Ancho and Poblano Chiles
By Dave Dewitt
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About this ebook
Over the centuries, Aztec cookery grew and spread to become the basis for the Mexican food of today, and many Aztec dishes have lasted through the years basically unchanged. Usually, these foods were roasted, boiled, or cooked in sauces, in a legacy that Dave DeWitt, the noted Pope of Peppers, has compiled into this wonderful addition to his scintillating Pepper Pantry series.
Dave Dewitt
Dave DeWitt is a food historian and one of the foremost authorities in the world on chile peppers, spices, and spicy foods. He has published fifty-six books, including Chile Peppers: A Global History (UNM Press). He lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
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Ancho and Poblano Chiles - Dave Dewitt
Author
INTRODUCTION
The Legacy of the Aztecs
In 1529, Bernardino de Sahagún, a Spanish Franciscan friar living in Nueva España (Mexico) noted that the Aztecs ate hot red or yellow chile peppers in their hot chocolate—and in nearly every other dish they prepared as well! Fascinated by the Aztecs’ constant use of a previously unknown spice, Sahagún documented this fiery cuisine in his classic study, Historia General de las Cosas de la Nueva España, now known as the Florentine Codex. His work indicates that of all the pre-Columbian New World civilizations, it was the Aztecs who loved chile peppers the most.
The marketplaces of ancient Mexico overflowed with chile peppers of all sizes and shapes, and Sahagún wrote that they included hot green chiles, smoked chiles, water chiles, tree chiles, beetle chiles, and sharp-pointed red chiles.
In addition to some twenty varieties of chillis, as the pungent pods were called in the Nahuatl language, vendors sold strings of red chiles (modernristras), precooked chiles, and fish chiles,
which were the earliest known forms of ceviche, a dish for which fish is preserved without cooking in a marinade of an acidic fruit juice and chile peppers. Based on the friar’s descriptions, there is no doubt that early forms of the ancho/poblano variety were in the Aztec markets.
Father Sahagún, one of the first behavioral scientists, also noted that chiles were revered as much as sex by the ancient Aztecs. While fasting to appease their rather bloodthirsty gods, the priests required two abstentions by the faithful: sexual relations and chile peppers.
Aztec cookery was the basis for the Mexican food of today, and, in fact, many Aztec dishes have lasted through the centuries virtually unchanged. Since oil and fat were not generally used in Aztec cooking, the foods were usually roasted, boiled, or cooked in sauces. The sauce legacy especially lives on today, as we will see.
NOMENCLATURE
The fresh green form is called chile poblano, or chile of the people,
and poblano
is descriptive of the Valley of Puebla, where large-scale production may have first begun. Literally, chile ancho means wide chile pepper,
an allusion to the broad, flat, heart-shaped dried pod that results from sun-drying of the mature red poblano pod. In the United States, the variety is called ancho/poblano,
but in Mexico, the variety is called ancho,
and the poblano is its processed green form. In Baja California, both the green and dried pods are called ancho.
Further adding to the confusion are the terms mulato (light brown
) and negro (black
), which refer to varieties of the Mexican ancho. In California, the confusion increases because poblanos are called pasillas
by the produce industry.
HORTICULTURAL HISTORY
The earliest poblano forms were probably cultivated in pre-Columbian times, and the present varieties are at least a century old, attesting to their popularity in the cooking of Mexico. About thirty-seven thousand acres are under cultivation in Mexico, particularly in the dry valleys of central Mexico in the states of Guanajuato, San Luis Potosi, Durango, Zacatecas, and Aguascalientes. They are also grown to a lesser extent in the coastal regions of the states of Sinaloa, Coahuila, and Nayarit. Popular Mexican varieties of the ancho are Esmeralda,
Verdeno,
and Flor de Pabellon
; the mulato variety is represented by V-2
and Roque.
LEGEND AND LORE
Chile, they say, is the king, the soul of the Mexicans,
A nutrient, a medicine, a drug, a comfort.
For many Mexicans, if it were not for the existence of chile,
Their national identity would begin to disappear.
—from El Chile y Otros Picantes, by Arturo Lomeli
The Ancho chile figures prominently in the legend of the origin of the