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The Heat Seeker: Into the Heartland

Believe me, when I went to Indy to watch the 500, I never thought my little side heat-seeking project would come into play. In fact, it was the last thing on my mind the night before the race when I dined at Harry and Izzy’s, the next-door expansion of the venerable St. Elmo’s Steak House, in downtown Indianapolis.

I ordered a meal that couldn’t be more ordinary: salad, steak and a shrimp cocktail to start. The menu said it was “St. Elmo’s Shrimp Cocktail,” but that distinction was meaningless to me.

Most shrimp cocktails are served with pink shrimp primly draped over the edge of a glass or a serving dish, and a dollop of cocktail sauce in the middle. For the St. Elmo’s Shrimp Cocktail, the shrimp swoon all over themselves and are slathered in a thick cocktail sauce. A fork on the side of the bowl spears a lemon, saltines were scattered around the saucer. I squeezed the lemon, seized my knife and, in the middle of a sentence, popped some shrimp into my mouth.

I dropped my cutlery as a sensation that I can only describe as what electrocution must feel like shot down my throat and then up my nose, forking its way into my brain. My hands started to rise and—yes!—I had the urge to clap my hands on my skull to keep the top from blowing off. My hands shot up in the air, my eyes started to water.

And then it was done. As my hands went back onto the table to liberate a saltine from its wrapper, I looked at this seemingly innocent shrimp cocktail, in the middle of downtown Indianapolis, with new respect. And I made a mental apology to my grandfather, who had not been overly dramatic after all.

I have to admit, though, I was puzzled by Indianapolis’ come-from-nowhere triumph in the blow-the-top-of-my-head-off quest—I mean, really, Indianapolis and not India? Not China, Honduras, Louisiana or Tennessee?

There’s actually a fairly simple explanation, and I found it, once again, in The Spicy Food Lover’s Bible, by Dave DeWitt and Barbara Gerlach. It turns out that food gets heat from only a few ingredients: ginger, wasabi, horseradish, black peppers, chile peppers and mustard seeds. Most of these plants are unrelated to one another.

But two of these plants are closely related botanically: black mustard and horseradish. Both find their heat from a compound called allyl isothocynate, “a pungent aroma and flavor that goes to the back of the throat and attacks the nasal membranes,” write DeWitt and Gerlach.

Black mustard is what’s used most often in Chinese mustard—which my grandfather absentmindedly dipped his egg roll in all those years ago. And horseradish—fresh horseradish, 20 pounds grated fresh daily and sealed in plastic to keep the fumes from knocking out the kitchen staff—that’s what delivers the punch in St. Elmo’s Shrimp Cocktail.

Separated by decades, miles and types of cuisine, my grandfather and I each had our unexpectedly intense confrontations with allyl isothocynate. It must be a family trait to believe that when confronted with this substance, we will be able to keep our skulls firmly moored by smacking our scalps hard enough. Indianapolis was probably the last place I would have imagined that I’d learn about a family quirk—and, certainly, that my global quest for the hottest food I could tolerate would come to an end. But so it was, nonetheless.

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Photos Courtesy:  REUTERS  |  iStockPhoto  |  flickr  

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