Pepper, Anaheim

Anaheim peppers are a mild variety of chile pepper used in Mexican and Southwestern cooking. Canned green chiles, mainstays of American-Mexican cuisine, are made from Anaheim peppers. Indeed, Anaheims are named for the city in Southern California where they were first grown commercially by a businessman named Emilio Ortega, who founded the company that still sells canned green chiles under his name. Anaheim peppers actually originated in New Mexico, where a slightly hotter version is cultivated to this day — though they go by the name of "New Mexico chiles," or sometimes "Hatch chiles," Hatch being the name of a town in New Mexico known for its chile crop. But they say history is written by the winners, and so we have the Anaheim pepper.