The little food company that originated from a family recipe. That is MAMA LIL'S story, with a slight twist. My mother, Lil Lev, from Youngstown, Ohio, did put up cases of pickled peppers in oil at the end of summer, from Hot Hungarian goathorn peppers she grew in her own garden. Jars of these peppers would come onto the table for all our meals, - in eggs for breakfast, on sandwiches for lunch, and my favorite, as a garnish to eat with steak.
One of my mother's Jewish Rumanian recipes, I thought, like her roasted eggplant in oil and other wonderful stuff she'd pack in jars. But I discovered that she was taught by a Serbian friend, who had learned it from a Slovenian, who learned it from God only knows. Though MAMA LIL'S may be the only commercial manufacturer of this wonderful recipe in the USA, I'm sure there are hundreds of people in the Youngstown/Warren Ohio area who put up a version of these peppers in oil in their own kitchens. How did this recipe become so popular in this one small city? Abruzze's 422 on the strip in Warren, Ohio, claims to be the first restaurant to start serving them, back in 1934. When you sat down, you'd get a bowl of semi-hot peppers in oil to eat with bread. And now, the popularity of these has grown to the point where it's hard to find any restaurant in Youngstown or Warren, Ohio that doesn't have a version of hot peppers in oil as an appetizer on their menu.
When I left Ohio and went off to college in Seattle, WA, my mom started sending me care packages, that if I was lucky, might include a few jars of peppers out of her summer's batch (usually 4 dozen or so jars). At first I would generously share them my friends. A mistake. Who could stop eating these until every last drop of oil was soaked up from the jar? Sit down with a loaf of bread, open the jar and abracadabra, they're gone. And before I knew it my supply of peppers was gone. When I'd ask my mom for more, she would always say no, that I'd eaten my share. “C'mon Mom, I know you have some hidden in the basement cupboard.” But she said "If you knew just how much time and work it takes, you'd be more careful with whom you share. Maybe you should think about making some yourself sometime."
Then one hot late summer day after tubing on the Yakima River in central Washington, I discovered the same fresh Hungarian goathorn peppers at a roadside vegetable stand. Except these peppers were so much more colorful than the ones I was used to from Ohio. In most of the country, the summers are humid, and the Hungarian goathorn peppers must be picked while still green, before they soften. In the fertile valleys of central WA., the climate is ideal. The dry hot days and cool nights allow the Hungarian goathorn peppers to ripen to their full spectrum of color, from green to yellow to orange to red, while still staying firm. (And the more color in the mature pepper, the higher its sugar content. By packing the jars with the variety of color, it made for a wonderful complexity of flavor!)
I asked my mother to send her recipe. She did. She even sent me a freshly slit pepper, showing me how to remove the seeds. In September 1992, a couple friends and their teenage kids and I drove over the Cascade Mountains to Krueger Pepper Gardens, in Wapato, WA. and picked 250 lbs. of the colorful Hungarian goathorn peppers. We hauled them back to the Seattle Unitarian Church, and over one very long weekend, we cut, de-seeded, pickled, drained, and hand-packed the peppers into the first batch of 250 jars of Mama Lil's Peppers in Oil. I learned first hand just how much a chore it was!
And soon Mama Lil was receiving care packages from her son.
A dozen years later, MAMA LIL'S Peppers harvested and packed over 200 tons of Hungarian hot wax (goat horn) peppers in Washington's beautiful and fertile Yakima Valley. And still, so much of the work is being done by hand. And yes, still, it's a labor of love. Thanks Mom.
CLICK HERE TO SEE HOW WE MAKE OUR PEPPERS!
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