BOTANICAL NAME: Capsicum annuum
FAMILY: Solanaceae
Some peppers have exotic names and mysterious origins. Buena Mulata (pronounced boo-WAY-nah moo-LAH-ta) cropped up in my grandfather’s collection like an eye-spinning Carmen Miranda, a visual Mardi Gras all to itself—and such a party it is! American folk artist Horace Pippin found the pepper for my grandfather in the 1930s. Although no one knows exactly where it came from, oral history places it in Nicaragua. My guess is that the key lies in the Spanish name (buena mulata means “jolly mulatto woman” — I envision her selling peppers in a marketplace) and an ancestral line leading back into Latin America.
The pod colors are sensational, undergoing the same color changes as the commercial pepper Aurora, but much showier. They start out deep eggplant purple, then shift to salmon, then to orange, brown, and finally bright red. All those colors on one bush are certain to attract attention, which is one reason why this pepper makes such a remarkable ornamental. Yet its best uses are in colorful salsas and in one of the secret flavoring ingredients of Nicaraguan cookery: vinagre de buena mulata. This flavorful spicy herb vinegar, made with white wine vinegar, Buena Mulata peppers, garlics, and cilantro, is a delightful addition to soups, sauces, and dressings. It is also good in marinades for goat.
The pod colors are sensational, undergoing the same color changes as the commercial pepper Aurora, but much showier.
German botanist Leonhard Fuchs illustrated a similar pepper called Long Indian Pepper in his famous 1542 plant book De historia stirpium. His pepper has the same long, dangling, narrow pods as Buena Mulata, but the pods ripen green to red. They are also the same color and shape as the heirloom Goat Pepper preserved by Seed Savers Exchange’s Heritage Farm and said to originate from an old plant collection in North Carolina. One of the other peppers in Fuch’s book ripens from black to red, so we may assume that such color shifting must have existed since pre-Columbian times. Buena Mulata is probably a selected strain of this type of mutation, a real pepper mulatto in its robust blend of colors and a true rainbow of flavors as well.