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| Above, yours truly and Larry Lucier at the El Rancho Hotel restaurant dining room with hanging chili peppers next to the wine rack. |
If you happen to like hot and spicy Mexican food, then New Mexico is the place to go to.
Condé Nast Traveler has an article on the most famous and popular food item that the state is known for; the chile pepper. It is titled "A Green Chile Road Trip Through New Mexico".
One of the styles of New Mexico license plates the state offers is one that has a red and green chili pepper on it with the slogan, "Chile Capital of the World". I have one on my Mustang.
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| Above, one of the license plate styles offered by the state. |
Personally, I prefer the red chile pepper to the green.
They begin it with:
Few states are as defined by a single food the way New Mexico is. Here, green chile is both the name of a plant and a prepared dish. It can be served as a salsa or in a stew. Spanish colonizers brought chile with them when they founded Santa Fe in 1610, and it has shaped the state’s cuisine for more than 400 years. As scholar Kelly Urig writes in her book, New Mexico Chiles: History, Legend and Lore, this is what gave New Mexico the time and space to develop foodways more distinct than its East Coast counterparts.
Today, chile in New Mexico is more than tourist trope. As Dave DeWitt, the Albuquerque-based historian and author of Chile Peppers: A Global History, explains, chile here is all things: condiment, spice, main meal, and even art—most notably in the form of ristras, the strings of dried red chiles that adorn doorways. In this road trip, we trace the history of chile through Santa Fe, Chimayó, Taos, and Albuquerque. And while Hatch Valley, in the southern part of the state, is famous for its green chile, there’s not much to do there outside of the Hatch Chile Festival, which takes place every Labor Day weekend and will hopefully resume post-pandemic.
To read more, go here.
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