Spicy food makes us break out in a nice sweat
- Scott Daniels: We Ate Well and Cheaply
- July 25, 2019
- 964
It looks as though by now the heat wave has passed us by for the moment. When it climbs up to near 100 F, well, that’s enough degrees, thanks.
When it gets so cussedly hot that it’s all anyone can talk about, nothing much sounds good to eat except lime sherbet and iced tea. Now I kind of wish we had a gas grill, just so I wouldn’t have to be out in the heat fiddling with an open fire. Even the dog was making quick with the yard squat, a first.
It’s just that much harder to be charming in the produce section when you’ve soaked through your clothes, praying you don’t run into anyone you know. And that, of course, is when you run into your smarmy ex.
What do people in roasting-hot climates eat? It seems to be a universal truth that the hotter the temperature through the year, the spicier the cuisine can be. Some of the very hottest places on earth are found in parts of Ethiopia with recorded average daily temperatures setting global records north of 100 F for years on end.
The food we see coming from there is full of flavor, fragrant spices and heat. Ethiopia is sandwiched in mid-eastern Africa between Sudan and Somalia with the Arab Middle East just across the Red Sea.
It’s hard to think of a region more regularly shaken up, and that always means a real mix of foods and flavors. I ate in an Ethiopian restaurant many years ago, and I still remember how good it was, served on an almost table-sized, soft flat bread called injera. It was like a giant, unflipped crepe with a spongy top side of tiny broken bubbles.
The food, a selection of meat stews, rice, lentils and cooked greens, was then portioned out all over the surface of the bread around the table, along with small servings of condiments.
There were no plates or cutlery, and you tore off pieces of the bread near you and used them to pinch up what you wanted. Not only is this an example of the usual hot-climate spicy fare, but also the sensible doing away with dishwashing in the heat.
When everyone is done, the remaining bread is just tossed or rolled up and taken home, still stained with the food servings here and there.
The bread is made from a gluten-free grain found in Ethiopia called teff, which I intend to hunt down to try to make a batch.
And here is where your presentation skills matter. Blobs of stew, lentils and spiced rice on a sheet of tan bread can look like cat sick on a round pillowcase if you don’t add color: fresh red pepper strips, greens, bright yellow condiments, anything to break up all that gray and brown. To forgo the bread-as-plate thing, just serve the bread rolled up like ancient Greek documents.
So why do people eat spicy food when the temperature climbs? Contrary to intuition, it helps you cool down, utilizing your own body’s brilliant system.
Our great development, in the animal world, is our cooling ability. An antelope can run pretty fast but not all day. It doesn’t take all that long to overheat and collapse from exhaustion. But we can trot after them patiently all day in the hot sun, as long as there’s water. We sweat, and the evaporating moisture keeps us cool as we jog on, waiting for that antelope to drop.
Spicy food tends to make us break out in a nice sweat as well, with the same result. It also causes us to automatically reach for the cooling fuel, a big glass of water.
Or, as is the case here, lime sherbet and iced tea, breakfast, lunch and dinner.