Aji Marchant pepper

(Capsicum baccatum) Hot pepper, but if you can take the heat, you’ll note that there is a rich, citrus-y quality to its flavour quite distinct from the Capsicum annuum hot peppers. Slightly crinkled fruits have a fascinating, nearly luminous translucency (lit with an inner fire?)! Heat increases as they mature, so if you want more fruitiness pick when they’re still green or yellow, and if you just like scorching your mouth wait until they look fiery. Brilliant for pickling or hot sauce. Late to mature, but the plants are tall and prolific and take the cooler autumnal weather well… and I have found that peppers we pick and bring indoors on that last day before frost tend to ripen rather well off the plant, too.

A legendary pepper of many pseudonyms. Under one of them, ‘Italian Wax,’ it has its own website, so look it up if you want to know more!

To summarize from the history recounted there: most of the peppers we grow in Canada are Central American, but baccatum peppers come from the west coast of South America. Chilean miners who came for the 1848 California Gold Rush brought seed along to northern California (hence another of its names, ‘Chileno’). They settled in the Sierra Nevada mountains, which looked sort of like the mountains of home, and grew the ancestors of these peppers for a taste of home.

Many people also immigrated to that area from northern Italy, and settled in the mountains which also looked sort of like home. Already well acquainted with Capsicum annuum hot peppers, they soon adopted the Chileno peppers which were happily growing in their new home. The pepper soon became a mainstay of the pickled pepper canning industry. Today they have been superseded by newer varieties, but those varieties don’t have the same richness and complexity of flavour, and so Chileno/Italian Wax/Aji Marchant peppers maintain a loyal fan base. Try them and you’ll soon see why.