🧵 View Thread
🧵 Thread (14 tweets)
Let's get started! The hot (ha ha) fav at 13 ❤️'s is Chilli Sauce. Specifically, this is a packet of Garlic Chilli Sauce, which is the only kind of chilli sauce that you get in McDonald's Singapore, for some reason. I have several questions, let's quickly run through them all https://t.co/CTwqX3eAiA
The first question, of course, is what are chillies even? how many kinds of chillies are there? what is the definition of a chilli? let's dig into the etymology of the related words ok so chili – aztec word capsicum – french botanist word pepper – maybe sanskrit/persian https://t.co/LLJ6I6L6Y3
(and just, really quickly for disambiguation purposes – what about Chile the country? is it because it's shaped like a Chilli? 😬 ...no, apparently not. There are competing reasons, but none of them have anything to do with capsicum-peppers. Okay then. Moving on.) https://t.co/BcwR1yvcNF
OK so. The active ingredient in capsicum-type chilli pepper thingies is a chemical compound called Capsaicin. Kind of circular nomenclature there – it's named for the plants (berries, technically) that have them. Fine, it works anyway. https://t.co/hMJeQiEiXH
so... what was the first capsicum/pepper? consensus seems to be that it was the Capsicum Annum. It originated in Mexico, and spread around the world via the Columbus exchange around the 1500s. (Interesting to wonder what Indian food was like before the chili.) https://t.co/Ou6tI8B8NX
Here's a useful chart, the Scoville heat scale. Bell peppers are basically benign, jalapenos are in the middle of the list, and habanero is the capsaicin kingpin amongst casual normies. It gets significantly wilder, of course... https://t.co/2ckqjPT5MG
If you want to know more about the history of chillis, this looks like a pretty decent and reader-friendly resource. Interestingly, seems like the Portuguese were more responsible for the proliferation of chilli peppers than the Spanish: https://t.co/eEoXoePdgy
OK anyway on to the sauce!!! Who started making sauce? When did sauce become... "condimentized"? How is it produced industrially? Why does McDonald's give you packets of it? How did this Mexican spicy berry make its way across the world into a tiny packet on my table? https://t.co/XWItnkiX05
Interestingly, there are separate wikipedia pages for "Chilli sauce and paste" and "hot sauce". Chilli sauce seems to refer to Asian variants – Szechuan chilli oils, Malay Sambal, Thai Nam Phrik... Just looking at these pictures is triggering a physiological response in me, wow https://t.co/PkEKj3ew9e
But ok, on to the chilli packets! Who was the first person to put chilli in packets?OK, 1st there were bottles before sauces, and apparently the first commercially available bottled hot sauce in the US was in 1807 in Massachusetts. What was it? (And what about outside the US...?) https://t.co/73kTRxjUHt
Sorry I just have to backtrack for a bit to include this: "Chilli is bad for the spiritual health of young people as it makes them horny" – Jesuit priest Father Jose de Acosta (1950) https://t.co/5k2C1mRi0v
From @jumpupjenny's book Hot Sauce! There are lots of interesting bits in here and in the related wikipedia pages, but I'm getting a little too sleepy to make sense of it all. To be continued~ https://t.co/YR6dhf5K54
