Ember Pepper

In the Mixteca Alta the pepper harvest ends in smoke. The ripe pods are strung on cords and hung above a bed of oak embers for three days, turning from lacquer red to the color of old brick. The Ruiz family of San Juan Teposcolula grew this pepper on terraced hillsides for as long as anyone can remember, and a parish record from 1938 notes a payment made in “chile de lumbre,” pepper of the fire.

When the family left the terraces for Oaxaca City in the 1990s, the seed nearly stayed behind with the old house. Inés Ruiz Cortés kept it alive in olive-oil tins on a city rooftop, saving a handful of seed each year from plants that never quite had enough soil. In 2014 she gave a packet to a visiting curator with a single instruction: grow it somewhere it can stretch.

The pepper is older than my family’s house. I only keep it company.

It now grows in the library’s network on four continents, and it has kept its character everywhere: slender pods, thin walls that dry quickly, and a heat that arrives late and stays. Fresh, it is bright and fruity. Dried over embers, the way it was meant to be, it is something else entirely.