolivia, the region where their spiciness may have originated. They found mixed populations of pungent and non-pungent plants, and pungency seems to be associated with higher elevations and possibly greater stress.

Chilli pungency: A selective chemical weapon

The paper on chilli archaeology that I described a couple of days ago included two recent references that caught my eye, both by Joshua J. Tewksbury at the University of Washington, Douglas J. Levey of the University of Florida, and various colleagues. They add to our understanding of why it is that chillis evolved to accumulate the chemical, capsaicin, that makes their fruits pungent.

Ancient chillis

Spices and herbs are stimulants. Not necessarily pharmacological, but sensory: they stimulate our senses of taste and smell in foods that are otherwise bland. The human diet must have gotten a little boring when our ancestors first learned to cultivate grains and root crops and began to lean heavily on these starchy staffs of life, after millions of years of eating this and that as hunter-gatherers. So when did humans start spicing up their monotonous new diet? Very early--in the Americas, even before the widespread use of cooking pots, according to a new report on the archaeology of the chilli "pepper." A  group of fifteen scientists led by Linda Perry of the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History published their results in this week's Science. 

Finding entries in "On Food & Cooking"

A number of readers have written to ask whether there's a electronic version of On Food & Cooking in the works, mainly to make it easier to find single terms or phrases quickly in those hundreds of thousands of words. Good question!

Yes, there is an ebook in development. Meantime, for the rest of us with hard copies, myself included, here's an interim solution. Go to the Google Books entry for the book (right), scroll down to the lower right corner of the page, and you'll find a search box. Type in a term and hit Search. It will give you snippets around the term, and page references. The entire text isn't viewable on Google Books, so you'll probably have to go back to your hard copy to see all the appearances of the term. And for some reason the search index isn't complete; it missed several entries for "capsaicin" in my test. But it's much more complete than the book's printed index.

I'm working with people at Google to place a permanent search box for the book right on this website. Stay tuned.

Google Books entry for On Food & Cooking:
http://books.google.com/books?id=iX05JaZXRz0C&vid=ISBN0684800012&dq

Rice: Old and new flavors; cooking; parboiled

A last installment (for the time being) of rice news.

Old and new Japanese rice As I've mentioned, Japan generally prefers their rice as fresh as possible; new-harvest rice is prized. Japanese scientists looked at the flavor changes that take place during aging, and found some pretty significant changes.

Rice: Red and brown

Rice news continued.

Red rice: I've enjoyed this exotic premium rice from Bhutan for years without realizing that in much of the rest of the world, the U.S. included, it's a troublesome weed.

Rice: Scented and un-, old and new

Last week I wrote in the New York Times about the distinctive aroma of Himalayan basmati and Thai jasmine rices and the chemical that contributes it. I've collected several other interesting studies of rice over the last few months. They come from labs all over the world: not surprisingly Japan and Korea and Thailand, but also France, Switzerland, Italy, Belgium--and Arkansas. Here's some of their news; more tomorrow.

In a Bottle, the Scent of a Mouse

I MADE my first rice wines last week, and they weren’t nearly as bad as I expected. I didn’t attempt homebrew versions of Chinese jiu or Japanese sake. My rice wines were a storebought sauvignon blanc and a chenin blanc into which I threw some rice. I don’t think grain-infused wine will ever catch on as an alternative to a kir or sangria (though these days you never know). But I was relieved that it didn’t remind me of Billy Goodman’s pet mice.

Wines sometimes do smell like my grade-school pal’s mouse cage, and this is not a good thing.

Curious Cook in the New York Times: Of mice and wine, and rice

In today's dining section I write about the surprising connection between an obnoxious off-flavor in wines and the prized flavor of aromatic rices.

Check back in a couple of days for more news about rice.

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Snowdon, E. et al. Mousy off-flavor: A review. J. Agric. Food Chem. 2006, 54, 6465-74. http://dx.doi.org/10.1021/jf0528613

Acrylamide again: Gingerbread and hartshorn

One more surprising discovery about acrylamide that I neglected to include in my recent roundup. Among the foods with the highest known acrylamide levels is gingerbread as it's traditionally made in northern Europe--so high that in Holland, gingerbread consumption alone accounts for something like a sixth of the total year-round acrylamide intake. This is despite the fact that wheat flours don't contain nearly as much asparagine as potatoes.