Feferoni, or the Thermodynamics of a Pepper
In the summers, I am either working or I am in Croatia. In either case, I am sweating. This is habitual. If I am at the beach in Rijeka or on my mother’s couch, I don’t have to worry about it. At the office, I do worry, cursing the laws of thermodynamics under my breath, while also praying that my sports bra will not just flatten my chest but also hide its moisture. ‘I come from a lineage of really sweaty people’ – I tell everyone who asks if I’m enjoying the weather.
In physics, to study sweat, you have to study heat, and to study heat you have to study thermodynamics. As a discipline, thermodynamics had its first peak in the 1800s, when physicists and engineers used it to understand engines like those that powered steamboats. It is reductive to claim that the human body is an engine, but like an engine, it can overheat. We sweat to stave that off. The laws of thermodynamics explain how.
The body’s own metabolism produces heat. When a body, like your body, is in a very hot environment, thermodynamics also forces it to absorb some of that warmth. When some combination of the two – the internal heat of the metabolism and the external heat of the environment – or just an extreme iteration of one pushes your body close to overheating, its outer layers erupt in moisture. You sweat and your body can use its excessive heat to make that sweat evaporate.
But not just any amount of body heat, of energy radiating through the skin, will do. There is a specific energy price – the latent heat of vaporisation – for evaporating sweat. As long as the body is hot enough to keep paying it, the sweat keeps evaporating. But after this process is repeated many times, the body spends enough heat to return to normal operating conditions. The sweating stops. The value of the latent heat of vaporisation is determined by the bonds between the atoms in your sweat molecules because breaking them is both what requires energy and what ensures evaporation.
Spicy foods make you sweat because molecules that are responsible for their scorching flavour interact with temperature-sensitive nerves in the mouth. Electrical signals from these nerves reach the brain, they trigger the same response as heat, and your body has no choice but to start sweating. It’s a classic case of mistaken identity: your body trying to get rid of heat though the heat is not really the culprit.
When I try to look up how to say feferoni in English, all of the translations are unhelpfully generic. Dictionary sites suggest ‘hot pepper’ and ‘chili pepper’. When I search for the pepper’s Latin name, I end up on the Wikipedia page for a plant that ‘is commonly known as paprika, chili pepper, red pepper, sweet pepper, jalapeño, cayenne, or bell pepper’. The Italian word ‘peperoncino’ produces images that resemble my memories of feferoni most, but I have lived in the United States for almost two decades and had chances to pop jarred pepperoncini into my mouth while making sandwiches or pizza. The temperature-sensitive nerves in my mouth have long decreed that the two cannot be equated. The Internet offers me ads for jars of pickled peppers from Romania and Macedonia, but not Croatia. I am left with no new information, and lots of old nostalgia.
These small, narrow peppers were my first introduction to real heat and courage, and I want them to be recognised as more than just a generic pepper. Why is there not a Latin name unique to how sweaty my grandfather got when he ate feferoni? For how excited us kids got when we bit into one and managed to resist tears? Back home, these peppers are ubiquitous, but in translation that ubiquity has somehow become a lack of distinct character. The excitement of feferoni, the beating of the heart and smiling of the mouths, has become just another faulty line of communication between the brain and the tongue.
‘We really need more hot peppers in here,’ I say out loud to the fridge door, but no- one is home, and the jar of vegan mayonnaise and the half-used container of coconut milk do not speak Croatian.
Rummaging through my spice cabinets reveals Thai bird’s eye chili peppers, red pepper flakes, powdered cayenne, dried chipotle and ancho chilies, and ground hot paprika. In the fridge, an array of hot sauces, glass bottles filled with reds, oranges, and yellows meet my gaze. An American ex-girlfriend once told me that I have so many ingredients and so many spices. Many are hot, but I can’t tell if that is actually interesting. To be fair, I can rarely ever tell what about me is actually interesting.
In Croatia, the home that I was born into, what is interesting about me is that I left and returned with tastes, foods and behaviours that read as foreign, even though the shape of my face and my accent do not. In America, the home that I ended up with, what is interesting about me is that no matter how well I translate myself, small hints of elsewhere always remain, like the acidity of a pepper you only thought would be hot.
I guess what I’m saying is, if you saw me pouring hot sauce on a roasted zucchini in Croatia you’d be as perplexed as if you clocked my accent while I’m ordering veggie tacos in New York. I am always taking part in cases of mistaken identity. The feferoni and I have that in common: what may have been a generic pepper, Croat, girl, or American is actually not at all simple.
In physics, to study sweat, you have to study heat, and to study heat you have to study thermodynamics. As a discipline, thermodynamics had its first peak in the 1800s, when physicists and engineers used it to understand engines like those that powered steamboats. It is reductive to claim that the human body is an engine, but like an engine, it can overheat. We sweat to stave that off. The laws of thermodynamics explain how.
The body’s own metabolism produces heat. When a body, like your body, is in a very hot environment, thermodynamics also forces it to absorb some of that warmth. When some combination of the two – the internal heat of the metabolism and the external heat of the environment – or just an extreme iteration of one pushes your body close to overheating, its outer layers erupt in moisture. You sweat and your body can use its excessive heat to make that sweat evaporate.
But not just any amount of body heat, of energy radiating through the skin, will do. There is a specific energy price – the latent heat of vaporisation – for evaporating sweat. As long as the body is hot enough to keep paying it, the sweat keeps evaporating. But after this process is repeated many times, the body spends enough heat to return to normal operating conditions. The sweating stops. The value of the latent heat of vaporisation is determined by the bonds between the atoms in your sweat molecules because breaking them is both what requires energy and what ensures evaporation.
Spicy foods make you sweat because molecules that are responsible for their scorching flavour interact with temperature-sensitive nerves in the mouth. Electrical signals from these nerves reach the brain, they trigger the same response as heat, and your body has no choice but to start sweating. It’s a classic case of mistaken identity: your body trying to get rid of heat though the heat is not really the culprit.
My grandfather sweats at the dinner table. This is habitual. Sometimes it’s the boiling hot soup that makes him sweat, sometimes it’s his penchant for salt. And there is always soup, and there is always salt, but also vegetables that he grows and pasta that my grandmother makes from scratch. We are not a big family per se, but big enough that the table feels crowded, especially when we all dunk our forks into the same salad bowl, foregoing manners. I always sit between my father and my grandfather so I get a good view of the older man as he holds steady, but sweatily, as the head of the table. When I was young, the most memorable culprit for his always bare chest erupting with moisture during Sunday family meals were hot peppers called feferoni.
Each singular feferon is long and lanky, almost like a green bean, ranging in shades of red, orange, or yellow. Their flavour is similar to cayenne, but because they are almost always served pickled, please imagine being confronted with both heat and acidity after biting into one. They are ubiquitous across the Balkans, and the Croatian coast where I grew up is no exception.
As kids, my brother and I considered it a feat of courage to pull a feferon from the jar and eat it whole. My grandfather, on the other hand, had a routine: He’d bite off a piece of the pepper and then dip the remainder of it into salt and eat it. Those nerve cells in his mouth would go haywire. Parallel sweaty streams would frame the edges of his face. His thick moustache would get visibly wet. He would take a napkin and dab first his mouth and upper lip, then his forehead, and, ultimately, his chest. It was sort of gross. It was also sort of funny. My mother sometimes imitates this ritual, and we always end up laughing to the point of tears.
I was raised as a girl, so no one expected me to ever like feferoni. In fact, grown women in my family rarely expressed passion for anything spicy. ‘I don’t know how you can do that,’ my grandmother would say, watching my grandfather do his salt-dipping, hard-sweating routine. She always sounded bewildered, almost disturbed. I gathered then that, at least in this instance, eating spicy food wasn’t about claiming the kind of manhood that impresses women, but about setting yourself apart from them. It did not matter that my grandma hadn’t expressed admiration at the eating of feferoni as a feat of strength, it mattered that she implied that she could never do it.
My father also likes feferoni and, when I was young, he used to relentlessly season all his meals with copious black pepper. Now, when I visit him in Croatia, the black pepper is supplanted by American gifts of his choice: sriracha and hot sauce. Every year the latter becomes more cosmopolitan, reflecting the selection of multicultural flavours from whatever New York neighbourhood I am living in. My brother follows suit – he ate feferoni on a dare as a kid, but now he tells me about ordering spicy food in Mexican and Chinese restaurants, both of which are still somewhat rare, even exotic, in Croatia.
But a few summers ago, I made enchiladas that were too hot for my father. Then, the following winter, my brother found my noodles too spicy. Having watched them both rejoice in adding heat to every dish served to them for years, I didn’t get it.
‘Are you really used to this?’ the men asked, the question laced with the same tone as my grandmother’s comment on feferoni years ago. It was as if they were asking: ‘Are you really that different? Does your world really taste so differently than it used to?’ I had to say yes, then keep chewing as anxiety built in my chest and sweat collected on my brow.
I moved away from home at 16, and that weakened the bonds between my family and me. Food always seemed like something that could bring us together, a type of glue. But not this time, not even when it seemed like I could offer a dinner table filled with flavours that had always been in high demand. I served too much heat, enough to weaken those bonds further.
I remembered how none of the grown women in my family enjoyed spicy food as much as the men, and my gender started to feel heavy. By leaning so heavily into heat, did I inadvertently fail some test of womanhood? Maybe I should have declared my dish a mistake and myself too dainty for its excess, instead of admitting the truth. But I don’t count myself among women anymore, and I have, since moving away from home, found masculinity in myself beyond what I could once access through those feferoni jars. As it turns out, I could not hide this at the dinner table. How embarrassing would it be if I got outed by enchilada sauce or by a mere bowl of noodles, I thought.
The moment luckily passed with no more drama than some coughing, some hurried gulping of water and an occasional sideways glance.
Each singular feferon is long and lanky, almost like a green bean, ranging in shades of red, orange, or yellow. Their flavour is similar to cayenne, but because they are almost always served pickled, please imagine being confronted with both heat and acidity after biting into one. They are ubiquitous across the Balkans, and the Croatian coast where I grew up is no exception.
As kids, my brother and I considered it a feat of courage to pull a feferon from the jar and eat it whole. My grandfather, on the other hand, had a routine: He’d bite off a piece of the pepper and then dip the remainder of it into salt and eat it. Those nerve cells in his mouth would go haywire. Parallel sweaty streams would frame the edges of his face. His thick moustache would get visibly wet. He would take a napkin and dab first his mouth and upper lip, then his forehead, and, ultimately, his chest. It was sort of gross. It was also sort of funny. My mother sometimes imitates this ritual, and we always end up laughing to the point of tears.
I was raised as a girl, so no one expected me to ever like feferoni. In fact, grown women in my family rarely expressed passion for anything spicy. ‘I don’t know how you can do that,’ my grandmother would say, watching my grandfather do his salt-dipping, hard-sweating routine. She always sounded bewildered, almost disturbed. I gathered then that, at least in this instance, eating spicy food wasn’t about claiming the kind of manhood that impresses women, but about setting yourself apart from them. It did not matter that my grandma hadn’t expressed admiration at the eating of feferoni as a feat of strength, it mattered that she implied that she could never do it.
My father also likes feferoni and, when I was young, he used to relentlessly season all his meals with copious black pepper. Now, when I visit him in Croatia, the black pepper is supplanted by American gifts of his choice: sriracha and hot sauce. Every year the latter becomes more cosmopolitan, reflecting the selection of multicultural flavours from whatever New York neighbourhood I am living in. My brother follows suit – he ate feferoni on a dare as a kid, but now he tells me about ordering spicy food in Mexican and Chinese restaurants, both of which are still somewhat rare, even exotic, in Croatia.
But a few summers ago, I made enchiladas that were too hot for my father. Then, the following winter, my brother found my noodles too spicy. Having watched them both rejoice in adding heat to every dish served to them for years, I didn’t get it.
‘Are you really used to this?’ the men asked, the question laced with the same tone as my grandmother’s comment on feferoni years ago. It was as if they were asking: ‘Are you really that different? Does your world really taste so differently than it used to?’ I had to say yes, then keep chewing as anxiety built in my chest and sweat collected on my brow.
I moved away from home at 16, and that weakened the bonds between my family and me. Food always seemed like something that could bring us together, a type of glue. But not this time, not even when it seemed like I could offer a dinner table filled with flavours that had always been in high demand. I served too much heat, enough to weaken those bonds further.
I remembered how none of the grown women in my family enjoyed spicy food as much as the men, and my gender started to feel heavy. By leaning so heavily into heat, did I inadvertently fail some test of womanhood? Maybe I should have declared my dish a mistake and myself too dainty for its excess, instead of admitting the truth. But I don’t count myself among women anymore, and I have, since moving away from home, found masculinity in myself beyond what I could once access through those feferoni jars. As it turns out, I could not hide this at the dinner table. How embarrassing would it be if I got outed by enchilada sauce or by a mere bowl of noodles, I thought.
The moment luckily passed with no more drama than some coughing, some hurried gulping of water and an occasional sideways glance.
When I try to look up how to say feferoni in English, all of the translations are unhelpfully generic. Dictionary sites suggest ‘hot pepper’ and ‘chili pepper’. When I search for the pepper’s Latin name, I end up on the Wikipedia page for a plant that ‘is commonly known as paprika, chili pepper, red pepper, sweet pepper, jalapeño, cayenne, or bell pepper’. The Italian word ‘peperoncino’ produces images that resemble my memories of feferoni most, but I have lived in the United States for almost two decades and had chances to pop jarred pepperoncini into my mouth while making sandwiches or pizza. The temperature-sensitive nerves in my mouth have long decreed that the two cannot be equated. The Internet offers me ads for jars of pickled peppers from Romania and Macedonia, but not Croatia. I am left with no new information, and lots of old nostalgia.
These small, narrow peppers were my first introduction to real heat and courage, and I want them to be recognised as more than just a generic pepper. Why is there not a Latin name unique to how sweaty my grandfather got when he ate feferoni? For how excited us kids got when we bit into one and managed to resist tears? Back home, these peppers are ubiquitous, but in translation that ubiquity has somehow become a lack of distinct character. The excitement of feferoni, the beating of the heart and smiling of the mouths, has become just another faulty line of communication between the brain and the tongue.
‘We really need more hot peppers in here,’ I say out loud to the fridge door, but no- one is home, and the jar of vegan mayonnaise and the half-used container of coconut milk do not speak Croatian.
Rummaging through my spice cabinets reveals Thai bird’s eye chili peppers, red pepper flakes, powdered cayenne, dried chipotle and ancho chilies, and ground hot paprika. In the fridge, an array of hot sauces, glass bottles filled with reds, oranges, and yellows meet my gaze. An American ex-girlfriend once told me that I have so many ingredients and so many spices. Many are hot, but I can’t tell if that is actually interesting. To be fair, I can rarely ever tell what about me is actually interesting.
In Croatia, the home that I was born into, what is interesting about me is that I left and returned with tastes, foods and behaviours that read as foreign, even though the shape of my face and my accent do not. In America, the home that I ended up with, what is interesting about me is that no matter how well I translate myself, small hints of elsewhere always remain, like the acidity of a pepper you only thought would be hot.
I guess what I’m saying is, if you saw me pouring hot sauce on a roasted zucchini in Croatia you’d be as perplexed as if you clocked my accent while I’m ordering veggie tacos in New York. I am always taking part in cases of mistaken identity. The feferoni and I have that in common: what may have been a generic pepper, Croat, girl, or American is actually not at all simple.