“I can’t remember being without Datil peppers…I would think it’d be a dreary existence to have to live without them.” -Mary Ellen Masters, St. Augustine, Florida.
The Datil pepper is a locally popular and regionally unique heirloom pepper endemic to St. Augustine, Florida. The small, spicy Christmas-light shaped pepper ripens to a bright orange, and while highly regarded in the St. Augustine community, the Datil maintains relative culinary anonymity on a national level. St. Augustine’s Minorcan community is imprinted on the Datil, giving rise to a romantic and contested origin story that continues to surround the pepper. St. Augustine’s cuisine is often characterized by Datil-based dishes such as pilaus, chowders, sausages and a variety of condiments. Notably, the pepper is included in Slow Food’s Ark of Taste catalogue of threatened heirloom and heritage foods.
“Bottling Hell” houses the documentary components of my Masters thesis in Southern Studies at the University of Mississippi. Here you’ll find interviews (and related material) with home cooks, Datil pepper growers, chefs, and Minorcan descendants in St. Augustine, Florida and the surrounding St. Johns County.
I hope these documentary elements provide a snapshot of the Datil pepper’s social history and shed light on its importance in the Nation’s Oldest City.
-Anna Hamilton, April 2014
Bottling Hell: Datil Peppers of St. Augustine 
I traveled to Menorca in 1994 with Dr. Lyon and Dr. Griffin to speak with the Bishop and the mayors of most of the cities on the island to obtain permission to return at a later date to microfilm the Church marriage, baptismal and death records as well as the notarial records in the municipal archives in each city. We returned in 1997 with 22 people, mostly of Menorcan heritage, to microfilm the archives over a period of seven weeks.
On the 1994 trip we inquired extensively about the datil pepper and found to our surprise it was unheard of on the island everywhere we asked. It turns out that Menorcan cuisine is rather bland with not hot spices used. It was suggested that any such pepper did not originate on the island.
On the second trip to microfilm in 1997 we stayed in a farmhouse for the seven weeks between Es Castell and San Clemente. We shopped our groceries at a small local grocery within walking distance. In the produce section we found a open box displayed of “datiles”. Dr. Griffin and I thought we had found the elusive datil pepper, but it turned out that the box of orange fruit was from the date palm tree on the island. They looked almost exactly like what we know here as datil peppers.
This has led to the speculation that the St. Augustine community dubbed the local hot pepper as the datil, as it looked like the dried fruit of the date palm. Looking up datil or datile in a catalan to english dictionary will provide that translation.
Sorry that I missed your talk from last night at Flagler.
John Sallas
904-829-5200
jasallas@bellsouth.net
St. Augustine
What a fantastic assortment of interviews, anecdotes and recipes about the most unique ingredient in Saint Augustine cooking. The Chris Way interview has stories that made me laugh out loud. Congratulations on a job well done!