When the news broke that a Trinidadian pepper is now ranked as the world’s hottest pepper, it raised a burning question. Why was Australia being named as the place of origin of the Trinidadian Scorpion Butch T? The local Scorpion emerged as an even hotter honcho than the English Naga Viper, ousting it from the Guinness World Records as of March 2011.
Fortunately, the Scorpion’s name features its homeland because this is a blistering business when it comes to marketing origins, and already heat has been turned up as its Trinidadian roots are not being touted in its international ranking.
The Guinness World Records lists it as a pepper grown in Australia by The Chilli Factory, who named it the Butch T, after an American, Butch Taylor, owner of Zydeco Hot Sauce. Taylor had passed out some of the seeds and they ended up in the gloved hands of the Chilli Factory Owners.
The pepper is indisputably of Trinidadian origin, as even its name reflects, but it needs to be more aggressively claimed or its commercial potentials may be diminished.
 A local chemist, Dr Rosalie Holder, was actually the one to begin measuring the Scorpion’s incendiary qualities from as far back as 1998. While she was doing research for her PhD at The UWI, visiting farmers and checking out their pepper yields, she was presented with some Scorpions by Lawrence Constantine, a farmer in the Maracas Bay area, who’d found this crop particularly hot.
Measured at 1,4463,700 Scoville Heat Units for the world record, the Scorpion packs a good 100,000 SHU over the Viper. To give you an idea of their potency as chilli peppers, the Jalapeno only goes up to 5000 SHU, and if you’re going to touch Scorpions and Vipers, it is advisable to wear gloves and masks.
Constantine’s peppers were growing at some altitude and it had been a blistering season, stressing out the crop. That would explain why the heat units went up, says Professor Pathmanathan Umaharan, a UWI professor of genetics, who worked with Dr Holder on her peppers, doing the purification, the agronomy and the morphology. He says that heat brings heat.
“The heat of the pepper is determined by the amount of stress the plant undergoes. Cool weather will keep them calm. Of course it has to do with the strain of the pepper,” he said. It sounds like something we can all identify with.
Dr Holder had been working on a dissertation, “Processing Potential of Peppers of the Capsicum Series,” and was gathering samples for her research. She bought hot peppers grown in areas like Caroni, Chaguanas, Tabaquite, Caigual and St. Helena.
“My first green and yellow peppers were purchased from Farmer Maikoo who grew them at St. Helena,” she said, but most of her samples were bought at the Port of Spain Market, and she got some from CARDI in Barbados and Trinidad. “However, Lawrence Constantine sourced the seeds of the Scorpion, Seven Pot, Chinese White and Congo peppers. He grew these peppers on the hillside at the one-mile mark of the North Coast Road that leads to Maracas Bay.”
When Mr Constantine’s peppers came to her in that hot season more than a decade ago, Prof Umaharan did the purification process that would ensure consistency, and as she began measuring, she was blown away.
Prof Umaharan recalls how a student, wearing two sets of gloves while examining the peppers, reported that he spent that night with his arms extended into two ice baths, such was the pain. Indeed, a couple years ago, Indian scientists were considering using the Bhut Jolokia, once ranked as the world’s hottest pepper, in hand grenades as a non-lethal weapon. Imagine it as a pepper spray!
Dr Holder is very perturbed at the idea that the Australian marketing thrust threatens the identity and origin of the pepper.
Dr Holder’s concern may be primarily about recognition for her work regarding the Scorpion, but it raises a larger question about the way we manage our business. Peppers are an almost folkloric component of Caribbean culture. The variations of heat and spice are invoked as human characteristics: she hot like a Congo, means she is not to be trifled with. Trinidadians know the difference between slight, medium and plenty. The names alone are revealing cultural markers.
In the brilliant novel, “The Sly Company of People Who Care,” by Rahul Bhattacharya, there is a character called Ramotar Seven Curry on account of his predilection for attending weddings up and down Guyana. His name shadows the phenomenal Seven Pot Pepper – known by some as the Seven Pod Pepper – but respected by all as one of the hottest peppers in the world. Just as Ramotar Seven Curry needs seven times the amount of curry the average person needs to sate his palate for wedding fare, so the pepper is hot enough to spice the equivalent of seven pots.
Pepper pots and stories – hot and sweet – abound; it is a part of our culture. The idea that the Trinidad Scorpion pepper is named after an American, and credited with an Australian origin suggests that once again we have been too slow to assert ownership of an indigenous product, and we have to act speedily and assertively to rectify this potential pickle.
By Vaneisa Baksh
Editor, UWI Today
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