Paprika

"Spices lose their flavor over time but few as quickly as paprika, which starts out tasting of pepper and sunshine but deteriorates in but a few months to sawdust and bitterness."

 -- NY Times recipe for chicken paprikash

On my spice shelf: three types of paprika.

Sweet paprika, hot paprika, and smoked paprika from Spain offer a nice variety of flavors for meals that I've been cooking while we are in isolation at home, avoiding the pandemic. I recently ordered this trio of paprikas because I was out of sweet paprika, which we have been sprinkling on Len's home-made crackers, among other things. I use the hot or smoked varieties in chili or other dishes where I want an alternative to cayenne or other very hot peppers -- still hot, but not TOO hot. When fresh, all three of these spices have a pleasing and distinctive aroma and flavor.

Vintage paprika bottle.

In my mother's kitchen and in kitchens throughout mid-twentieth century America, a bottle or a can of paprika almost always appeared on the rather sparsely stocked spice rack (maybe with similar containers of ground pepper, cinnamon, poultry seasoning, "pickling" spice, and one or two others). We used paprika to add color to pale foods such as deviled eggs, but we believed that it had no flavor. What we didn't know was that it had once had flavor, long ago, when it was purchased, but that time had obliterated the taste.

Vintage paprika tin.

A little bit of spice goes a long way, so the contents of those tiny containers -- somewhere between half an ounce and 2 ounces -- would last for years and years. Meanwhile, the essential oils that give spice its aroma and pungency would fade away. And our deviled eggs were sprinkled with an odorless, tasteless red powder whose lost capabilities we didn't even realize.

Paprika is made from a few select varieties of capsicum peppers, which are grown and processed in Spain, Hungary, California, or Mexico. The capsicums, native to the New World, include a vast number of varieties from blow-your-head-off new strains of habanero pepper like "ghost peppers" to the mildest of bell peppers. The paprika pepper and the tomato pepper -- two strains of long, mild red peppers -- are dried, ground, and made into several flavors of paprika. 

The original location of Spain's capsicum pepper cultivation was the La Vera region of Extremadura. Farmers there began growing peppers soon after Columbus brought New World produce back to show to Ferdinand and Isabella. The region continues production of smoked paprika, according to Smithsonian Magazine --

"Pimentón de la Vera Co-op [is] a group of 17 brands and family-owned businesses creating Protected Designation of Origin-certified smoked paprika in Spain. The La Vera region of Spain, in the Cáceres province in Extremadura, is the ideal place to produce this type of paprika, thanks to its subtropical climate, salt-free water and soil with high organic matter content. Planting begins in May and June, and the ripe red peppers are harvested in September and October. Then the smoking begins." (link)

Hungarian paprika box,
from article in kitchn.com

Szeged, Hungary is another famous center of paprika production. The Hungarians began to grow and use paprika within 100 years of the European exploration of the New World, and eventually developed the strain of peppers used for Hungarian paprika. Chicken paprikash is probably the most famous and popular Hungarian dish using their signature paprika. Although just one or two flavors of Hungarian paprika are generally available in US markets, there are actually eight of them used for different dishes in Hungarian cuisine. (See this article or this article for a list of the eight flavors as well as many other facts about paprika.)

I wonder if paprika is the only spice to figure in Nobel-prize-winning research. Albert Szent-Györgyi, a Hungarian scientist, won the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1937. His early research, isolating the chemical now called vitamin C, took place at Cambridge University in England and at the Rockefeller Institute in New York. In 1930, he accepted a position at the university in Szeged. Continuing his research, Szent-Györgyi used the famous local Szeged paprika as one of his sources for vitamin C. He demonstrated the specific effect in scurvy prevention of the chemical he had isolated. (link, link)

Hungarians eat around one pound per year of paprika so I imagine they buy it in somewhat larger containers than we do, and use it up before it fades into flavorless red powder. Also, maybe the higher level of consumption enables them to get actual health benefits from the vitamins in paprika, while it's doubtful that Americans -- in the fifties or even now -- would receive a useful amount of vitamin C from the decoration on their deviled eggs.

This blog post copyright © 2020 mae sander for mae food dot blog spot dot com.

Antique spice box images are from auction sites on the web.