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up at the Austin Chronicle Hot Sauce Festival in the mid-1990s, we didn’t know exactly what to do with it. These sauces weren’t intended as a dip for tortilla chips, they were made to be eaten on grilled fish or with curries or wrapped up in flatbreads called “rotis.” We tasted them on the tip of a plastic spoon.
    The habaneros, Scotch bonnets, and other cultivars of the explosively hot Capsicum chinense species may be among the hottest in the world, but the wonderful apricot, peach, and citrus aromas that you smell when you cut one open can change your attitude about hot and spicy food. Caribbean peppers and hot sauces became something of an obsession with me, and I spent a lot of time in the islands. In 1995, I won my first James Beard Journalism Award for a magazine article about my piquant quest—it was titled “Hot Sauce Safari.”
    If an obsession with hot peppers sounds a little silly, consider the mindset of the Spanish who bankrolled Columbus. To say that the Europeans were looking for a shorter route to the SpiceIslands doesn’t begin to explain it. In the medieval imagination, pepper, cinnamon, and ginger came from Adam and Eve’s lost paradise, according to German authorWolfgang Schivelbusch in his book, Tastes of Paradise . Europeans were more than a little obsessed with spicy food.
    With poetry, art, and historical accounts, Schivelbusch illustrates the absolute frenzy over spices during the Middle Ages. By the fifteenth century, Europe’s entire system of social status and a large part of its economy were defined by spices, and every entrepreneur and adventurer alive was trying to find a new route to the paradise where spices grew.
    The earlyhistory of the Caribbean islands was shaped by the spice trade.Columbus thought he had landed in the East Indies, which is why he called the natives “Indians.” The fiery chile pepper pods that the Caribbean natives called aji were renamed “pimiento” by the Spanish after pimienta, the word for black pepper. Strangely, they called the fruit of the allspice tree, the other spice they discovered in the New World, pimiento as well. (It wasn’t until the Spanish encountered the Aztecs that they coined the term “chile.”)
    Ajis , or chile peppers, weren’t related to black pepper, but thanks to their hardiness, they spread quickly. Within ten years, the Spanish and Portuguese had carried chile peppers all over the world. Asians, Africans, and Europeans quickly forgot that the chile peppers in their gardens were originally brought from the Americas in the 1500s and came to believe their local peppers were native. When early English settlers came to the United States, they brought European chile peppers with them, along with other plants and seed they thought they might need in the Americas.
    Though Columbus failed to reach the East Indies by sailing west, the agricultural products of the New World replaced the spices of the East Indies in economic and cultural importance. Just as black pepper and cinnamon had created immense fortunes in the Middle Ages, chocolate, coffee, and sugar created enormous wealth in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It wasn’t just the utility of these products that made them desirable, Schivelbusch argues. The Caribbean replaced the Spice Islands as the earthly paradise of the European imagination.
    PEPPERPOT AND BARBECUE
    The Arawaks migrated gradually across the islands from present-day Guyana. Along with the Capsicum chinense pepper ( aji ), they brought cassava, pineapple, and maize with them from South America. For some ten centuries, theCaribbean islands as far north as Jamaica belonged exclusively to these peaceful fishermen and farmers.
    The Arawaks lived in villages and had a communal style of cooking. The game they killed ended up in a constantly cooking stewpot. The stew, flavored with peppers and the cassava preparation called cassareep , was called ajiaco , or pepperpot. The earliest descriptions of Amerindian