|
SuperSite Recommendations
Chile Pepper Bedding Plants... over 500 varieties from Cross Country Nurseries, shipping April to early June. Fresh pods ship September and early October. Go here
Chile Pepper Seeds... from all over the world from the Chile Pepper Institute. Go here
After transplanting, the pepper plants seem to sit and do nothing for a few weeks. Although they may not seem to be growing very fast, they are putting out roots and preparing for an enormous surge of growth. Sometimes there will be leaf damage from the sun and wind until the plants totally adapt to being in the ground.
|
|
Nancy's 2011 Roundup from Yucatán |
 |
 |
 |
By Nancy Gerlach, SuperSite Food Editor Emeritus
We are both well and still happy that we embarked on our adventure in Mexico. In spite of all the negative stories that circulate about the violence, our area remains peaceful and each year we are here, we love it all the more. The downside of our location is that the word has gotten out and we’ve had a huge influx of expats moving here from the US, Canada, and Europe. To give you an idea, last year we had 3 families from NM and 4 couples from Norway here full-time. Given the population of both places, that’s a lot of people from small areas. I won’t even get into the number of Texans. If you add the flocks of snowbirds escaping winter to the number of full timers it adds up to a whole lotta white faces speaking English. But we couldn't put a fence around New Mexico to keep people out and we certainly can't here.
And all of us have an impact on the Mexicans and the area just by our presence. The most noticeable effect is, of course, on the prices of real estate and the cost of construction and building supplies. We were lucky we did the bulk of our renovations when we did and that we didn’t do massive changes. The people who are moving here now seem to want huge houses with all the luxuries and amenities found in north of the border houses, even if they will only be used for maybe 6 months in a year. Now our house is huge compared to the 900 square feet we had in Albuquerque, but compared to many now, not so big.
Another change we have seen in the past year is the growing number of U.S. food products on grocery shelves. On occasion we can now get Gold Medal flour and C & H brown sugar, and fairly regularly Toll House chocolate chips, Wolf brand chili, and even Jiffy cornbread mix. I say “on occasion” as the stores, and I’m including Costco and Sam’s, haven’t mastered the concept of when you stock an item and flies off the shelves, restock it. All of us operate on the adage “if you see something you want, buy a bunch as you may not see it again for a long, long time.” For example, one of the Mexican grocery chains brought in Campbell’s Pork’n’Beans and within days it had disappeared. A friend was telling us about a Mexican lady he met at a party and somehow these beans came up in a conversation. She said she saw them in the store and called her son because she knew he had developed a taste for them when he was working in the States. He told her to buy every can on the shelf and all the cases in their storeroom. So she got every can and we haven’t seen them again. Since many of the Mexicans here have worked, studied, and/or lived in the States, it’s not just us gringos nabbing the foreign goodies.
|
|
|
Barbecue Videos Added to SuperSite! |
|
|
|
|
 As part of our ever-expanding effort to bring you the best in barbecue, we have added barbecue videos to the SuperSite. Check back often for new videos, but so far we've featured Butch Lupinetti of Butch's Smack Your Lips BBQ Team on making the best rib possible, Steven Raichlen of Planet Barbecue fame following up with preparing baby back ribs, the winner of $100,000 for the best hamburger, and the hilarious and most-viewed Brad's Buick BBQ Tour from Austin to Atlanta. You can find them all here.
|
|
Wilbur Scoville and the Organoleptic Test Centennial |
|
|
|
By Dave DeWitt
[Author's Note: The year 2012 marks the Centennial Anniversary of the Scoville Organoleptic Test, so I decided to apply all my food history online research skills that I've honed over the past five years to create what is the first definitive—however brief—biographical essay on Scoville. Fortunately, the combination of Google Books, Google Scholar, and other online resources proved successful and at least now we know quite a bit more about Professor Scoville's professional life. His personal life remains shrouded in mystery.]
I seriously doubt that Wilbur Scoville ever imagined that he would be most remembered for his Scoville Organoleptic Test that was the first attempt ever to quantify the heat of chile peppers, in 1912. He probably had convinced himself that he would be most famous for authoring The Art of Compounding in 1895, which is now in its ninth edition, a facsimile, published in 2010. Although he was interested in chile peppers, he didn't write much about them, preferring to focus on even more bizarre chemicals like the cantharides in Spanish fly.
A pharmaceutical chemist, college professor, magazine editor, laboratory director, and author, Wilbur Lincoln Scoville was born in Bridgeport, Connecticut in 1865. We know little about his early life except that his involvement with pharmacy began in 1881 when, at the age of fourteen, he worked at a drug store owned by E. Toucey in Bridgeport. This apparently influenced him greatly for in 1887, he moved to Boston to attend the Massachusetts College of Pharmacy. He graduated in 1889 with a Ph.G. (“Graduate of Pharmacy”) and married Cora B. Upham in Wollaston, Massachusetts in 1891. They had two daughters together, Amy Augusta, born August 21, 1892 and Ruth Upham, born October 21, 1897. In 1892 he accepted the position of professor of pharmacy and applied pharmacy at his alma mater, where he taught until 1904. He also took on specialized journalism, becoming editor of the New England Druggist in 1894.
After just three years on the college faculty, when he was just thirty years old in 1895, his best-known work, The Art of Compounding, was published. The book was used as a standard pharmacological reference up until the 1960s. The subtitle of the book, A Text Book for Students and a Reference Book for Pharmacists at the Prescription Counter, gives us a clue as to why the book was so popular—there were two markets for it. I found a copy of this book in Google Books, and here are two notable quotes that I discovered. Scoville was one of the first, if not the first person to suggest in print that milk is an antidote for the heat of chiles. “Milk, as ordinarily obtained,” he wrote, “is seldom used except as a diluent [diluting agent]. In this capacity it serves well for covering the taste of sharp or acrid bodies as tinctures of capsicum, ginger, etc., and for many salts, chloral, etc.”
|
|
