On Sunday I went on a vision quest by mistake. Things began innocently enough with a box of Poppers® brand frozen jalapeño poppers that my sous-chef had bought me some weeks ago. I had the amusing (it seemed) idea of pairing these with homemade ones and performing a blind taste test with some of my fellow Banqueters. I’m really not a “Spicy Food Guy” in this sense, but in my Internet wanderings I found a recipe for something it would never have occurred to me to make—habañero poppers—and thought they might be an interesting novelty.
Jalapeño poppers are pretty intuitive, but I’ll run through the procedure for the benefit of those who can still look at a Capsicum annuum after my tale is done. Cut a lengthwise slit in each pepper, then cross it with a short perpendicular one near the stem. (The result should look like a long capital T.) This lets you seed and hollow the pepper without breaking it. Stuff the peppers with your proprietary blend of herbs and cheeses. Cream cheese is nasty, but it is traditional; it also makes for a sticky enough mixture to keep the peppers closed.
My breading didn’t stick all that well, and the largest of the peppers burned badly in the scalding vegetable oil. Bad omens all around. But how, I thought, could one screw up something so adorably bite-size as a habañero popper? And, as R— remarked several times, after it’s been stuffed with cheese and fried in a thick shell of Guinness batter, how hot can it really be?
Not unbearably so, it turns out. The stuff that makes a pepper hot, capsaicin (see also here), is particularly concentrated in the seeds of the plant. Don’t get me wrong: There’s still a crapload of it in the flesh. Habañero poppers are not, in the final analysis, pleasant to eat. Still, apart from pacing around bug-eyed or sucking on ice cubes, none of us had any unusual reactions. Except me. First there was a tingling in my fingertips, like a burning urge to tocar la guitarra. I had not, as all the recipes suggest, worn latex gloves.
The real fun started at 4 a.m. sharp with an alarming bathroom visit. Suffering trembling and chills I watched a rainbow-colored gila monster climb out of my toilet. It spoke to me in a beautiful voice, like the late Ricardo Montalbán’s: “There is a crack between the two worlds, the world of the diableros and the world of living men. There is a place where the two worlds overlap. The crack is there. It opens and closes like a door in the wind.”
“Carlos Castaneda?” I asked, but the lizard vanished. My sleep was fitful and plagued by strange dreams of talking cacti and eagles the size of elephants. By 8 a.m. I was ejecting jellied habañero peppers from every aperture in my body. My forearms were numb; my hands felt as though I’d been wearing a pair of Foreman® grills as mittens all night. I felt like a conquistador being slow-roasted by vengeful villagers. This continued until at least 2 p.m., at which point I was on the couch, drinking Pepto-Bismol from the bottle, too exhausted even to change the channel when The Da Vinci Code came on.
That goddamn talking lizard never reappeared, but I think I learned the secret of the crack that “opens and closes like a door in the wind.”