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Cayenne Pepper
For this, thick-skinned, fine, long red peppers must be used. Spread about one-half pound of them on a tray, and dry in the open air, but not in the sun; then remove all the stalks, place them in a mortar and pound them thoroughly. Put the cayenne into jars and it is then ready for use. The mortar should be covered over with a cloth while pounding in order to prevent the dust from flying into the eyes of the operator.
A single-ingredient preparation that stands or falls on how thoroughly the peppers dry. Everything else is grinding and storage.
- Dry until brittle, not merely leatheryThe hinge of the whole thing: a pepper that still bends holds enough moisture to mould in the jar or clog the mortar into paste. The pods should snap cleanly and rattle when shaken.
- Why not in the sunOscar doesn't say. Direct sun is generally held to fade the red pigment and may carry off aromatic oils, leaving a duller powder; what the recipe calls for is shade with open air around it.
- Air-drying in a modern houseFew kitchens have the dry, ventilated space a 1896 pantry did. A dehydrator at 125-135F, or an oven on its lowest setting with the door propped, does the same job in 8-12 hours; thick-fleshed pods take the longest.
- Thick-skinned, long red peppersOscar means a fleshy chile of the cayenne type, not the small thin-walled bird peppers. Fresh cayenne or a similar long red chile will serve; thinner-walled pods dry faster and are not what the recipe specifies. The seeds and pith may be left in or removed depending on how hot you want the result.
- Capsaicin, not dustThe cloth over the mortar is genuinely necessary, and a modern spice grinder or blender is worse rather than better, since it aerosolises fine capsaicin powder. Grind in a covered vessel, let it settle before opening, and keep it away from your face and hands. Gloves are sensible when handling the dried pods.
- YieldHalf a pound of fresh peppers loses most of its weight as water and gives roughly one ounce, about a quarter cup, of ground cayenne.
- StorageJar it airtight and keep it dark. Ground chile holds colour and heat perhaps a year at room temperature; the red fades first and the heat goes last.
Cayenne's name is often traced to the Cayenne region of French Guiana, though that is generally regarded as the folk derivation; the word is more usually traced to a Tupi word for the pepper, later assimilated to the place-name. The peppers themselves are a New World crop long since naturalised across Africa, India and Hungary, and the commercial powder of Oscar's day rarely came from Guiana at all. Whatever the reason a hotel cook book gives instructions for making a spice rather than buying it, adulteration was a real hazard: ground red pepper was among the most notoriously doctored goods of the nineteenth century, commonly cut with brick dust, ground rice or turmeric and sometimes coloured with red lead, and food-purity chemists on both sides of the Atlantic named it repeatedly in their reports. A kitchen that pounded its own half-pound at a time knew exactly what was in the jar, and got a fresher, redder powder into the bargain.