Datil vs Habanero

The Datil belongs to one town. UF/IFAS says it has been grown around St. Augustine, Florida, since the 1700s, and commercial production today sits in St. Johns and Putnam counties. The local story credits Minorcan settlers, survivors of Andrew Turnbull's New Smyrna plantation who moved to St. Augustine after the governor voided their labor contracts. Anna Hamilton, writing in Southern Cultures in 2015, treats the tale of seeds sewn into clothing as folklore from early 1900s oral tradition, and she points to a 1937 St. Augustine Record item in which a local preserves maker, S. B. Valls, sent to Santiago, Cuba, for seed of the Spanish Datil pepper. The botany agrees with Cuba. The Datil is Capsicum chinense, a species that arose in South America and reached Florida through the Caribbean, not the Mediterranean. The USDA genebank has held a Datil accession, PI 281435, since 1962.

The habanero belongs to a peninsula. Mexico's Diario Oficial published the protected appellation of origin Chile Habanero de la Peninsula de Yucatan on June 4, 2010, covering all of Campeche, Quintana Roo and Yucatan. The declaration describes a fruit 4.5 to 6.0 cm long and 2.5 to 3.0 cm wide with a wall 1.5 to 2.0 mm thick, no ring constriction at the calyx, and a mature color that varies while the aroma stays the same. Both peppers are lantern-shaped C. chinense with the floral, fruity perfume that species carries.

Heat overlaps more than reputation suggests. UF/IFAS puts the Datil at 100,000 to 300,000 SHU, in the same band as the habanero and Scotch bonnet, and this database gives the habanero 100,000 to 350,000. The habanero can run higher in the right ground. Canto-Flick and colleagues at CICY measured 18 Yucatan accessions grown under greenhouse conditions at 405,228 to 892,719 SHU whole fruit (HortScience, 2008). Those are that study's figures for that field, not a grocery-store habanero.

What separates them at the table is sugar. Datil fans describe a sweet, fruity tang riding the heat, and the town built a condiment culture on it: Minorcan clam chowder, pilau, and bottled sauces from the 1980s on, starting with Chris Way at Barnacle Bill's and the Dat'l Do-It brand that sold 7,000 gift baskets in two minutes on QVC in 1995. The habanero is more perfume than sugar, apricot and citrus that survive cooking, which is why it anchors mango and pineapple sauces and Yucatecan dishes. Swap one for the other in a sauce and it works. Expect more sweetness from the Datil and more aroma from the habanero. A yellow Datil next to a yellow habanero is easy to mix up, which is how they end up mislabeled in seed lists.

Sources

• UF/IFAS Gardening Solutions: Datil Pepper
• Anna Hamilton, Southern Cultures 21(1), 2015: Bottling Hell, Marketing St. Augustine, Florida's Datil Pepper
• Diario Oficial de la Federacion, 4 June 2010: Declaratoria de Proteccion de la Denominacion de Origen Chile Habanero de la Peninsula de Yucatan
• Canto-Flick et al., HortScience 43(5), 2008: Capsaicinoids Content in Habanero Pepper (Capsicum chinense Jacq.): Hottest Known Cultivars
• USDA ARS GRIN-Global accession PI 281435, Capsicum chinense 'Datil Pepper'