Chris Schlesinger is a restaurateur who has long been the chef/owner of the East Coast Grill in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The restaurant specializes in innovative tropical and semi-tropical cookery--especially grilled foods--from the "Ring of Fire" circling the Earth's equator. His first cookbook--The Thrill of the Grill--was my introduction to preparing Jamacian Jerk Chicken, Ethiopian Berbere, and Southern US Barbecue.
In addition to the restaurant, Schlesinger also produced for retail sale Inner Beauty Hot Sauce (and its even hotter cousin, Very Hot Sauce). This was a hot sauce based on habanero, mango, and yellow mustard, a style common in the West Indies, where it is used as a condiment or as an ingredient in Jerk marinades. Inner Beauty Very Hot Sauce billed itself as the "hottest in North America". This may have been true when it was first released, but it's since been overshadowed in the heat department by Dave's Insanity and many other sauces using capsaicin extracts.
Unfortunately, the East Coast Grill discontinued production of Inner Beauty sauces. Fortunately, Chris Schlesinger published the recipe in his book Big Flavors of the Hot Sun. Here it is.
Home-style Inner Beauty Hot Sauce, recipe by Chris Schlesinger
12-15 habanero or Scotch Bonnet chile peppers, coarsely chopped
1 ripe mango (or try two)
1 cup mustard
1/4 cup packed brown sugar
1/4 cup white vinegar
1 TBS curry powder
1 TBS ground cumin
1 TBS chile powder (such as hot paprika or cayenne)
1 tsp freshly ground black pepper
Peel, seed, and mash the mango. Mix all ingredients together and stand back.
This will keep, covered and refrigerated, indefinitely. Be careful, though--if it spills, it will eat a hole in your refrigerator. If you ever want to dispose of it, call the local toxic waste specialists.
This is from the original label of East Coast Grill Very Hot Sauce:
WARNING: Hottest sauce in North America. Use this to enhance dull and boring food. Keep away from pets, open flames, unsupervised children, and bad advice. This is not a toy. This is serious. Stand up straight, sit right, and stop mumbling.
My own notes on this wondrous concoction:
o Don't use frou-frou high-brow Dijon or other fancy mustard here. French's or other cheap yellow stuff is what they use in the West Indies, and it's what works best here.
o Yes, curry powder. The ubiquitous Sun brand Madras stuff that you'd never see me consider putting into an Indian dish. This, and some Chinese and Singaporean dishes, are where the stuff actually has a legitimate place.
o I dump everything in a blender and puree it to a smooth consistency. I use whole cumin seeds and black peppercorns and grind them to a powder just before dumping them in the blender.
o Allow 24 hours for the flavors to marry (or at least cohabitate) before you first use it. When I made my first batch, I tasted it immediately after blending and thought, "Yuk! This looks right, but it doesn't taste like the real thing." A day later, it was just like the late-lamented bottled Inner Beauty, but fresher and a bit more lively.
o Be very, very careful when handling habanero chiles! I very strongly recommend wearing rubber gloves while you chop these. Thai bird chiles rate up to 50,000 on the Scoville hotness scale. Jalapenos are a mere 5,000 Scovilles, tops. Habaneros are 150,000 to 300,000 Scoville units each. If you chop and handle these with your bare hands, your fingers may burn for days afterward, and even if you wash them thoroughly you can do serious damage to yourself if you rub your eyes later on. Trust me on this. Remove the hard and useless stems, but of course for this sauce you want to retain the seeds and placental ribs, which are the hottest part of the chile. Vary the number of habaneros to control the heat of the sauce. My latest batch used 30 of them.
-Paul W.
