The Devil's Dinner: A Gastronomic and Cultural History of Chili Peppers
Stuart Walton
History, food
What irritated me most about The Devil's Dinner was the organization. The chapters are arranged without any real narrative flow, information is sometimes repeated, and the whole thing comes off as something of a muddle. Nor did I think that the research that went into the book was especially deep or complete; Walton seems to have relied heavily on a small number of interviews and a lot of second-hand reportage.
That said, there's some interesting stuff in here. The "burning" sensation of chili, for example, really does activate some of the same neural pathways as actual burning. Also, there's a real thing out there called Male Idiot Theory, which has been used to explain chili-eating contests. I'll buy it.
Rather surprisingly, there's no recipe section.
Overall verdict: mildly interesting. But with a title and topic like this, "mild" shouldn't be the descriptor! I'd pay good money to see John McPhee do for the chili pepper what he did for Oranges, for example.
Tangentially, I just read McPhee's latest book, The Patch, and I learned something: John McPhee can write interesting articles about golf, but even he can't write interesting articles about fishing, so I'm surprised to find that fishing, not golf, is actually the least interesting subject there is.
ReplyDeleteI had thought that J McP could make anything interesting. Have you read his The Founding Fish? That's about fishing, or at least it's fishing-adjacent, and I liked it. Plus it has UMass's own Willy Bemis in it.
ReplyDeleteI did read The Founding Fish, and the parts where he hung around ichthyology departments discussing the structure of fish eyes were great, but the long prose poem about how he spent all day on an urban river bank slowly reeling in one fish just put me to sleep.
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