Word: flavorings
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...THESE," MARK MILLER URGES HIS WARY GUEST, proffering a handmade sausage stuffed with duck, fig and habanero chile. Miller watches with satisfaction as his quarry reacts to a fugue of piquant flavors that slowly fades to a smoky afterburn. "The chile pushes the flavor," explains Miller, who believes that good food should sing. "The duck fat is the low notes," he says. "The habanero is the high notes...
...eclectic menu ranges from neo-Tex-Mex tidbits like chipotle chile breadsticks to fresh-baked buckwheat cinnamon bread, smoked duck and buffalo jerky. "Smoking is a natural by-product of heat," Miller says, launching into an aria of poetic exaltation. "There's an intensity of wildness, of untamed flavor. It's loaded symbolically with a primordial sense of fire and man. I read a lot of meaning into food. I think it's one of the last experimental frontiers...
Miller's passion for untamed flavor began in his native Massachusetts, where Mexican and Indian friends of his French-Canadian family introduced him to the spicy exotica of non-European cooking. Travels in Latin America, Africa and Asia prompted him to experiment with ethnic accents, first as an assistant chef for nouvelle California guru Alice Waters at Chez Panisse in Berkeley and later in the same city at his own Fourth Street Grill, where he was one of the first chefs in the country to use mesquite wood for grilling...
America's infatuation with the once humble (and often shunned) chile has been fueled by a proliferation everywhere of Mexican and nouvelle Tex-Mex restaurants over the past decade and a growing public appetite for new flavor sensations. Last year sales of salsa, whose main ingredient is chile, surpassed catsup by $40 million, making it the country's most popular condiment. The peppers are popping up in such mainstream products as Le Menu "Santa Fe style" frozen dinners and McDonald's chicken fajitas. Manufacturers are packaging chile pastas, chile jams and jellies, chile catsup, chile-spiced mustards, peanuts, potato chips...
...four-alarm fire is capsaicin, a chemical concentrated in the veins and seeds of the chile pod. A member of the nightshade family (as are tomatoes, potatoes and tobacco), the chile pepper is believed to have originated in South America. Incas and Mayans prized it for its vibrant flavor and curative powers, prescribing peppers for ailments as diverse as arthritis, epilepsy and the common cold. Pepper seeds carried back to Europe by Christopher Columbus eventually found their way to China, Korea, Thailand and India -- the last of which today leads all other nations in per capita chile consumption...