The woman sitting across from me had tears streaming down her cheeks - and she was loving every minute of it. It was her first bite of the "Wings from Hell" at East Coast Grill, and she was in her element. "I love hot stuff," she said. "Usually I have to ask them to bring me a bottle of Tabasco to spice things up, but this is incredible." At least, I think that's what she said. It was hard to tell between her coughs and huge gulps of beer.Like a culinary global warming, Bostonians' taste buds have gotten progressively more comfortable with hot-and-spicy foods. What does this mean for us? Like the frogs in Al Gore's cinematic opus, are we adjusting to the warming world bit by bit? Just look at the profusion of ethnic eateries with hot stuff front and center on the menu: Thai one very corner, Indian restaurants stacked like saris, "Hell Nights," Caribbean jerk on summer menus.
It's interesting that most hot-and-spicy food comes from hot-weather locations, with Southern India, one of the world's most challenging climates, offering a cuisine that is tops on the Scoville scale. What's the Scoville scale, you ask? It's the measure of the hotness of a chili pepper, developed by Wilbur Scoville in 1912. The main culprit iscapsaicin, the naturally occurring heat engine in raw peppers. A sweet pepper - like a green bell pepper - has a Scoville rating of zero; one of the hottest peppers, ahabañero, gets 350,000. Scotch Bonnet rates between100,000 and 300,000. Red Tabasco sauce hits 7000Scovilles; green gets only between 600 and 800 on the scale. As a point of reference, habañeros are used in Mexican, Thai, Caribbean, and African cooking, among others. Be forewarned.
Johnny Levins was one of the pioneers of hot stuff in Boston. As the chef at Green Street Grill, he was the man responsible for teaching us that a Scotch Bonnet is a chili pepper, not a chapeau, and that Caribbean food is a lot more than piña coladas on the beach. Now Levins has his own new spot in Arlington, Something Savory, and he thinks some-thing's up - and it's not just the weather. Levins says that, after a 10-yearbreak, people's palates are again craving high heat.
"During the '80s, people started to love hot food," he notes. "They couldn't get enough of it. Everything I made was hot, and people often asked for it to be even hotter. Then in the '90s, the hot thing seemed to fizzle. Suddenly everyone was eating steak and frites, and even I started to turn the heat way down."
Levins says his cooking today is a little less hot than it was when he began offering his Caribbean tropical-fruit-and-chili-pepper menus in the'80s. But when he considered truly toning down the Scovilles, there was an outcry. "I got telephone calls and e-mails and customers begging to keep up the heat," Levins says. His customers are all ages; they come in once or twice a week to feast on the ribs, jerked pork shoulder, and Caribbean goat roti. Levins seasons his food mild, medium, or hot on request, and he makes his own jerk mix of seven or eight spices, with ample pinches of Scotch Bonnet, jalapeño, and a spice from the bark of the Anaheim tree.
