Chile Information Overload

There may be no other single food that inspires as much devotion as the chile pepper. Its prophets are legion--there seems to be another “hot ‘n’ spicy” cookbook published every day. But there are precious few bibles to help the novice sort out what can be a bewildering collection of regional names and dishes.

That’s where Dave DeWitt’s “The Chile Pepper Encyclopedia” (Morrow, $19.95) comes in. It’s a treasure trove of chile information, far more complete than almost anything that precedes it. Like many religious tracts, though, it may appeal more to the converted than the casual reader. This is one of those quirky books that seems to strive for completeness as a goal in itself. From achocolatado (yet another regional name for pasilla) to xcatic (a mild chile from the Yucatan), DeWitt buries us in an avalanche of information. That he sometimes never quite makes sense of it all is obscured by the sheer volume of data he throws at us.

On the other hand, perhaps that criticism is unfair. Context is rarely what encyclopedias are about. Rather, this is the kind of book that a chile-head will dip into fairly regularly, the way a baseball fan might go to his Red Book or a chess fanatic his complete games of Capablanca. It’s not a book for those with only a passing interest. It’s for the brotherhood.