14, July, 2008 - To most foreigners, chilli is something of a provocative oddity in the cuisine. What kind of vegetable makes a person break into a sweat and yelp and howl and gasp for relief, all at the same time? Or worse, makes you scoot to the loo right after consuming it. There is little room in mainstream cookery for food so potently flavoured and impolite, they protest.

To a Bhutanese, however, ema (chilli) enjoys an exalted culinary position. It isn’t just a food or a fad. It is the stuff of life. It is integral Bhutanese heritage and culture.

It’s not just the vegetable; it’s the taste. A bowl of black dhal or a cauliflower sabzi in a diner in India is likely to contain some chillies, and would be considered very hot by most people there. But that, as every Bhutanese who has studied in India would vouch, is piddling compared with the blistering fury of a highland Bhutanese chilli. But it is not raw heat that makes Bhutanese chillies distinctive. It is their incomparable sharp flavour, which some describe as succulent and earthy, with a clarity that seems to reflect the taste and smell of the skies and landscapes of Bhutan.

Bhutanese eat chilli raw or cooked, minced or roasted, but no Bhutanese dish is complete without ema. And young toddlers are initiated in the art of chilli eating early on. Parents pick meat or vegetables from the chilli dish, suck it to moderate the heat, and then feed their child, who breaks into a sweat but quickly adapts.

Ézay is one of Bhutan’s favourite chilli progenies. First, roast the chilli pods and shred over a wooden mortar. Next roast traditional green tomatoes, then carefully drop its insides into the mortar. These are followed by roasted thingnay and coriander leaves. Salt is added. Finally datsi is crushed and spread over the vegetables. The mix is then pounded.

It’s a mouth-watering sight. The roasted pods smell tastily pungent, and, as the bottom of the round-bottomed ladle grinds them gently, their blackened flesh turned supple and they glisten celadon green. When they are retrieved from the mortar, they give off the unique perfume of an authentic lip-smacking Bhutanese ézay: sharp and robust. With zoidey, some say, the outcome is even better. Throw in shakam to go with it and you are in culinary heaven, gushes Tshomo, 45, a housewife in rural Bumthang.

“My late uncle liked to prepare green chillies on skewers,” writes Kunzang Choden in her delectable must-read book Chilli and Cheese, Food and Society in Bhutan. It is a delightful take on Bhutanese society from the perspective of its native food, from doma and suja to chang and ema datsi. She carries on:

“We had to wait as he incised slits in the chillies and filled them with fresh butter and salt. When the chillies were ready they were put on bamboo skewers and placed over the flames in the hearth. After much sizzling and hissing took place, each of us received two to three chillies on our rice. The chilli would be slightly roasted from the outside, and the butter inside would have melted and absorbed into the chilli. They were delicious.”

How can one forget ema datsi? The dish is chilli cooked with cheese and it’s a quintessential Bhutanese dish. For some, especially Bhutanese living abroad, the very thought of ema coated with cheese is enough to send their taste buds tingling into feverish desire. There isn’t a restaurant in the entire kingdom that does not have ema datsi on its menu. It occupies a special place, in the high culinary company of matsutake mushroom. Only this is cheaper and readily available.

There are different ways ema datsi is cooked although the basic ingredients don’t change. According to Kunzang Choden, her favorite ema datsi is with “… dried red chillies and soya nuggets, perked up with a bit of zoidey, a fistful of cheese, crushed garlic and garnished with celery leaves.”

Apart from the fresh chilli, ema used in the ema datsi have three other varieties, each with a unique taste of its own, flavoured by the soil and the sun - dried red chilli (ema kam), blanched and dried white chilli (shur-kam), and blanched and dried green chilli (hoo-kam).

Elders say dried chillies complements dried meat like no other vegetable on earth. Ema shur-kam with pieces of dried pork or orchid with a dash of semi-old cheese is not bad either, say elders.

Naturally, chillies are ubiquitous in Bhutan. You can smell chilies in the summer air as you drive past Paro. The green ones, not yet ripened in the fields, exude a perfume that is clear and bracing but which gives no hint of pungency. They are allowed to ripen, and when they turn red they are strung up in braided ropes in rows along adobe walls and on makeshift wooden racks, or simply on the roof, where they dry in the sun; they make colourful decoration until picked off and used in cooking. Throughout rural Bhutan houses are draped with chilli by late August; there are chillis dangling along the sides of sheds and barns.

The best emas in the country, aficionados say, are from Trashiyangtse and Punakha “They taste like meat.” They also say that the Wang ema from Wangduephodrang is good for salad and the Sha Ridang ema is great for pa dishes.

The origin of ema, let alone of ema datsi, in Bhutan is a hard one to trace. The beginning is fuzzy at best and the key characters and witnesses are long dead. Officials of Cultural Department and the Centre for Bhutan Studies shrug their shoulders. Author Kunzang Choden throws some light but banks heavily on guesswork. This much is known, however, that the ema is not indigenous to the Himalayas, much less to Bhutan, and that it originated in South America. The Portuguese are said to have introduced the chillies in Asia.

Kunzang Choden offers: “Once the chilli arrived in Calcutta … it must not have taken too long for its flavours to spread northwards.” She credits the spread of ema in the country to Bhutanese traders and pilgrims of yore.

But it is also here that the fruit of the Capsicum plant -ema- has been elevated from a cash crop to a cultural favourite, a national dish. Today, along with those who boast they are from the land of thundering dragon or GNH, there are also many Bhutanese, who are proud to say that they are chilli-heads and who make a big point of distinguishing their food from that of others- and a central difference is the crucial role that chillis play.

The reason that Bhutanese actually enjoy eating alarmingly hot chili is not culinary masochism. Capsaicin, the chemical from the chilli, provokes pleasure as well as pain, but a satisfying one at that.

According to scientists, chilli sends the nervous system into a state of panic, and the brain reacts by flooding the distressed nerve endings with endorphins, which are the body’s natural painkillers – a sort of friendly morphine. The sudden shot of endorphins is what transforms the pang of hot food into pleasure, and also what makes it tolerable after the first few bites.

Doctors also say that the flavour and bite of chillies is as fundamentally good as the pungency of salt and the luxury of butterfat – with the added attractions that chilies are loaded with vitamins A and C, are cholesterol-free, and are a source of medicines that cure ailments ranging from rhinitis to phantom-limb pain. Dried ema on embers are also a nemesis to evil spirits. Beat that!

Ema, however, can also cause ulcer and hypertension in later life, according to doctor Pemba Yangchen of the Thimphu JWNRH. She cautions that Bhutanese know their limits. But few care.

“Addictions to ema are formed early in life and the victims, I for one, never recovered,” said Abi Sonam Kitsho, 85, from Zhemgang. “On cold winter days, I get such a passionate yearning for a bowl of ema datsi that I nearly lose my mind.”