The Heat Seeker: Eat, Sweat, Love

Travel Stories: Alison Stein Wellner likes her food hot and spicy. To find out how hot and spicy, she searched the world for heat. Part one of five: Currywurst in Frankfurt.

05.11.09 | 11:12 AM ET

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It started with the currywurst in Frankfurt, which is not the first place where a quest for the hottest food in the world should begin, but nonetheless.

I was in Germany on assignment and had met Carl, a California-born expat. He told me about Snack-Point, which claimed to serve “The Best Worscht in Town.” Currywurst is a sliced sausage, served in ketchup, with added chile powder and other spices. Snack-Point makes this available in varying degrees of heat and even serves one sauce made with Red Savina habanero powder, which held the Guinness record for the hottest chile in the world until 2007, when it was displaced by India’s bhut jolokia, which is sometimes used as elephant repellant.

Carl ordered for us in German and, in chivalrous deference to my feminine taste buds, ordered for me something from Snack-Point’s mid-range of heat. We stood at the tall tables, under an awning, in the rain, and speared the meat with a plastic pic. It was delicious, and my mouth felt hot and tingly, but my head was not on fire.

I was disappointed. For what I wanted, I realized later, was to replicate for myself something I’d witnessed when I was in elementary school. I’d often spend a weekend day with my grandparents and various extended family members, driving around to tag sales, flea markets and junk shops in the New York City suburbs. This was my grandmother’s second-favorite pastime. Arguing was her first, and she’d often combine the two activities. My grandfather was always the designated driver. He was a judge by profession, and I figured his job probably helped him develop his natural habit of sitting quietly during disputes. While the rest of my family would chatter and shriek and laugh and bellow, he’d quietly and carefully drive us to wherever we were going. He’d find himself a bench or a chair and sit placidly, with his eyes cast downward, either on The New York Times crossword or on the hem of his sweater. He didn’t say too much, to me or to anyone else, and I certainly never saw him make any sudden moves.

Until one Sunday. After our usual shopping day, the family descended on a Westchester, New York strip mall for a traditional Jewish Sunday dinner: Chinese food. I was deep into my chicken lo mein when my grandfather missed the duck sauce and instead dunked his egg roll into the dish of extra hot mustard. He flushed from chin to scalp, rose a few inches from his chair, while his hands flew into the air and then clapped down hard on the top of his bald head—as if to keep it from exploding.

MORE OF THE HEAT SEEKER: Video: Alison Stein Wellner—The Heat Seeker | Part two | Part three | Part four | Part five

This impressed me. I’d never seen him move so fast before unless he was swinging a golf club and had never seen a person turn that shade of purplish red. As he sat there shaking his head and saying “hoooo boy, man oh man,” and some other things not to be repeated in polite company, a desire was born in me: I wanted to eat something so hot that I would risk a cranial flare-up. But I was about 8 years old. I also wanted to be Wonder Woman or a fashion designer and worried a lot about mastering long division. So by the next week, I forgot the whole thing. In fact, for nearly three decades, I didn’t give much thought to spicy food at all—“medium” was my reflexive request when I was asked how hot I wanted something, about what I judged my heat tolerance. And so it was, until that currywurst in Frankfurt reminded me of my childhood desire to seek heat.

Ever since, as I’ve traveled, I’ve squeezed in a foray to find the burn—and not just any burn, but one that would make me forget myself and leap from my chair and try to fan the flames by beating myself on the head. In my quest, I’ve joined a long tradition of people who have, to a greater or lesser extent, structured their voyages around spice.

The quest for pungency—in the form of ginger, cinnamon, mustard and, most especially, black pepper—has set explorers’ and merchants’ ships to sail since before Roman times. In the days before refrigeration, spice was more than just a “nice to have” in a meal. The battle to keep food from going bad was a challenge only equaled by what it took to make dried, pickled or otherwise preserved food even vaguely palatable. Spice, which is both an antimicrobial and tasty, was the answer. The Spicy Food Lover’s Bible reveals that the actual Bible refers to spice trade between the Arab world and India; the prophet Mohammed married a wealthy spice-trading widow; ships that brought Crusaders to the Holy Land returned with spices that were traded out of Egypt. The great age of exploration came about because European powers wanted to circumvent overland spice-route middlemen.

Of course, the most famous spice seeker of all was Christopher Columbus, who mistook chile peppers, which originate in South and Central America, for black pepper. This is why we call chiles “pepper” even though they’re not botanically related, the same category of mistake by which Native Americans were referred to as “Indians” for centuries. In fact, those “Indians” set habaneros on fire and tossed them over Columbus’ fortress walls, creating an early version of tear gas, according to In the Devil’s Garden: A Sinful History of Forbidden Food.

But ultimately, Columbus and other explorers took their plunder, with chiles among the booty. In ships’ holds, chiles made their way to the cooking pots of Asia and Africa. Today, it’s no easier to imagine the fiery cuisines of India, Thailand, Sichuan, Ethiopia, Morocco without chile than it is to think of Bolivian, Mexican or even New Mexican food without those hot pods.

Unlike my historical compatriots, I would not pillage, steal, kill or enslave on my mission. Instead, like any traveler pursuing an interest on the road, I would seek out crimes of opportunity: Wherever I found myself, I’d seek out restaurants known for their fiery cuisine; if an item on the menu was labeled “hot and spicy,” I’d order it. When given the option, I’d always, always ask for it extra hot.

Now I realize this is an odd thing to pursue, the feeling of heat in the mouth so intense that it mimics the most extreme pain one can stand. It’s probably important to say at this point that in no other way am I someone who relishes things that hurt. I am, in fact, quite a wimp.

But this is not an ordinary sensation of pain that heat provides. In fact, science tells us it’s an “ambiguous neural response,” one that we did not evolve to properly interpret. When you bite into a chile pepper, your body knows one thing for sure: It’s experiencing an intense sensation. A bit of a panic ensues—this may be a very dangerous situation, your mouth may actually be on fire! And yet none of your sensors register actual heat, as measured in degrees F or C. Just in case, your brain registers what’s happening as swallowing fire, and creates a full-body response. You flush, you sweat, you rise from your chair and clap your hands on your head.

Some people hate this, and some of us find it pleasurable in the same way that some people find a horror movie or a roller coaster pleasurable—it’s fun to simulate the physical reaction we have to actual danger without the real risk of it. Eat hot food and you get all the fun of setting yourself on fire—including the surge of endorphins to help ease your theoretical third-degree burn—without getting the least bit singed. Eating spicy food is an adventure sport. The currywurst in Frankfurt was obviously the junior leagues. I was ready to push myself to the limits.



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