Best Women's Travel Writing 2010

I was in Germany for work and had met Carl, a California-born expat. He told me about Snack-Point, which claimed to serve “The Best Worscht in Town.” Currywurst is a sliced sausage served in ketchup with added chile powder and other spices. Snack-Point makes this available in varying degrees of heat and even serves one sauce made with Red Savina habanero powder, which held the Guinness record for the hottest chile in the world until 2007, when it was displaced by India’s bhut jolokia, which is sometimes used as elephant repellant.

Carl ordered for us in German and, in chivalrous deference to my feminine taste buds, ordered for me something from Snack-Point’s mid-range of heat. We stood at the tall tables, under an awning, in the rain, and speared the meat with a plastic pick. It was delicious, and my mouth felt hot and tingly, but my head did not ignite.

And that was disappointing, for I wanted to replicate something I’d witnessed in elementary school. I’d often spend weekends with my grandparents and various extended family members, driving around to tag sales, flea markets, and junk shops in the New York City suburbs. This was my grandmother’s second-favorite pastime (arguing being her first). One Sunday, our family descended on a Westchester strip mall for a traditional Jewish Sunday dinner: Chinese food. I was deep into my chicken lo mein when my grandfather missed the duck sauce and instead dunked his egg roll into the dish of extra-hot mustard. He flushed from chin to scalp and rose a few inches from his chair, while his hands flew into the air and then clapped down hard on the top of his bald head—as if to keep it from exploding.

This impressed me. I’d never seen a person turn that shade of purplish red. As he sat there shaking his head and saying, “Hoooo boy, man oh man,” and some other things not to be repeated in polite company, a desire was born within: I wanted to eat something so hot that I would risk a cranial flare-up.

I have since joined a long tradition of people who have, to a greater or lesser extent, structured their voyages around spice. The most famous heat-seeker was Christopher Columbus, who mistook chile peppers, which originate in South and Central America, for black pepper. (This is why we call chiles “pepper” even though they’re not botanically related.) Columbus and other explorers took their plunder, with chiles among the booty. In ships’ holds, chiles made their way to the cooking pots of Asia and Africa. Today, it’s no easier to imagine the fiery cuisines of India, Thailand, Sichuan, Ethiopia, and Morocco without chile than it is to think of Bolivian, Mexican, or even New Mexican food without those hot pods imported from the New World.

Unlike my historical compatriots, I will not pillage, steal, kill, or enslave on my mission. Instead, like any traveler pursuing an interest on the road, I seek out crimes of opportunity: Wherever I find myself, I seek out restaurants known for their fiery cuisine; if an item on the menu is labeled “hot and spicy,” I order it. When given the option, I always, always ask for it extra hot.

I realize this is an odd thing to pursue, the feeling of heat in the mouth so intense that it mimics the most extreme pain one can stand. It’s probably important to say that in no other way do I relish things that hurt. I am, in fact, quite a wimp.

But heat provides no ordinary sensation of pain. Science tells us it’s an “ambiguous neural response,” one that we did not evolve to properly interpret. When you bite into a chile pepper, your body knows one thing for sure: it’s experiencing an intense sensation. Panic ensues. This may be a very dangerous situation, your mouth may actually be on fire! And yet none of your sensors register actual heat, as measured in degrees Fahrenheit or Celsius. Just in case, your brain registers what’s happening as swallowing fire, and creates a full-body response. You flush, you sweat, you rise from your chair and clap your hands on your head.

Some people hate this, and some of us find it pleasurable in the same way that some people find a horror movie or a roller coaster pleasurable—it’s fun to simulate the physical reaction we have to actual danger without the real risk of it. Eat hot food and you get all the fun of setting yourself on fire—including the surge of endorphins to help ease your theoretical third-degree burn—without getting the least bit singed. Eating spicy food is an adventure sport. The currywurst in Frankfurt was obviously the junior leagues. I was ready to push myself to the limits.

I had expected that my global search for the spiciest food would be something of a private mission, one that would only capture the attention of others at the split-second at which I achieved my goal: feeling like my head was going to explode. And for a while, it played out as I imagined. I did not gain a second glance in Louisiana’s Cajun country, for example, as I downed fiery gumbos and Tabasco-spiked ice cream, nor did I merit extra notice in Hong Kong, when I dug into tiny dumplings bathed in orange chile oil on a side street in Kowloon.

On my first night in India, though, my private adventure sport started to morph into a spectator event. It was nearly 11 P.M. by the time I’d threaded through Mumbai’s maze of cars and haze of crowds and arrived at Masala Kraft, a contemporary Indian restaurant. It happened to be located in the Taj Mahal Palace and Tower, which, at the time of my visit, was still months away from the terrorist siege of November 2008.

A waiter brought out the first two courses, both house specialties: Delhi-style corn on the cob, roasted and rubbed in lime, cilantro and a mild chile powder, and amazingly tender Lucknow lamb kebabs, a dish first prepared for nobles who were too lazy to chew. He deftly transferred each course in succession from serving dishes onto my plate, and hovered nearby, in order to intercept any forward motion I might make towards the serving dishes. So his vigil would not be interrupted, a more junior waiter ran my dishes out from the kitchen.

But when it came time for my chicken-and-rice dish, which I’d ordered extra hot, there was a commotion. My waiter was ushered aside, replaced by a young man in a dark suit. Was he the manager? The maître d’? In any event, he was someone of greater authority. During my first two courses, I had been sized up, and I was deemed to be in over my head.

“The chef sent this out because he thought it would be too hot for you,” he explained, spooning raita—a yogurt and cucumber relish—onto my plate. “This raita will be your savior, and then also the mango chutney.”

He pointed each out to me, seeking comprehension. I assured him that I was really into the spice, and he assured me that there was no way I could possibly imagine the heat that they could deliver from the kitchen. My mind flashed to the McDonald’s and the Subways that I’d spotted en route from the airport. Judge U.S. cuisine by those standards, and it’s easy to understand how anyone could reasonably think that we Americans are a nation rendered taste-insensate. I thanked him, and he took a couple of steps backwards and joined my waiter and a busboy. They watched me.

Nothing! Not hot at all. It was delicious, and I loved it, but it was savory, not spicy. The manager came forward as I swallowed and anxiously inquired how it was, whether he should return it to the kitchen and fetch something more mild. I strove for diplomacy. Delicious, loved it. It’s not you, it’s me.

He explained, as if to a child, that if he were dining that night, he would eat the chicken with a stack of raw chile peppers beside him, alternating bites of each. He was just kidding, but of course, now I wanted to try it that way. He attempted to dissuade me, but with a sigh, sent for the chile peppers. They arrived, three of them, thin and green, on a white plate.

“Eat it from the thick side, where there will be fewer seeds, the heat is in the seeds,” he advised. (Actually, I found out later that the heat is most concentrated in the membranes between the seeds, but that’s a small distinction.) “Take a bite of food, then a bite of pepper, just a tiny bite! The tiniest of bites! Then more food!”

This was no joke. It was hot. How hot? You don’t have to be a chef or a biochemist to know that tolerance for spicy food varies. In chile peppers, the heat comes from a substance called capsaicin. Genetics determine our sensitivity to capsaicin, which means that individuals experience heat differently. In 1912, a pharmacist named Wilbur Scoville was frustrated with the inexactitude of this, and found that no technology could detect capsaicin as effectively as the human tongue—namely, his. He dissolved extracts of different types of peppers into an increasing quantity of sugar water, until he could no longer detect the pungency. He then assigned scores, expressed in Scoville Units, to each pepper, starting with a zero for a bell pepper. Until quite recently, food companies selling things like spices and salsas would employ a panel of trained Scoville tasters, and used an average of their assessments to assign a Scoville unit rating. This highly subjective objective measure continued until the invention of the High Pressure Liquid Chromatograph, which measures capsaicin levels precisely.

I don’t travel with a chromatograph, so I’ll describe the way I experience heat to you another way. You know how it feels to take a nap on a beach on a sunny day? The sun is warm on your face, but there’s a cool breeze so you’re not hot, and you’re certainly not sweating. That’s how it feels inside my mouth when I’m getting what I would consider a basic level of heat. Now imagine the breeze dies down a bit, so now you’re noticing that you’re getting a bit toasty, and it would sure be nice to have a cool beverage or duck under a beach umbrella. That’s what was delivered by the chile pepper I had at Masala Kraft.

While I was short of my skull-thumping goal, it was still a pretty fantastic experience. Capsaicin renders the mouth exquisitely sensitive, so that you can feel the precise texture of what you’re eating—each grain of rice, each shred of chicken. It also commands attention, a trait I value in a life lived in a state of quasi-Attention Deficit Disorder. When you’re eating heat, you cannot read, you cannot watch TV, you can’t even really carry on a reasonable conversation. Each bite is its own experience, each bite requires a breath, a preparation, a question of whether this morsel will burn as much as that morsel. I ate the entire plate of chiles and retired to my room upstairs, where my stomach burned until the sun rose the next morning.

As I traveled through India, I noticed a common denominator among the people who wouldn’t serve me sufficiently spicy food: they were mostly male. India values modesty in its women. As journalist Amal Naj reports in his book Pepper: A Story of Hot Pursuits, even before the days of the pornographic Spice Channel, spice and heat have long been associated with carnal pursuits. African women bathed in pepper-infused waters to enhance their attractiveness; in Swahili, pili pili is the name for pepper and also slang for penis; a Peruvian prison banned peppers believing it aroused the inmates. Indeed, at least some of the physical effects of eating hot foods—flushing pink, sweating—are also likely to show up between the sheets.

There is something a little bawdy about being a woman who likes it hot, and perhaps, then, my search for it could strike men as being somewhere between unseemly and a little slutty—a quest that a decent man shouldn’t encourage in an apparently respectable married woman such as myself. And quite possibly, a quest that a young man would not like to engage in with an older woman, and find himself lacking.

Which may be what happened in Honduras, which is not at all known for its spicy food, although plenty of chile peppers grow there, both in the wild and for export. I’d set off on a nature tour of the Welchez, just outside Copán Ruinas, not far from the Guatemalan border. I was traveling with a group that happened to be all female, and my stammering requests in Spanish for hot sauce had already made clear my penchant for all things hot. Our guide was a young man with a wide smile topped with the bare beginnings of a wispy moustache. He was somewhere between giggly and giddy, clearly amped up by the idea of leading a bunch of girls around the tropical rain forest.

As usual, I lagged behind the crowd, snapping pictures of the otherworldly beginnings of banana pods, red hibiscus blooms, and bright green berries that would turn into my morning joe. The group rounded a corner ahead of me, and I heard my name being called. I caught up to find that everyone had stopped.

There, hanging from a bush, were chiles—red, skinny, to the best of my identification abilities, tabascos. It emerged that I would now be expected to eat one of these, or at least try it. Of course, I didn’t need a lot of convincing.

My husband and I have an old friend, a guy we knew when we were in high school, and not that long ago we reconnected with him for a rainy afternoon of margaritas. I’d gone off to the restroom, and when I returned, he was in the middle of regaling my husband with an off-color guy story. I encouraged him to continue. Really, I said, you can’t shock me. The rest of the day, he did his damndest to curl my hair with ever-escalating tales of lewd debauchery, which apparently reached their crescendo during his days on a rugby team. After each tale he’d look at me expectantly—but although my eyebrows were tickling the inside of my skull, I maintained a Zen-like countenance and calmly sipped my margarita.

As I stood there in Honduras, with my young guide staring eagerly—and the group training their cameras on me—I re-evaluated my stated mission. Although I really wanted to have heat that was more than I could stand, I didn’t want this moment to be my head-banging moment. No matter how much this hurt, I decided, I wasn’t going to create a spectacle.

But it wasn’t going to be easy. The burning started with my lips, then shot like a pinball machine throughout my mouth. I could feel the pepper’s progress as it slid into my digestive system. It felt like I had actually swallowed fire.

It was too bad everyone had put their cameras away, because here was the show they were waiting for. First he gasped, and then he started coughing and then wheezing, shaking his head rapidly side to side like a wet dog. Then he was crying, gasping, and laughing at the same time. He crashed off into the jungle in search of a stream and drank from it, returning with his plaid shirt soaked. He clutched a handful of mint in his fist for the rest of the tour, chewing on it pensively. He kept his distance from me. Which was fine because I wasn’t talking to anyone, either. My mouth burned for the rest of the day. His mouth must have burned for a week. Could that have been my ultimate heat experience, my definitive tribute to Grandpa’s head-thumping moment? I didn’t know—my pride got in my way.