Ingredients · Spice

Cayenne

Capsicum annuum · Solanaceae (nightshade family)

Cayenne
Clean, direct heat with a dry, faintly fruity red-pepper taste behind it — the workhorse hot pepper of a North American kitchen. Standard cayenne runs 30,000 to 50,000 Scoville heat units; the shop's Mild is 40,000 and its Hot, which is actually a bird's eye pepper, is 90,000, well above typical cayenne. Five products carry it, and unlike a named chile such as ancho or guajillo, cayenne is chosen for heat rather than for character.

What it’s like, and how to use it

The partFruit
KindSpice
CaffeineCaffeine-free
Where it is fromFrench Guiana, Mexico
TasteHeat first, then a dry, slightly fruity red-pepper taste

How to use it

A pinch at a time, and taste between. Into chili, gumbo, jambalaya and blackening rubs. On devilled eggs. In hot honey. Stirred into a cream sauce or macaroni cheese, where a very small amount sharpens everything without reading as hot. Bloom it in fat rather than adding it at the end.

With food

Eggs. Cheese and cream sauces. Chocolate. Honey. Tomato. Shellfish and crawfish. Chicken. Corn. Lime.

With spices

Paprika, which brings colour without heat. Garlic and onion. Cumin and oregano. Thyme and black pepper for Cajun. Smoked paprika.

With tea

Something with body and sweetness to meet it — Assam, rooibos, a spiced chai.

Its story

Where it comes from

Chile peppers were first grown in central-east Mexico; cayenne-type peppers are tied to French Guiana, where Indigenous peoples grew them long before European contact. The name comes from Old Tupi kyynha and is dated in English to 1756; it was only later, and mistakenly, associated with the town of Cayenne, whose own name is a French form of Guyana. Our lot origin is unconfirmed.

What happened

Columbus and his crew called capsicum fruits pimientos because they burned like black pepper, and the name stuck to a fruit that is not related to pepper at all. Diego Alvarez Chanca, the physician on the second voyage, brought the first chiles to Spain in 1494. Because they were cheap and easy to grow where black pepper was expensive, chiles became the poor man's pepper across Europe, Africa and Asia within about eighty years. Cayenne's North American chapter runs through Louisiana: the British deported the Acadians from the Maritimes in the mid-eighteenth century, many settled in the south of the state, and cayenne became the main heat in Cajun cooking — which gives a Canadian shop an unexpected thread back to its own country. It also ran through nineteenth-century American folk medicine, where Samuel Thomson built a whole system on restoring the body's heat with steam baths, cayenne and lobelia, and sold the right to use it to any family for twenty dollars; he had sold more than a hundred thousand of those patents by 1840.

On the shelf with it

Every product it goes into.

Every ingredient in the shop

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