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A beautiful culinary and ethnobotanical survey of the punch-packing ingredient central to today's multi-cultural palate, with 40 pan-Latin recipes from a three-time James Beard Award-winning author and chef-restaurateur.

Table of Contents

Contents 

A Pepper Epiphany vii 

The Silent Gardeners 1 

Pepper Anatomy and Heat 13 

The Capsicum Clan 24 

Peppers into Words 41 

The World Travels of Peppers 66 

Gallery of Fresh Peppers 81 

Gallery of Dried Peppers 195 

Into the Pepper Garden 219 

Cooking with Peppers 227 

Resources 330

About the Author

MARICEL PRESILLA is the chef-owner of two pan-Latin restaurants (Cucharama and Zafra) and a cooking atelier (Ultramarinos), president/founder of Gran Cacao Company (a cacao importer), a frequent contributor to Saveur, and a former medieval Spanish history professor (Rutgers). She has been profiled in the New York Times and Washington Post, and led the White House's Latin cultureshowcase in 2010. She was named the James Beard Best Chef Mid-Atlantic in 2012; her opus, Gran Cocina Latina- The Food of Latin America, won the James Beard Book of the Year in 2013; and she was inducted into the Beard Foundation's Hall of Fame in 2015.

Reviews

“Maricel is such an inspiring chef, and is so dedicated to understanding as much about the ingredients she uses as possible. This book is an amazing achievement and a resource that I will be using for years.”
—José Andrés, chef/owner, minibar by José Andrés and ThinkFoodGroup
 
“Maricel Presilla’s Peppers of the Americas is a deeply researched, eye-opening, beautiful guide to one of the world’s most intriguing foods.”
—Harold McGee, author of On Food and Cooking
 
“Maricel Presilla—the planet’s foremost authority on the cuisines of Latin America—has written the most definitive guide to peppers ever created. It is an essential book for every cook who cares about flavor.”
—James Oseland, author of Cradle of Flavor and Top Chef Masters judge
 
“In this thorough work, Maricel Presilla brings her fine scholarship to an ingredient that virtually all Americans use, deftly traveling a great distance and wresting clarity from complexity. A truly impressive book.”
—Deborah Madison, author of Vegetable Literacy and In My Kitchen

“Presilla is both “botanical sleuth” and chef, presenting a scholarly and stunning visual guide to peppers in this definitive guide.”
—PW Starred Review

"Our test kitchen's go-to chile pepper resource!"
—Martha Stewart Living

"Like Betty Fussell’s The Story of Corn, Presilla’s work is essential to our understanding of an ingredient that’s native to the Americas. It’s also absorbing and just plain fun: a hot summertime read for pepper people everywhere."
—Atlanta Journal-Constitution
 
“There’s an astounding amount of information here—historical, botanical, and even linguistic. It almost accidentally functions as a crash course in food archaeology, and contains an explainer on the hot hot heat of capsacin, the compound that makes food spicy. And somehow Presilla manages to present the vast majority of this potentially very dry subject matter almost conversationally, as though she is walking you through her backyard pepper pots, glass of wine in hand, telling you anecdotes about each. … The whole package is enough to make me reconsider single subject cookbooks. While I still think some can veer flabby, afterthoughts of publishers’ trying to plug up gaps in their catalog, Peppers of the Americas is different. Scholarly, even. And anything that manages to be well-researched and charming will always have a spot on my bookshelves—especially when it’s a book as spicy as this one.”
—Paula Forbes, Food52

"You don’t expect a botanical ethnography on peppers to send shivers up your spine, but Peppers of the Americas does just that. With academic rigor, Presilla examines the Capsicum genus’ pre-Hispanic origins, delving headlong into the epic collision between the Old and New World that sent peppers across the globe."
—NBCNews.com

"For the chile lover, the pepper obsessive and the cook who wants to learn everything there is to know about a single subject, this is the book."
—NPR's Here & Now Best Cookbooks of 2017