Hot and Spicy

In another place and time, I often stopped at a neighborhood Chinese restaurant on the way home from work. The restaurant served hot pepper sauce with their spicy dishes. The sauce contained ground peppers in oil and was very spicy hot. (I don’t know what kinds of peppers were in it. They appeared to be toasted dark brown then ground and combined with the oil.)

The first time I tasted the pepper sauce, it felt like an atomic fireball went off in my mouth. I could tolerate only a small amount of it. But after a few years of eating it weekly, it became quite tame. I got it with every meal and spooned it onto everything. The restaurant owner knew I liked it and she began adding it to everything I ordered. Even fried rice had hot pepper sauce in it. That didn’t stop me from spooning even more on. I loved its flavor as well as its hotness.

I also loved Mexican food. A local Mexican family owned and operated several restaurants called El Rodeo. Sometimes I would stop in and have dinner at one of their restaurants. Upon sitting down, the first thing that happened was a waiter would bring a basket of corn chips and a bowl of red, tomato-based salsa and place them in the center of the table. That was an appetizer while the food order was being prepared. The salsa was supposed to be hot and spicy, but because of my Chinese pepper addiction, it tasted fairly bland to me.

One night I was in El Rodeo with a friend who was, like me, a hot pepper sauce addict. We both lamented the lack of hotness in the salsa. On an impulse I asked our waitress if she had anything hotter. She said, “No.”

So I said, “Come on now, you’re a Mexican family, you eat here in the restaurant and this is the hottest salsa you have? I don’t believe it.”

She admitted, “We do have something hotter. But it’s too hot for you.”

Too hot? Bring it!

She brought me a bowl of green salsa. Green, like a jalapeño! It even looked hot. I dipped a chip in it, and with just a slight amount of trepidation, I popped it into my mouth. Hmmm … not bad. It was definitely hotter than the regular, red salsa. My friend and I continued our conversation as we dipped chip after chip into the hot, green salsa.

Eventually hot peppers became something that a meal seemed incomplete without. It’s surprising that a person can adapt to, and even savor, something that at first is so painful. The brain learns to re-interpret that fiery sensation on the tongue as something that is as essential as table salt and black pepper.

On the other hand, if humans lacked that ability to adapt, this would be an awfully painful world. I wonder how many painful things I’ve adapted to … adapted so well that I’ve become comfortable living with them.