HOT SALSA / BOOK REVIEWS : Books for Pod People

Ten years ago, when two friends and I were writing a chile pepper book, we figured we had the subject to ourselves. There were only two “hot” cookbooks in print, one mostly being a ramble through southern Lousiana and the other dwelling on (oh, how spicy!) Hungarian food.

By the time we got our book finished, though, the dam had burst, and there’s been a flood of chile books since. These days bookstores are likely to have a whole shelf full of titles like “Hot Peppers,” “Hot” and “Hot, Hotter, Hottest.” Here’s a sampling of the latest.

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RED HOT PEPPERS: A Cookbook for the Not So Faint of Heart, By Jean Andrews ; (Macmillan: $25, 256 pp.).

Jean Andrews herself was a major dam-burster with her 1984 book “Peppers: The Domesticated Capsicums.” It went into vastly more botanical detail about chile peppers than any popular book before or since, complemented by Andrews’s striking, passionately observed watercolors of chile varieties.

To a degree, her new book, “Red Hot Peppers,” is a repackage of the same material, including lots of botanical detail and her excellent illustrations (in this case delicately stippled drawings, rather than watercolor portraits), in a smaller, more affordable format. Since writing that first chile book, Andrews has gotten around--visited the Far East, for instance--and the new book also goes into some detail on how peppers are used in the world’s cuisines.

In keeping with the scholarly aims of her earlier book, Andrews opens the new one with a historical quibble: Why is it that only one chile species, Capsicum annuum, spread throughout the world, though it was not indigenous to the Caribbean islands that Columbus visited? Now, nobody loves a good quibble better than I do, but I wonder whether it was wise to start the book this way. I suspect not many readers are going to stay with Andrews (even with all her detailed maps) through a tortuous argument that revolves around the idea that Columbus actually could have found C. annuum in the Caribbean.

And if they do plow through this section, they may ask why they bothered. Sure, Columbus could have found C. annuum in the Caribbean; it would be amazing if he hadn’t. He found corn there, and we know that corn, like C. annuum , was originally domesticated in Mexico. If a demanding crop like corn made it to the Caribbean islands in ancient times, chiles sure could have.

Obviously, the experts who have claimed that C. chinense (the species to which habaneros belong) was the only one in the Caribbean are wrong, but the whole issue seems beside the point. We don’t have to presume that the first species of chile Europeans saw would be the one to spread. As Andrews admits, the Mexican species is simply a lot better candidate for world popularity. C. chinense lacks sweet varieties, doesn’t keep as well and is far more finicky about what climate it will grow in.

Fortunately, after 20 pages in thickets like these, Andrews finds her way to open ground and gives the most detailed sketch yet to appear in a popular book of how peppers spread in the 16th Century. I have my own quibbles here, but they’re small ones. For instance, she credits the Turks with taking peppers to Hungary, but it was clearly Croatian merchants from Dubrovnik ( paprika is the Croatian word for pepper plus a Slavic suffix added to plant names). This section may overwhelm you with detail, but you’ll come away with an awed respect for the scale of international trade that was managed--particularly when the cargo was spices--in those days of wooden ships and toiling caravans.

The rest of the book contains plenty of the kind of great chile lore you expect from Jean Andrews, such as: What’s the medical name for the chile “morning-after burn”? Jaloproctitis. Why have Americans come so late to the chile pepper party? It’s not only the chile-less Northern European background of American cuisine--it’s that the Indians of North America didn’t know of peppers, so they couldn’t teach the pioneers about them.

As the subtitle “A Cookbook for the Not So Faint of Heart” suggests, the biggest difference between “Red Hot Peppers” and Andrews’s earlier book is the emphasis on recipes, which fill half these pages. Given the scholarly approach in the rest of the book, you might expect nothing but specimen ethnic dishes, but au contraire , this is a diverse and sophisticated collection. Quite a few are from restaurant chefs, particularly fellow Texans such as Robert del Grande, Dean Fearing and Stephen Pyles.

It may seem odd, though, after all the tempting detail Andrews has given on scores of exotic peppers, that the recipes only call for chile varieties you can find in a supermarket. You can consider that a disappointment, if you’re a cutting-edge foodie, or a relief, if you were actually hoping to cook out of this book.

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CHILE PEPPER FEVER: Mine’s Hotter Than Yours; By Susan Hazen-Hammond with photos by Eduardo Fuss ; (Voyageur Press: $19.95, 124 pp.).

This book deserves note because it looks as if it belongs in the same category as Jean Andrews’. It contains only about a dozen recipes, but otherwise, like Andrew’s book, the text is largely about science and history and the abundant illustrations are striking. (What am I saying? The illustrations are overwhelming . Eduardo Fuss’s photos are so powerfully saturated with color they just about put your eye out.)

But there’s no comparing this chatty, superficial, dimly organized book with “Red Hot Peppers.” After a while you even get tired of the hyper-vivid photos, because so many of them are the same shot over and over: a close-up of a surface covered with colorful peppers (often not identified in the caption). The combination of highly polished photos and a gabby, meandering text gives “Chile Pepper Fever: Mine’s Hotter Than Yours” the feeling of a very, very long National Geographic article.

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THE GREAT SALSA BOOK, By Mark Miller with Mark Kiffin and John Harrisson (Ten Speed Press: $14.95, 116 pp.)

Mark Miller, chef/owner of Coyote Cafe in Santa Fe, N.M., and Red Sage in Washington, is a major chile booster. He published a guide to chile varieties (“The Great Chile Book”) three years ago, and his chile posters have gone up on kitchen walls all over the country.

This book follows the same format as “The Great Chile Book”--tall and narrow, lots of color photos--but this time the subject is hot sauce recipes. Is it ever: fully 100 salsa recipes, each with stylish photograph by Valerie Santagto on the facing page. They’re organized in 10 categories (with 10 recipes each): tomato, chile, tropical fruit, non-tropical fruit, corn, bean, vegetable, nut/herb, seafood and exotic.

Not all of them are hot--5% contain no chiles at all--and the idea of salsa is interpreted rather liberally. Some of these “salsas” could be described as relishes, some are really side dishes and one or two, particularly among the bean-based salsas, could be served on their own.

But there are a lot of intriguing ideas here. A sort of pumped-up mole poblano containing ancho chiles, dried tomatoes, coffee, prunes, toasted almonds, chipotle peppers and chocolate. Mangoes with lime juice, chile de arbol and fresh ginger juice. Roasted garlic, corn kernels, green chiles and beef or venison jerky. Seared pineapple chunks with chipotle, orange juice and brown sugar.

And those photos are gorgeous. Remember: Don’t eat the pages.

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SALSAS, SAMBALS, CHUTNEYS AND CHOWCHOWS: Intensely Flavored “Little Dishes” From Around the World, By Chris Schlesinger and John Willoughby (Morrow: $20, 150 pp.)

Schlesinger and Willoughby are known for 1990’s best-selling “The Thrill of the Grill,” and this book too represents the highly flavored cooking that Schlesinger showcases at his East Coast Grill in Cambridge, Mass. It might not be quite fair to lump it in with chile books, though, because barely half of the recipes could be considered hot. They’re what Schlesinger and Willoughby call “little dishes”: not just salsas but Indian, Indonesian and South African condiments and old-fashioned American pickles, relishes and ketchups (they hold to the 19th-Century definition of a ketchup: a fruit, vegetable or nut sauce flavored with vinegar and spices).

This probably explains why “Salsas, Sambals, Chutneys and Chowchows” violates the chile book tradition of having a red color scheme, preferably with a suggestion of flames. Here, lax yellow or chartreuse squiggles run down through every page, giving the book a sort of Fifties patio-life feeling. The color photos that attend all the dishes also have the neutral, even texture of Fifties food photography, rather than the sharp-edged look particularly favored for spicy food nowadays.

You pay a bit for the casual, undemanding style, though. This is a spaciously arranged book, fitting only 42 recipes into its 150 pages. There’s quite a bit of not-terribly-informative informational text; for instance, one whole page is devoted to a nice color photo of some tomatillos and two sentences explaining what they are. Don’t say you haven’t been warned.

The recipes, obviously a collection of the authors’ personal favorites, are certainly easy to like. It’s particularly nice to see a couple of those old Southern fresh pickles chowchow (sour, usually including cabbage with other vegetables) and piccalilli (ditto, only sweet-and-sour and including green tomatoes).

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HOT & SPICY & MEATLESS, By Dave DeWitt, Mary Jane Wilan and Melissa T. Stock (Prima Publishing: $12.95, 246 pp.).

This is the 12th chile pepper book from the Dave DeWitt chile pepper book factory, and the third co-authored with his wife, Mary Jane Wilan (the others being “The Food Lover’s Handbook to the Southwest” and “Callaloo, Calypso and Carnival”). DeWitt is the New Mexico-based editor of Chile Pepper Magazine; Stock is also an editor at Chile Pepper. In the intro the three authors stress that they’re not vegetarians. Apparently they decided to write this book simply because they had acquired a lot of vegetarian recipes, from their own experimentation or from friends and “far-flung correspondents,” over the last 20 years.

The book certainly reads that way. Some of the recipes are rather original (black beans with chipotles, pasillas and bourbon), quite a few are pretty traditional Southwestern or Caribbean dishes, but most look as if they have come from full-time vegetarians or people who have to avoid flavoring elements like butter and salt. I’m particularly thinking of the spiced-up versions of traditional vegetarian dishes from all over (hot coleslaw, habanero lasagna, spicy ratatouille, tabbouleh with serrano peppers, French fries with red pepper and cilantro-spiked ketchup).

Some of the recipes are a little odd (the idea of dill in caponata may give some people the creeps), but in general, this book does what it sets out to do: It gives vegetarian dishes flavored with hot peppers. The recipes--even when unfortunately named, such as hotsy hummus or tempting tempeh fajitas--are livelier than you’d find in most vegetarian cookbooks, which tend to the sweet, rather than the hot, and most would go down easy even with non-vegetarians.