Devil's food

IF YOU'RE A member of the Mariposa food co-op on Baltimore Avenue in West Philadelphia, you get a key so you can shop at will, recording your after-hours purchases of goat-milk ice cream, etc., on the honor system in a ledger on the counter. There's such illicit glee – the incarnation of the kid-in-candy-store sensation – in roaming a darkened store in the middle of the night, selecting treats. It feels unreal; a mini-escape from capitalism.

Pursuing the escape known as vacation, I am in parts East, learning to say "Schuylkill" (a river, pronounced SKOO-kl), and drinking Yuengling beer, sweaterless all the balmy night on sprawling roofs and porches of dilapidated punk-rock houses. My days are a pleasure-seeker's pilgrim's progress. I spent the morning of John Cage's birthday at an Ethiopian café called Kaffa Crossing, eating ful, a fava bean stew amid an honorific happening, and reading Cage's Silence, in particular an essay wherein he muses on parallels and intersections between music and mushrooms. Cage was an enthusiast for fungi. Perhaps a bit too bold in that direction, as he once had to have his stomach pumped after ingesting a specimen he'd mistaken for edible.

The other day I was bold at Manattan's Union Square Farmers' Market. At the Eckerton Hill Farm stand, I bought a little basket of hot peppers, assorti. I've always been a little scared of chili peppers, which, akin to rattlesnakes, are most potent at their smallest. Their shapely ember glow was a taunting tongue, wagging at me, "You want a piece of this?! You can't handle this!" The thing with peppers is, they come with consequences. Unlike, say, a slice of sea urchin, the unnerving texture of which, once swallowed, is no longer manifest, the pepper's just begun upon ingestion – firing up the tongue, setting lips to tingling, and triggering the tear ducts. Drinking water just makes the whole thing worse by opening the taste buds further for assault – as I discovered years ago at an Indonesian meal in Holland after gulping a canal's worth, pitcher by pitcher. Since then, my pepper fears persisted, prompted partly by a year of splitting bowls of pho with an Indian companion, who always dumped in all the chili slices from the garnish plate and chomped them down as though they were as sweet as strawberries. Meanwhile, my mouth was in an uproar. "Keep them on your side of the bowl!" I'd implore, batting the offenders away with a chopstick.

The farmers' goods at Union Square offered no shortage of engaging edibles, like Red Clepp pears the burgundy of royal velvet in a Rembrandt and fist-sized, pale-green melons called Sweetie Number Six. But the peppers stopped me in my tracks. There's nothing that cultivates fascination quite like fear, and also, they made a little pleasure riot for the eyes. Eckerton Hill Farm boasts a hundred varieties of chilis and tomatoes each. Their table was a pepper plethora, from the standard, mild Hungarian wax in signature red, to pale yellow ones the shape and size of teardrops, with delicate, jagged green caps and slender stems. Called Wild Brazil, they look like what I'd like a jewel to be.

Into my bag I tucked a three-by-three-inch carton of assorted fire: Wild Brazils, yellow-orange Scotch bonnets (also known as Fatali), Czech blacks (they are actually black), chocolate and red Cevino habañeros, and aji dulces, which resemble rumpled red tam o' shanters, on a two-inch scale. I never thought I'd eat them: pretty demons to admire and proffer to generous hosts.

But then in the evening, back at Union Square – transformed from daytime farmers' market to a spot for student lolling and unintelligible, fervent speeches by politicos with megaphones – I met a friend who offered me a pastry box. The box contained hot peppers of the long and slender sort, assorted red, green, yellow, chocolate-dipped. I bit the challenge in the tail (the end where one's less likely to encounter seeds, the strongest culprits of a chili's spice) and tasted why chili and chocolate are meant to be together. A thought I'd vaguely had before when eating ancho chili chocolate cake, just thinking that I liked the kick. But now my taste buds actually relayed a flavor through the heat. Aha.

That night I sliced up tiny tasting portions of a Wild Brazil. The little seedless bites were fresh, apple-y, and friendly. A little jolt, and then slow-spreading heat in mellow registers. This foray made me bolder, and a few nights later, baking a Philly farmers' market medley of beets and bell peppers, eggplant and delicata squash, I threw in an aji dulce trio, whole. At dinner I kept a wary eye out for them, masked among their cousins, the phlegmatic bell peppers. I set aside the aji for last, and ate one, seeds and all. Its flavor was sweet and deep and mildly surprising. I wanted more. It tasted like vacation.

E-mail Masha Gutkin at lydialeapfrog@yahoo.com.

E-mail Masha Gutkin at lydialeapfrog@yahoo.com.