The Hot Sauce Info Superhighway

Hot Hot Hot, the Pasadena hot sauce boutique, claims its mail-order catalogue is the first food catalogue on the Internet. If you want to browse it with Mosaic (hey, color graphics!), https://www.hot.present.com/hot/ is the address.

Warning: For Exterior Use Only

Speaking of hot stuff, paprika sales were suspended in Hungary last week following the discovery of flour colored with red house paint in a third of the paprika samples tested. At least 40 Hungarians are hospitalized with lead poisoning from the adulterated paprika and 18 people have been arrested in the scandal, which has been traced to recently opened fly-by-night paprika mills concentrating on Hungary’s voracious domestic paprika market. No warning has been issued about the major-brand paprika that Hungary exports to other countries.

Java Jive

Tejava, the brand of unsweetened, unflavored bottled tea, now also comes in one-liter glass bottles. OK, maybe that’s not the biggest news, but it’s an excuse to note that when we reviewed bottled teas a couple of weeks ago, we unknowingly didn’t give Tejava a fair shake. The bottle we tried must have been pretty old, since it had the kind of cap that requires a bottle opener. Recent Tejava bottlings have twist-off caps.

Fiery Cookbook

“The National Firefighters Recipe Cookbook” features 175 easy, hearty recipes from every state in the nation, plus firehouse anecdotes, a glossary of firefighting terminology and eager comments on every recipe from a cartoon spokesdog named Cinders. (Those who have to cook for big appetites will also appreciate the Firehouse Kitchen Rules, which begin, “1. It doesn’t matter what it tastes like as long as there is enough. 2. The later the meal is served, the more food you will need. 3. When in doubt, make it Mexican.”) The book is a fund raiser for the Phoenix Society for Burn Survivors. To order, send check for $15 plus $3 shipping (50 cents for each additional book) to All Hands Publications, 2640 E. Virginia Ave., Phoenix, Ariz. 85008.

Whale on Ice?

Whale bootlegging is nothing new--the Soviet Union had a secret operation in the Southern Hemisphere that processed 48,477 humpback whales between ’48 and ‘73, while reporting only 2,710--and it’s no surprise that the current whaling moratorium hasn’t totally prevented it. Science Magazine recently published a DNA analysis of whale meat sold in Japan (limited numbers of minke whales, caught for scientific purposes, may still be sold for food there) that suggests that some of the meat was from the fin whale, which hasn’t been legally caught since 1989, and some of the rest was North Pacific humpback, which, if legally caught, would have to have been in cold storage for 27 years.