By Joel Denker

My tongue began to tingle. My eyes watered. I was excited. I chewed on the slices of green chili peppers that lit up the stir fry of chicken and basil leaves cooked in a garlicky fish sauce, a favorite of mine.

Chilies are a spice native to the Americas that we all too often consider exotic. They migrated to other continents, only to return in the flavoring of other cuisines.

European mariners found the tantalizing pods on the island of Hispaniola (home today to Haiti and the Dominican Republic), where they were a staple of the Carib Indians’ diet. They called them axi–shortened to aji by the Spaniards–and used them to enliven their bland diet of cassava, maize, beans, and fish. The islanders endured winters in the mountains “with the aid of the meat they eat with very hot spices,” Columbus observed.

In pursuit of a direct route to the Indies and its rich supplies of black pepper, the explorers assumed the pungent fruits were “peppers”, a name that has been linked to chilies ever since. They were probably Scotch bonnet peppers, the plump members of the chili family, named for their resemblance to the hat.

The curious chilies, the Spaniards discovered, burned. The Indians bombarded the garrison that Columbus left in Hispaniola with gourds filled with ashes and ground pepper.

The “country pepper” of the West Indies probably originated in South America, where the spice was also called “axi.” Chili was a hallowed food for the Incas of the Andes, whose graves were painted with pictures of it. No Andean dish was complete without chili. Even the leaves went into a festive stew or lorco.

South American chilies grew wild on shrubby bushes. Their brilliant colors and intense fragrance may have attracted birds, who then deposited the seeds in new locations. They were aptly named “bird peppers.”

The Spanish took the seeds back from the Caribbean to the mother country. By the early 1500’s, chili plants were springing up in Spain’s gardens. After their word, pimienta, for black pepper, they dubbed the spice pimento.

Chilies traveled beyond Iberia, diffusing more rapidly than any other spice. The Portuguese, the most accomplished food disseminators, took the pepper from Brazil to Macao, their Chinese colony, and to Goa, their entrepôt in India. Trading for slaves in West Africa, the Portuguese left behind chilies. Like the tomato and potato, also members of the Nightshade family, the chili would transform the cooking in new lands.

Unlike the black pepper, chili was easily exploited. Since it dried well, it could be conveniently transported. Seeds kept their flavor for long periods. The plant which was relatively simple to grow bore fruit easily. New varieties with different sizes, shapes, colors, and flavors mushroomed.

Compared to the scarcer and more expensive black pepper, the chili was abundant and cheap. The condiment, Sophie Coe argues, democratized the consumption of spices. It provided commoners with a seasoning they could enjoy.

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Mexico had a vast storehouse of chilies. When the conquerors invaded, they discovered a crop that the Indians had been cultivating for thousands of years, perhaps even before corn. Archaeological evidence, Carl Sauer points out, suggests that the spice was being grown before 3500 B.C.

“The chili seller . . . sells mild red chiles, broad red chiles, hot green chiles, yellow chilies. He sells water chilies . . . smoked chiles, thin chiles, those like beetles. He sells hot chilies, the hollow-based kind. He sells green chilies, sharp pointed red chiles. . . .” As the Spanish friar Bernardino de Sahagun reports in 1569, Aztec folkways were steeped in chili. The Spanish borrowed their general name for the plant, chilli, and changed its spelling to chili.

The sun radiated fruits blazed with red, scarlet, orange, and yellow colors in Indian plots. Strings of peppers dried on adobe walls. They were smoked, roasted, pickled, or eaten raw.

The Aztecs were attuned to the specific flavors and temperatures particular chilies produced. They divided chilies according to the heat they emitted: “very, very hot,” “brilliant hot,” “runaway hot,” etc. The different properties determined how each was best employed or blended in cooking.

Lacking salt, the tribes sparked simple dishes of beans or maize with chili, sometimes with additions of tomatoes. They fired up the appetite and made it easier to digest starchy foods.

Chilies were a critical ingredient in the mollis, the stews prepared for Indian royalty. “The lords also ate many kinds of caseroles . . . one kind . . . of fowl made . . . with red chile and tomatoes, and ground squash seeds . . . ; they ate another casserole of fowl made with yellow chile,” friar Sahagun wrote. The most celebrated dish, mole poblano, was typically turkey suffused in a sauce of chili paste, mixed with chocolate, cinnamon, raisins, and other aromatic flavorings.

Chilies were powerful cultural symbols. A sign of wealth, baskets of pods were sent as tribute by subjects to their kings. They were also sacraments that were renounced during fasts

The chili also represented male potency, sometimes the phallus itself. A pepper with its seeds removed was considered “caponized” or emasculated.

It was both revered and feared. Disobedient children, servants, and wives were suspended over fires of chili. The Mayans punished young girls looking at men by rubbing pepper in their eyes.

Chili was also a popular health remedy. The Indians took pepper mixes to alleviate sore throats, ear infections, and coughs. The Mayans treated infected gums by holding peppers in their mouths. The Aztecs rubbed mashed chilies into aching bones and muscles.

The Spaniards also believed in the chili’s medicinal powers. Some in the 17th century began eating two roasted peppers after each meal to improve their vision. Sailors carried pickled peppers, a rich source of vitamin C on their voyages to prevent scurvy.

Some Europeans marveled at the vivid plant. Writing in 1597, John Gerard, an English apothecary, was transfixed by a blossoming chili. “The flowers groweth along the stalks out of the wings of the leaves. After them groweth the cods, greene at first and when they be ripe of a brave colour, glittering like red corall, and of a hot, biting taste. . . .”

Others were apprehensive. Jose de Acosta, a 16th century Jesuit priest, was worried that consuming too much chili, an aphrodisiac to the Indian, would lead to sensual excess. “. . . it is very hote, fuming and pierceth greatly so as the use thereof is prejudicial to the health of young folkes, chiefly to the soule, for that it provokes to lust. . . .”

When our senses explode after eating chilies, as mine did at local restaurant Sala Thai, there is a scientific explanation. Capsaicin, a colorless, odorless chemical concentrated in the placenta, the whitish tissue to which the seeds are attached, stimulates the mucus membranes.

Our watery eyes and runny nose are warning signals sent by the nerves when this irritant reaches the tongue and the mouth. They are the body’s warnings to stop eating it. After realizing that the chili presents no real danger, psychologist Paul Rozin argues, we begin ignoring the signals and start savoring the sensations. In fact, he says, the pepper devotee revels in the “constrained risk.”

Perhaps this was what made a trip to Sala Thai so thrilling. Enjoying a chili dish was the restaurant equivalent of a roller coaster ride.