Culinary Note: Spicy Food--You never can quite tell…

One of the more common questions waeguk saram (foreigners) like myself get asked is, “Can you eat spicy/hot food?” Note, the question is not a matter of the emphatic “Do”, as in “Do you eat (meaning “prefer” spicy food?”, but “Can”, as in, “Is it even within the remotest realm of possibility for you to consume something which may or may not make fire shoot out of every orifice of your body and from there consume you as a field fire set by a farmer consumes the locust?”

Usually, my answer is a ready, “Yes.” For instance, when my friend, H.W., told me that her family would like to have me over for dinner during Chuseok (Korean Thanksgiving, which is next week. Mark you calendars and eat some kimchi.) and that the traditional food is usually fairly spicy, I usually would immediately say, “Oh, that’s alright. Americans eat spicy food all the time!” Now, though…

What happened is this—On Saturday, abeoji and I were eating pajeon and watching T.V. together. As per usual, the main course was accompanied by various side dishes. Among these side dishes was the ubiquitous green hot pepper.

Now, I’ve had the ubiquitous green hot pepper, and its heat variance is pretty wide. It can knock your socks off or simply taste crisp and clean like the bell peppers back home. In all of my experience, however, they’ve always been at least tolerable. So, I picked out one of the bigger ones and began moving it towards my mouth, anxiously awaiting my surprise.

But then the abeoji stopped me. “Jeremy, no, no, no…” He literally grabbed the pepper from my hand and told me repeatedly in Korean, “Spicy, spicy.” I’ve gotten a little tired by now of Koreans thinking I can’t do something just because I’m foreign, so I told him in Korean that I would be fine. I like spicy food. He smiled and said, “Ok, eat.” And I did.

Not only did the pepper knock my socks off, it darned the holes in them, threw them in the wash, placed them in the rain to dry, and the heat from the pepper still had enough energy to defeat the pull of gravity on the rain and vaporized it as it came down.

I hiccupped. I swore. I wheezed and gasped. (Abeoji and omeoni just laughed about it, as is their custom.) It took a full 30 minutes for my socks to find their way back to my feet and about four glasses of water (we have no milk) later my mouth was back to tasting other things besides smoldering coals.

Now, when someone mentions spicy food, I have to think long and hard. I told my friend what I usually tell people. I think that I’ll continue to say, “Oh, it’s ok. Americans eat spicy food. Thai, Indian, Mexican, Creole, it’s all got spice.” I’ll just have to make sure I have some milk handy in the future…