The Chile Roast That Stopped Traffic
One September Saturday the smell of my roasting peppers drew a line of cars a mile long down our county road, and a deputy wanted a pound.
If you have never smelled a Pueblo chile roasting in late September, I cannot help you. It is the smell of a whole region exhaling. And in my family we do it right, with a propane-fired drum roaster on a trailer, forty pounds of peppers per batch, and a pot of coffee that has been going since dawn.
We had planned a quiet morning. My sister and I and two nieces were going to roast about three hundred pounds for the freezer and call it done. The wind, however, had other plans. It came out of the west around nine, the lazy kind of September wind, and picked up the smoke and carried it east along the highway like a town crier.
By ten there was a pickup at the end of our lane. By ten-thirty there were six. By eleven the line reached the main road, and a young deputy in a patrol car pulled up with the window down to ask if we were having some kind of event. 'No, sir,' I said. 'Just roasting.' He looked at the line and at the roaster and, very slowly, at me. 'Ma'am,' he said, 'I am going to need a pound of those.'
I started a sign-up sheet on the back of a feed sack. Before noon we had people from three counties parked along the ditch. A man in a suit who had been driving to a funeral called to say he would be late and asked if I took cards. A woman in a bridal veil, I swear this is true, came up the lane in a golf cart and asked for a half peck for the reception. My nieces ran the scales and the bags. I ran the drum.
We sold out by one. I made more in that afternoon than in a normal week, and I did not spend a dollar on advertising. I do not recommend trying to plan this, because it cannot be done. It only works when the wind cooperates. I told the whole thing on farm.FM, where somebody asked whether there was a song about chiles, and I said there should be, and then I wrote the first verse in the truck.