Peppers today, sauce tomaly: Congo peppers the fiery heart of Caribbean cuisine, were transplanted from the jungles of Amazonia

We park on a dirt road in front of a cinder-block hut tucked into the jungle. The farm workers, who are dumping freshly harvested peppers out of big sacks, look up and smile. I walk over and look into the hut. Its floor is covered with shiny orange and green orbs to a depth of about three feet.

"There's my field up there:" says Aaron Henry, my Trinidadian guide, who is also a part-time pepper farmer. All I can see as I squint through the haze is a steep slope covered with dark greenery. As we get closer, I can make out shiny leaves on the knee-high plants. The tropical sun is brutal; the palm trees that surround the clearing are dead still. I am dripping with sweat and breathing hard as we climb the hill, but I assure myself it will be worth the bother to see a whole field of the famous congo peppers of Trinidad.

"Well, what do you think?" chortles Henry as we stand in die middle of the field.

"Where are the peppers?" I ask. Pulling back the foliage on a large bush, Henry smiles at his little joke. Completely hidden under the leaves of every bush are dozens of fat, ripe congo peppers. Any peppers that are exposed to view are quickly eaten by the birds, Henry says; only those hidden under the leaves survive.

Congo peppers don't come from Africa -- congo is a Trinidadian slang word meaning "large and powerful." True to the name, these are the biggest, fleshiest Caribbean peppers I've ever seen. Their color ranges from green to yellow to bright red. They are about the size of apricots, but instead of being oval or round, they are wrinkled and curled into strange shapes. I pick a few of the prettiest specimens. One looks like a bright red boxing glove; another resembles a yellow shrunken head. Henry offers to take my picture with a handful of them, so I primp for the photo by taking off my Panama and wiping the sweat from my forehead with my hand.

Bad move. My forehead begins to burn immediately. I try to smile for the photo, but I'm in agony as the pepper burn begins to spread across my face and into my eyes. After a few minutes my hands begin to tingle. Then they, too, begin to burn.

I have been cooking with chili peppers for years and I know the pain that careless handling can cause, but never before have I gotten such an intense burn from peppers that weren't even cut open. Back at the storage shed where we parked, I scrub my face and hands with dish detergent and swear my undying respect to Capsicum chinense.

C. chinense is one of the five species of domesticated Capsicum peppers. It was given its odd name in 1776 by a Dutchman named Nikolaus von Jacquin. In his Hortus botanicus vindobonensis, von Jacquin noted, "I have taken the plant's name from its homeland." Chinense is the botanical term indicating a Chinese provenance, but there is no clue as to why von Jacquin thought the plant had originated in China. In fact, the peppers originated in the jungles of South America. To this day, botanists are still trying to figure out what the Dutchman was thinking.

Botanists are also uncertain about when C. chinense peppers arrived in the Caribbean islands from their Amazonian homeland, but they're sure humans were involved in the transport, according to Paul Bosland, a horticulturist at New Mexico State University. The fruits of the wild species are all small and are eaten by birds, which then spread the seeds. But the domesticated peppers are too large to be eaten whole by birds. "The big-fruited species had to be transported by humans wherever we find them," says Bosland. "Sometimes birds will come and peck at the bigger fruits, but they really don't disseminate the seeds."

Most of the peppers that we cook with in North America are of the C. annuum species (which includes bell peppers). If you're used to cooking with these milder peppers, the first thing you'd learn about C. chinense is to be careful. Pepper heat is measured in Scoville units, and C. chinense peppers typically rate at the top of the scale. The peppers get their pungency from a group of chemical compounds called capsaicinoids. The two hottest compounds in the group -- capsaicin and dihydrocapsaicin -- together make up 80 to 90 percent of capsaicinoids found in the C. chinense fruits. The Scoville Organoleptic Test was devised by pharmacologist Wilbur Scoville in 1912 to measure human response to these compounds. An extract of the pepper was put in a diluted solution for taste tests. The smaller the amount of pepper extract required to register some perception of heat, the higher the pepper rated on the Scoville scale. Nowadays, high-performance liquid chromotography has replaced the human guinea pigs, but pepper heat is still expressed in Scoville units. While the heat of jalapenos usually ranges from 2,500 to 4,000 Scoville units, the typical grocery store specimen of C. chinense ranges from 80,000 to 150,000.

Although they may be the hottest peppers you'll ever encounter, the wonderful apricot, peach, and citrus aromas that you smell when you cut them open can markedly improve your attitude toward hot and spicy food. But what to call these peppers is a confusing issue. The many cultivars of the C. chinense species are all mixed up. Certified seed sources are seldom used in the Caribbean, and farmers will sometimes import seeds from other islands. There is no reliable field guide that can sort out the congo peppers of Trinidad from the Scotch bonnets of Jamaica (named for a hatlike crown, which is the typical shape), booney peppers of Barbados, piment bouc of Haiti, or bonda man Jacques of Guadeloupe. While there are typical pod shapes associated with these varieties, they can confound you by looking very similar. They also may taste and smell almost alike to the uninitiated.