Peter Piper Picked a Peck of Pickled Peppers

In this house we love peppers. All sorts of peppers, from bells and capsicums (that are actually in the nightshade family) to sweet bananas, habeneros to Chinese bull hearts. We have stuffed Bell peppers at least twice a month and no vegetable dish is complete without that hot little pod of long pepper. On the Sunday's we go to the Smokehouse for the buffet, I often carry a zip lock bag of peppers that I took from the garden just that morning. Mac grew a lovely little sweet pepper for eating without the aid of a glass of milk that we found especially good with succotash (butterbeans and corn). Our garden is never complete without the benefit of the pepper plants. I picked peppers yesterday to make pepper vinegar to go with the collard greens we'll be enjoying this winter. Making pepper vinegar (or pepper sauce) is so simple it's ridiculous. You simply take any heat proof jar (or cruet, as I have done) stuff it full of hot peppers of your choice and slowly fill the jar with boiling vinegar, close tightly, turn the jar upside down to seal (unless you're using a cruet, in which case just refrigerate immediately) and when the collards are ready, you will be, too!

So anyway, while I was working with the peppers I remembered the peppers Mac grew about 8 years ago. He bought the seed for these peppers from a little man at the flea market. He asked him what kind they were. The old man laughed a little and replied "don't know their name, but they're hotter'n hell!" As we walked away, our little packet of seeds in hand, he yelled after us "be careful handling them seed...they hot...they really hot!" When we came back by the spot where he'd been, I swear there was no sign he'd ever been there. Mac started humming "do da do do do da do do" from the Twilight Zone. I laughed.

The first pepper plants came up and they were really pretty little plants, thick and bushy and an odd green...not really dark, not quite light...not exactly in between...like I said, odd. Mac went out and hoed around them, fertilized them, making sure to give a good dose of phosphates and when the peppers came on, it was unbelievable. Each bush was over two feet tall, had so many blossoms on them you couldn't count them all and was so thick with leaves you couldn't see daylight in the middle. I got home from work one night and Mac was sitting in his chair, his hands in a bowl of milk. "What in the world are you doing?" I asked. "I picked those peppers for you to can and the old fella was right. They're really hot...you Mother told me to soak my hands in milk to take the burn out. It works. She said sour cream would be better...but I didn't know if she was joking or not." Shaking my head, I walked out to the kitchen and got the tub of sour cream out. Laughing fit to be tied, I handed him a towel for his hands and began to smear the sour cream on them. "She wasn't joking," I told him.

One night at work, we were talking about peppers and I was telling them I didn't know what I was going to do with the ones I had put up because they were too hot for consumption. (Mac had even diluted some with water and used as a spray for garden insects. It killed them dead. Of course it killed the plants, too...) So one of them says "when I eat at the Pizza Hut in Pageland they put the hottest they have out for me to put on my salad, they haven't been able to get me with one to hot, yet!" I guaranteed him that he'd not be able to eat one of these, in fact I doubted that he would be able to stand a drop of the juice. He looked at me as though I may have sprouted a second head, and said "I'll bet you 20 bucks I can eat at least one pepper. You on?" I turned to the Dispatcher and said "you heard that, he has 20 bucks that says he can eat one pepper, right?" She agreed that she had heard him and we made plans for the next night, the bet would be won or lost on single pepper.

Just as I was leaving for work the next day, I happened to remember to grab a jar of pepper sauce. I took it to the jail and placed it prominently in the middle of the table in the break room. At 7 pm we were to meet and settle the bet. Imagine my surprise when the break room was filled to capacity and we had to move out to the back lobby to complete the test. I set the jar down and told Deputy Dawg "here you go...just one pepper. That's all you have to eat."
He took the jar in his hands and twisted off the cap's ring. Someone handed him a church key (type of bottle opener) and he handily snapped up the cap. He brought the jar to his nose and inhaled deeply. And began to cough. Then he began to choke. He put the jar down and ran out into the Sally Port and bent double. He then went to the emergency water station and let the water run over his face. After about fifteen minutes, he came (crawled) back inside the lobby and slapped a twenty dollar bill down on the counter. "Remind me never to bet with you again, McBride, okay?"

We worried about what to do with those jars of pepper sauce. Mac wanted to empty the jars in a pit and bury them. I was terrified that they would take sprout. We ended up pouring them in the burn barrel and setting fire to them. It only took one match. We pulled up the plants and burned them, too. As we were turning to leave, Mac took the little envelop with what was left of his seed and tossed them in for good measure. "Tell your dad hello when you get back to hell," he muttered.
And yes, this is a true story...only a name has been changed to protect the ignorant. I mean, innocent.