While reading the (usually) good Arts and Letters Daily, I happened upon an item that ascribed the boom in ultra hot sauces and the like not to changing and more adventuresome tastes in America but to Baby Boomers' aging taste buds. Old people can't taste as well, they say, so they're demanding more flavorful foods. (Never mind that most senior citizens' menus have all the spicy piquancy of gruel.) Fully eighty per cent of all capisicum-heavy sauces are sold to men over forty, the news stated, and already food companies have been working on more extreme versions of their usual packaged foods to cater to the aging American population.
I don't know about you, but this just seems to be one of those pieces of non-news you read more and more often these days -- state a passing social phenomenon or odd behavior, link it, ever so tenuously, to some quirk of physiology, and you have a nice, tidy "blame the brain" generalization factoid that may not hold up tomorrow -- until another article crops up that states just the opposite is true because genetically (or physiologically, or sociobiologically)...blah, blah, blah.
The reason I think hot sauces are now popular among late-middle-aged men is the fact that there are more older men cooking than ever before, and very few of them would like to admit it.
Time was, people stayed married. A man of fifty or so was likely to have a wife, who cooked for him. The food was likely to be, well, homestyle: after thirty or so years of marriage, the repetoire of recipes was pretty well honed, unless she unaccountably started watching Julia Child or Graham Kerr in the middle of the day while the kids were at school. Cooking, for most men, was confined to grilling the occasional hot dog or hamburger over a tempermental charcoal grill or an elaborate stew or chili, made into just enough of a performance as to be mighty impressive to all onlookers but not something you'd want dear old Dad to do every day. A man who paid a lot of attention to food, either as a gourmet or cooking, was regarded as eccentric at best and downright effeminate at worst.
Nowadays, many men under forty or so have faced up to the fact that they might at some point have to do some things for themselves (pick out clothing and furniture, clean house, cook) that used to be outsourced to a stay-at-home-wife. Also, the metrosexual phenomenon means that a good many younger men feel comfortable with such subjects as living and eating mindfully, well, and dare I say it, with a bit of creativity and expertise. Not so with many older men, who still feel antsy in a produce aisle and need directions to find out where the cinnamon is kept. (It's right next to the sugar and flour, on the spice shelf under "C", guys!) They'd love to claim expertise (after all, Real Men know everything) but would like to do so in a way that doesn't make them feel like Nero Wolfe. Hot sauce, and its conoisseurship, covers up a multitude of sins.
For one thing, it takes all the guesswork out of seasoning anything. Since you "like it hot", you don't need to wonder whether you should have added fennel to the spaghetti sauce or nutmeg to the steak relish: just lay on a shake or two of liquid heat and any question of flavoring is moot. In fact, you don't need to be much of a cook at all! Whether you actually intended the steak to be well-done to the point of being dry and grey or the chicken to have pink spots is not a problem when your romantic dinner companion is sobbing for a bowl of yogurt (the ultimate compliment to the chef, in hot-sauce terms). Flesh, fish, fowl, eggs, even juice and chocolate can benefit from this treatment -- why learn to cook when you can buy a shortcut?
Secondly, hot sauce love can be an interest in itself: older guys love hobbies where look like experts just by buying stuff. Setting aside actual flavor, hot sauce comes in all kinds of interesting bottles with intreguing names on them (mostly cartoon guys saying things like "Arrgggh!", skulls, devils, and other manly themes). While it's debatable whether you actually need more than two or three varieties to use day to day, having a huge rack (or tray) of hot sauces makes your kitchen look less like a place where you microwave your Stouffer's and more like you actually spend time there. Whether you simply buy a few bottles from the local megamart or go so far as to collect all five of Blair's AM Reserves, plus his Limited Edition 16 million Scoville capisicum extract vial, you can have an impressive shelf of sauces that will have everyone convinced you're an expert cook -- without having to...well...
Best yet, this carries utterly no taint of effeminacy: anyone who eats food this hot has to be a man, or at least pretty tough. (Along with old men, I would belive that the major consumers of XXX-Treme Microdinners would be frat boys and 'lads' everywhere.I can see them having eating contests with them...of course, being young, they have delicate taste buds...) Eating food drenched in hot sauce is the corollary to the flashy cars, the expensive home entertainment systems and the huge power boats often indulged in by men too proud to use Viagra: even though they might not be good in bed any longer, and are unfit for any sport more ballsy than say, jogging, they can still prove that they're MEN, by ghod! Boy howdy! All the kudos of being a Real Cook without the sodomy! Only in America!
And that is why old men love hot sauce.
In closing, I realize I've been pretty tough on some people..I myself have used Tabasco from time to time, to the extent that my own mother has wondered why I keep buying so many bottles of it (her own bottle, which she recieved at a bridal shower, served her well over forty years of marriage). I even own a bottle of Dave's Insanity Sauce and even like tiny slivers of habenero now and then on my tongue. What I mean are people who don't know how to cook. And don't want to know how.