Great Bowls of Fire : A Chile Pepper’s Just a Hunk-a Hunk-a Burning Love to Fans

The mixture Paul Evans has scooped into a clay bowl seems cool and inviting, a pointillist chef’s creation in slivers of green, red, white and poppy-orange.

The first taste delivers the freshness of cilantro and the sweetness of ripe tomato. Deep in the flavor something glows, like a setting sun.

And then, suddenly, realization dawns. That was no sunset. That was a firefight, just south of the tonsils.

Now, all the way along the defenseless tongue, the tender upper palate, the unguarded throat, scorching charges explode. The scalp tingles. Perspiration beads along the forehead, puddles under the eyes.

As the barrage abates, Evans offers a cool drink, a smile and a confession.

“I usually make it hotter than this,” he says. “I was being nice.”

Evans, 39, savors this salsa, which he ignites with a liberal dose of four-alarm chiles he grows in his Fullerton yard. And he happily squirts searing Serrano chile sauce into his mouth and swallows it as if it were honey. His “dynamite” sauce of pureed chiles, vinegar and oil burns like a blowtorch. He grinds his own head-exploding horseradish.

Paul Evans is a fire-eater.

Fire-eaters approach their food much as a lion hunter confronts a powerful, snarling cat. It’s kill or be killed. Swallow or be swallowed. The eyes of fire-eaters light up as they describe what happens when they chomp into a hunk of burning love.

“It’s kind of exhilarating,” Evans said. “You’re putting your tongue to its threshold. You’re taking things to the limit. It’s an adrenalin rush.”

For people engaged in the quest for gustatory fire, black pepper, mustard, ginger, garlic and even horseradish are only the warm-ups. Fire-eaters typically find their ultimate pain--and pleasure--in the chile pepper.

Chiles originated in South America and quickly spread through the Incan, Mayan and Aztec cultures, according to David DeWitt and Nancy Gerlach, authors of “The Whole Chile Pepper Book.” When Columbus arrived, he mistook chiles for black pepper and saddled them with the name.

Explorers and traders carried chiles and seeds home to Europe and then on to Asia and Africa. Soon, dishes from Hungary to Thailand and Ghana incorporated them. Today, India and China are the biggest producers of chiles. One study says Koreans have the hottest cuisine of all, with average chile consumption of nine grams per person, per day.

Now, chiles are conquering timid palates here.

In the United States, retail sales of salsa, taco sauce and other spicy condiments reached $640 million in 1991, surpassing ketchup, according to Packaged Facts, a New York research firm.

More acres in the United States are devoted to chile-pepper production than to honeydew melons and celery, said Paul Bosland, a horticulturist at New Mexico State University and director of the Chile Institute there. Americans eat more chiles than they do either green peas or asparagus, he said.

But the question remains. What turns people into fire-eaters?

The fire-eaters can’t really explain it, since food that would scorch the average mouth tastes just right to them.

Evans said he began when he doctored his father’s poker-party chili with spices he had tasted at his Latino friends’ homes. As a teen-ager, he began to use chiles to wean himself from fattening butter-and-cream cooking. He discovered he was hooked.

“How do you explain the craving you have for something? he said. “You get used to a flavor and heat, and you wonder, ‘What will a little more do? And a little more?’ ”

Connecticut chemistry professor Susan Henderson encountered her first spicy food at a Thai restaurant in New Haven. Most of the dishes seemed so excruciatingly hot she couldn’t eat them.

“But then, almost immediately, I wanted to go back,” she said. “It’s a real kind of craving cfor foods I had found painful,” she said. “The more you eat, the more you want.”

Researchers have several theories to explain the fiery-food romance, “and probably more than one of them is true,” said Paul Rozin, a psychology professor at the University of Pennsylvania.

Perhaps a food’s flavor offsets the burn, Rozin said. Or people first encounter spicy food in a positive social setting, so they learn to love it because family and friends do.

“I’ve studied this in Mexico. Everyone is eating, enjoying chiles and the little kid of the family is getting into it,” he said.

Rozin has also theorized that fire-eaters like risks--but not as much as sky divers and mountain climbers do. Blazing food gives fire-eaters a rush, but they don’t have to worry about failed chutes and fraying ropes.

Finally, there appears to be a biochemical reason for the chile passion. The fire that burns inside the chile not only gives diners pain, but also pleasure.

When a burning chile hits the mouth, pain receptors send a message to the brain, which retaliates with a release of endorphins, a morphine-like natural painkiller. Endorphins not only squelch the pain, but sometimes “overshoot,” Rozin said, imparting a pleasing sense of well-being. Marathoners know it as the “runner’s high.”

“It’s not a buzz or high, but a feeling of contentment,” Henderson said, describing her sensation. “It’s almost a psychological component. If you eat a big spaghetti dinner, you feel full. But with this, you get a sense of pleasure.”

The fire-eater skims along the outer edge of the pleasure-pain continuum, pushing the pain further and further while experiencing the endorphin-induced enjoyment, said Dr. Robert Henkin, director of the Taste and Smell Clinic in Washington, D.C.

People then advance to hotter foods because they build a tolerance to it, Henkin said.

“You appreciate the sensation, and you tend to diminish the discomfort associated with it,” he said. “You adapt and you reach a pleasure-pain relationship that is on the pleasurable side.”

Die-hard fire-eaters really push the envelope, seeking the hottest chiles they can find.

DeWitt, who also is editor of the 80,000-circulation bimonthly magazine Chile Pepper, says these thrill-seekers are most often men.

“There’s an idea that you’re more macho if you could eat spicier than other people can,” he said. “It’s a total myth, of course, but there do seem to be more men than women.”

Lori Tellez said she sees that at Anita’s, the New Mexican restaurant she and her husband own in Fullerton. It’s usually a male customer who ups the chile ante.

“Men have a tendency to think, ‘Hey, I can take it hot.’ But New Mexico chiles bite back,” she said.

Fire-eating does indeed have its risks. Chiles induce gustatory sweating and gustatory rhinitis--or the “salsa sniffles.” There is “Hunan hand,” the skin irritation that comes from chopping chiles. Some suffer Jaloproctitis(, the burn jalapenos impart as they exit the body. And, according to a letter from a group of Tel Aviv doctors to the Journal of the American Medical Assn., chile peppers were the prime suspect in a recent case of acute perforation of the small intestine.

But for every negative, “chile heads” will counter with a positive. Sweating cools the body. That’s why people in sweltering climates like spicy foods, they say. Evans said chiles cleared up his sinus problems. And, the Tel Aviv incident notwithstanding, DeWitt and Gerlach report on other studies showing that capsaicin has no ill effects on the stomach lining.

So the fire-eaters continue to carry the torch for their chiles. But do they love the food? Or are they enslaved, like miserable smokers unhappily married to a cigarette habit?

Some say yes: Fire-eaters get hooked on the endorphin rush they get from spicy food. They have become chile addicts.

But Rozin disagrees. Chiles do show some characteristics of an addictive substance: People build a tolerance to them and they produce a craving. But, he said, he knows of no withdrawal symptoms, such as those that people undergo with a truly addictive substance, such as nicotine.

“I don’t think it’s useful to term it an addiction,” he said. “What people really mean is a craving.”

The lore piling up around the chile apparently has led some people to think that it might be the peyote of the ‘90s.

Bosland said he’s had more than a few phone calls from people inquiring about the chile’s supposed mind-altering properties.

“It’s more like the feeling you get from coffee,” he said. “It isn’t a psychedelic rush. Some people are real disappointed when you tell them that.”