Chiltepin

• chiltepín

  Spanish — Sonora and northern Mexico

• chile piquín

  Spanish — Mexico and Texas

  Used for chiltepin in some places and, more often, for small oblong semi-cultivated chillies of the same species. A jar labelled piquín may hold either, and the oblong forms are usually milder.

• chiltecpin

  Nahuatl

  The source of the Spanish name. It is commonly glossed as "flea chilli", for the size of the fruit; the etymology is traditional rather than settled.

Intensely hot and then gone. The heat of chiltepin rises sharply and falls away quickly compared with habanero or bird's eye chilli, which is why it is crushed over food as it is eaten rather than cooked into it: the flash is the point.

Faint and dry — a little fruit and smoke. Most of the experience is in the mouth rather than the nose.

Small, round, bright to brick red berries, a few millimetres across, drying to a darker red with a glossy skin.

A brittle shell that shatters between the fingers into flakes and seed.

• Capsaicin and dihydrocapsaicin — The pungency. Wild fruit retains the high capsaicinoid content that domestication reduced in many lines, and the plant evolved it as a deterrent to seed-destroying mammals rather than to birds, which cannot feel it.(what capsaicin is, what dihydrocapsaicin is)

Crush over the finished dish rather than cooking in. Wash your hands afterwards, or crush in a small mortar instead of between the fingers.

A table chilli above all: crushed over caldo de queso, menudo, pozole, beans, eggs and grilled meat in Sonora, and pickled green as a relish. It is used in small numbers — two or three berries season a bowl — and rarely cooked into a sauce, where its brief heat would be wasted.

• grinding — Crushed between the fingers or in a small mortar at the table rather than ground in advance. The whole berry keeps well; the crushed one is used at once.
• boiling — Crumbled into a soup or stew at the end, where it seasons the bowl without being cooked in. Most capsaicin survives cooking, so cooking it longer would do little to soften it and much to disperse it.

The berry should be glossy, red and brittle. Heat is not a freshness test, because capsaicin outlasts every other quality.

• Dull brown colour
• Soft or leathery rather than brittle berries

• Fading of the carotenoid colour under light
• Moisture uptake if kept open

Solanaceae

A woody perennial shrub, often growing in the shade of a nurse plant such as mesquite or hackberry, carrying small round fruits that stand erect and ripen red. The erect, easily detached fruit is a bird-dispersal trait: birds do not feel capsaicin and pass the seed intact, and domestication selected away from exactly these features.

Wild from the southwestern United States through Mexico into Central America. Domesticated chillies were derived from these populations, and the combined evidence points to east-central Mexico as where that happened.

• Mexico (Sonora, Sinaloa, Chihuahua) — origin. Sonora is the heart of the chiltepin harvest and trade, almost all of it gathered from wild plants.
• United States (Southern Arizona and Texas) — native range. Wild populations at the northern edge of the range, some of them protected.

Picked by hand from wild shrubs in late summer and autumn, by families who travel to the stands for the season. The labour of picking pea-sized fruit one at a time is the reason the price is high.

1. Gathering — Ripe red fruit picked by hand from wild plants.
2. Sun-drying — Spread and dried whole in the sun until hard and brittle.Why: The dried berry keeps for a year or more and is how most chiltepin is sold.
3. Pickling (green fruit) — Some green fruit is preserved in vinegar and salt rather than dried.

Overwhelmingly wild-harvested. Attempts at field cultivation have been made; germination is slow and erratic without the passage through a bird, which is part of why the trade still depends on gathering.

Arid and semi-arid scrub, where the plant survives under the canopy of a nurse shrub that shades it and protects it from frost and browsing.

Whole, always. The berry is crushed at the table and a pre-ground chiltepin loses the one reason to buy it rather than a cheaper chilli: the bright, fast heat of a freshly broken berry.

• Round berries rather than oblong ones — the mark of wild chiltepin as against pequín.
• Glossy red colour and a brittle shell.
• Few stems and little broken material.

Chiltepin is the wild form from which domesticated Capsicum annuum was derived in Mexico. The earliest archaeological chilli remains in Mexico are dominated by wild-type seed, which places people eating and moving wild chillies before anyone was growing them, and the domesticated forms that followed spread into every chilli-using cuisine in the world.

Early chilli seed from Mexican archaeological sites is largely of the wild type, consistent with gathering from wild populations before and during domestication.

A regional trade centred on Sonora, supplied by seasonal wild harvest and priced far above cultivated dried chillies because of the picking labour.