More than 40 years ago, my father Joe and my then-boyfriend revolutionized the Key West dining scene. This was not a good thing; some locals still blame them for unfortunate culinary addictions and ongoing digestive distress.
That’s because Joe and my boyfriend (to protect the guilty, let’s call him Ed) introduced my unsuspecting island friends to the spiciest hot peppers they had ever tasted.
Except for his passion for peppers, I adored my father. A retired advertising writer, he was quirky, unconventional, creative and deeply interested in what made people tick.
During his first visit to Key West in the early 1980s, when the island was still a haven for fishermen and hobbyist marijuana smugglers, he was enthralled by its end-of-the-world atmosphere and eccentric characters.
The overall effect was too heady to resist. Almost immediately he and my mother sold their Arizona home and settled into a small Key West cottage. Within weeks, Joe knew the neighborhood dogs by name and was immersed in researching the Keys’ seafaring history.
Research on another topic inspired him to launch an organization whose name still strikes fear into the hearts of Key West gourmets: the Southernmost Pepper People Society.
My father had been an aficionado of spicy foods for most of his adult life. During a foray to St. Augustine, he discovered one of the spiciest — the datil pepper.
“I ate one and damn near died,” he later told me proudly, as though that was a positive recommendation.
His rampant curiosity led him to discover that datils were supposedly brought to the U.S. from Minorca and were virtually unknown outside the St. Augustine area. Before long, he had introduced them to Key West.
Joe earned a reputation for growing datils in the island’s hot climate. But it wasn’t until he became the “head pod” of the Southernmost Pepper People Society that he gained lasting infamy.
The society was a loose-knit organization of mostly male pepperheads who met periodically for dinner and copious quantities of alcohol. Each member prepared and brought one or more dishes to the gatherings — apparently with the goal of serving something too hot for fellow members to eat.
My boyfriend Ed was Joe’s enthusiastic accomplice in society matters, and most dinners were held at our shabby house in Old Town. Ed had his own pepper addiction: the terrifyingly hot pili-pili, an African variety whose name (in at least one language) can be loosely translated as “male organ.”
My mother and I were dragooned into chairing the Pepper People ladies’ auxiliary, known as the Hot Flashes. Other regular society members included songstress Vicki Roush, builder Terry Brown, radio personality Jerry Reed, and a guy known only as Tom the Bomb Maker — plus an ever-changing cast of visiting and local denizens drawn by the lurid tales that emerged about dinners and their after-effects.
While I can’t attribute it to the society, spicy food had a huge spike in popularity around that time. Some years later, island residents Tom Luna and Michael Fatica even opened a shop called Peppers of Key West, featuring what may have been the world’s first hot-sauce tasting bar.
A paradise for pepperheads, the emporium offered hundreds of sauces that ranged from mild to shockingly spicy. A few were rated too dangerous for the tasting bar, but patrons who brought beer were sometimes allowed to sample secret blends or those in development.
Today the Southernmost Pepper People Society is (perhaps mercifully) no longer operational. Peppers of Key West closed its Key West store, and Joe and Ed are concocting hellishly hot dishes in a heavenly realm. But preserved in my keepsakes, I still have my father’s self-penned cookbook – filled with hot-to-the-max recipes that feature (what else?) his beloved datils.
