The question, or some variation of it, inevitably arises whenever I meet someone new: Scoville, Scoville…hey did you know that has something to do with how hot peppers are?

Yes, I did, but according to Wikipedia, the Scoville heat unit scale isn’t very accurate because it doesn’t weight properly for capsaicin sensitivity in individuals who conduct the Organoleptic Test, devised by a pharmacist named Wilbur Scoville in the early 20th century. I have no idea if he’s a relation, but “Scoville” isn’t exactly like “Smith” or “Johnson” as names go. It wouldn’t surprise me to find out we were somehow related, in other words. (You can probably imagine my surprise when I happened upon the Scoville Memorial Library in downtown Salisbury, Connecticut when I went to high school about 10 minutes north in Sheffield, Massachusetts; my family and I were the only Scovilles I had ever known.)

Why do we describe peppers’ flavors as “hot” in the first place? Well, our brain literally thinks our tongue is on fire when we eat them (h/t GAS):

I don’t think there’s necessarily a connection, but when I still smoked, I preferred menthol cigarettes to regular tobacco blends.

For a long time, Tabasco was my favorite hot sauce. It was spicier than flavorful, and I liked it because I could take a lot of heat early on. There’s a lot of history at the Tabasco company, including an island that the McIlhenny family (the sauce’s creators) own privately in Louisiana bayou waters:

Sanjay Gupta is a total crawfish boil neophyte. You can watch the full 60 Minutes episode on Tabasco below.

Tabasco produces a number of great products, including the Buffalo chicken sauce, the smoky chipotle sauce, and even the green jalapeño sauce, none of which I really appreciated in the early goings. When I was young, there was a certain machismo that came with being able to eat hot foods with high heat in large quantities and short time periods. The hottest pepper I personally ever ate is called an ornamental pepper. A nursery for which I worked in my late teens sold them in small 3″ plastic pots, and the same plant would bear yellow, orange, red, purple, and green peppers. They were very pretty, but I discovered when I ate one that they’re called “ornamental” because you aren’t supposed to eat them, and not because they’re pretty. I felt like I had swallowed the sun.

Today, I’m less concerned with showing off (which I did a lot when I worked in the restaurant business; my palette was a novelty in some places) than I am just having a good meal. Like many others (so many, in fact, that there was cause to worry there would be a shortage recently), I’ve graduated to Huy Fong Foods’ Sriracha chili sauce, NIMBYs be damned. Sriracha does a far better job of combining heat and flavor than Tabasco’s original pepper sauce. But don’t listen to me tell you about it: spend $5 here to watch a full documentary on the company and its magical elixir. Here’s the trailer:

Unrelated: one of my favorite new pastimes is searching YouTube for “ghost pepper prank,” and then crying from laughing so hard. Watch, for example, as this topless middle-aged bro is rendered helpless by a small fraction of a pepper:

I have no ending for this blog post, except to say that (a) I will never eat a ghost pepper, and (b) Sriracha popcorn and bacon popcorn are both high on my list for items to serve during a cocktail hour either at my wedding reception or rehearsal dinner this fall.