He certainly overstates his case; moreover, he may not have been the best-placed individual to comment on mainstream Portuguese foodways given the fact that he was a “New Christian,” one of the many nominally converted Jews who went abroad to escape the prying eyes of the Inquisition.*33 Nevertheless, he has a point. Infanta Maria’s Livro de cozinha repeatedly instructs the cook to finish dishes with a sprinkle of cinnamon. A contemporary Catalan cookbook says much the same. But even the Italian sources, including the widely disseminated cookbooks of Scappi and Messisbugo, make it clear that cinnamon was the “it” spice of the sixteenth century. Not that cinnamon wasn’t used earlier. The recipes of Martino/Platina, so popular in the latter part of the fifteenth century, use plenty of cinnamon, but they typically use it in concert with ginger and only occasionally sprinkle it on as a final garnish. It would be hard to prove that the increased availability of better-quality Ceylonese cinnamon brought about by the direct sea route between India and Lisbon had a direct impact on the tastes of the fashion capitals of southern Europe; however, it is a documented fact that the naus increasingly devoted more cargo space to cinnamon as the century progressed.
The taste for sugar increased in tandem with the fashion for cinnamon. Food historians who find medieval quantities of spice off-putting must be apoplectic when they read how much sugar was used in meat and fish dishes in the Renaissance. In a typical recipe from Cristoforo Messisbugo’s trendy sixteenth-century cookbook, a fish pie made with some three pounds of fish includes more than a cup of sugar as well as cinnamon and rose water. The slightly earlier Livro de cozinha may not give quantities, but more than half the “savory” dishes include sugar. And while the Portuguese certainly did not invent the European sweet tooth, their plantations—first in the Algarve, then in the Atlantic islands, and finally in Brazil—went a long way toward creating the very idea of dessert in European cuisine. Even today, the Portuguese love their sugary sweets sprinkled with cinnamon. Moreover, the use of cinnamon as a final garnish, even for savory items, has never entirely left the Portuguese repertoire. In Arte de cozinha, a cookbook written by the royal chef Domingos Rodrigues around 1680, cinnamon makes an appearance in dozens of meat, poultry, and vegetable dishes as well as the expected sweets, typically sprinkled on at the end. Fish seems to be the exception; there, pepper is more popular. Rodrigues’s book stayed in print until 1836, attesting to the recipes’ popularity. At the turn of the last century, cinnamon was still used commonly in stews. Even today, it can be found in rustic main-course dishes in the mountainous enclaves in the Algarve as well as in soups in the Azores. Admittedly, these days, cinnamon appears much more commonly in Portuguese confectionary than in savory dishes, yet a popular culinary website still recommends cinnamon sticks for flavoring “chicken, lamb and stuffed vegetables.”
Portugal’s favorite spice, cinnamon, in a somewhat fanciful print from Garcia da Orta’s masterwork.
Though the opening of the sea route to India made spices more widely available (albeit by no means cheaper) in Europe, Portugal’s influence on the continent’s tastes north of the Pyrenees can be considered only marginal at best. Elsewhere, however, this little country’s impact on the way people eat was nothing short of transformational. Today, a brief walk through Panjim’s central market reveals piles of cashews still attached to the yellow, plum-sized fruit on which they grow, papayas the size of watermelons, fat winter squashes, hillocks of tomatoes, straw baskets bristling with pineapples, galvanized metal tubs of white and purple sweet potatoes, woven trays of lumpy passion fruit—all foods brought from the Americas by the Portuguese. The transfer of foods between the New and the Old Worlds has come to be known as “the Columbian exchange,” but at least in the Tropics, it would be more apt to describe it as “the Cabralian exchange,” for the man who put Brazil on the map. It was the Portuguese sailors in their pepper naus, not the Spanish conquistadores, who brought peanuts to Africa and cashews to India.
Nonetheless, when we think of Indian cuisine, we tend not to dwell on cashews and sweet potatoes. The first thought that comes to mind is the spicy burn of red pepper. The produce aisles of the Panjim market have plenty of chili peppers both large small, but it isn’t until you enter the ill-lit back section of the sprawling market, where row after row of vendors display their dry spices, that Cabral’s stopover in Brazil hits home. As you would expect in this nation of curry eaters, there are bright plastic basins full of every indigenous spice, from fat yellow fingers of turmeric and loose brown curls of cassia to fine crystals of asafetida and wrinkled peppercorns. Yet as you breathe in (and I would recommend doing this gingerly, for even the locals go about sneezing), you do not smell the spices that Europeans risked their lives for. What you smell, what scrapes through your nostrils and lungs, what makes your eyes well with tears, is the fierce burn of chili pepper. For while the other spices occupy modest washbasin-sized containers, the chilies fill enormous chest-high burlap bags, color foot-high pyramids of ruddy masala powders, and flavor jars of spicy relishes and pickles. It is certainly the most delicious irony of the spice trade that the Portuguese, who had come to India to bring home black pepper, would be the ones to introduce red pepper to most of the world. It is widely accepted that New World peppers—which are, of course, in no way related to Piper nigrum—were carried to Africa, India, and Southeast Asia in Portuguese ships. What is less clear is just how this happened and when, and even more obscure is how capsicums got to Portugal itself.
THE PEPPER MYSTERY
In Portugal, until recently, people bought their fish, their fruit, their spices, in much the same sort of sprawling market as you still find in Panjim. But today, the customers who make the trip down to Lisbon’s main waterfront market are getting older and fewer. Just as everywhere else in the developed world, almost everyone now shops in supermarkets. If you really want to know what people in Lisbon eat day in and day out, visit a Pingo Doce. The Portuguese are mad about their shopping malls, and it seems that nearly every one is anchored by a Pingo Doce, the country’s largest chain of supermarkets. Most of these markets are upscale, antiseptic, and entirely generic. There is Coca-Cola by the case; you can stop by the sushi bar or buy vacuum-packed tortellini. But since this is Portugal, there are also counters of exquisitely fresh sardines and overtly odiferous bacalhau. So what can Pingo Doce tell us about chilies in the national cuisine?
You’ll find plenty of sweet peppers in the produce section. In Portugal, these are called pimentão, and you’ll find them grilled, slow-roasted in olive oil, and ground up into a paste that is used as a marinade. The spice shelf features jars of equally sweet peppers dried and ground into a paprika-like spice referred to as pimentão doce. When the locals want a bit of heat, they reach for cellophane packages of little dried peppers called piripiri. But just to confuse things, the Pingo Doce sells fresh hot chilies under the name malagueta, the same name once given by the Portuguese to grains of paradise. Out of this comes a misconception I hear stated more than once that chilies actually went from Africa to Brazil instead of the other way around. Yet this very confusion is illuminating, for it hints that the route that chili peppers took from America to Portugal was far from direct.
When João II sent Bartolomeu Dias past the Cape of Good Hope in search of a quicker route to those Christians and spices, there was no doubt about what spice his sailors were after. It was black pepper, Piper nigrum, the fruit of that leafy vine that still clambers up trees in the emerald jungles of India’s Western Ghats. Columbus had much the same idea when he pointed his caravelas redondas west. Yet, in our time, the world’s most widely traded spice is not Piper nigrum but the dried fruits of the Capsicum genus—what we call hot pepper, red pepper, chili, chilli, or chile, depending on just who is doing the cooking. And the world’s appetite for this incendiary seasoning is growing by leaps and bounds.*34
When we look back to 1492, the only cooks familiar with the spice were limited to the kitchens of the Western Hemisphere. Kashmiris had to ma
ke do with black pepper and ginger to give a little kick to their rogan josh, there wasn’t a Thai curry that could make you break a sweat, and Korean kimchi wouldn’t have been much hotter than sauerkraut. Yet fifty years later, chilies had circled the globe. How did this happen so fast? And just who brought the chilies from the “New World” to the Old, and why did they bother in the first place? Then there is the question of why they were so quickly adopted from Spain to Sichuan.
The broad outlines of the answers are reasonably uncontroversial. It is in the details that the story gets murky and promises to remain so until a cadre of fanatical graduate students scours all the unpublished sources and digs through Renaissance privies of five continents to find the undigested seeds that would provide more definitive answers. In the meantime, we have botanical clues, some scattered linguistic testimony, and the occasional eyewitness. Unfortunately, none of this adds up to more than circumstantial evidence.
Here’s what we know. In Mexico, chilies had been cultivated as far back as 5000 to 7000 B.C.E. By the time Columbus made landfall, an assortment of cultivated varieties grew across most of what is now Latin America. In addition, many varieties must have grown wild, since chilies are widely distributed by certain birds that happily munch the fruit of these little tropical bushes. (Birds are apparently not sensitive to capsaicin, the chemical responsible for chilies’ characteristic burn.) Chilies are notoriously promiscuous and will cross-pollinate with no more than the glancing touch of a passing insect’s thigh. This makes them particularly hard to classify. There are nevertheless some four or five domesticated species (with hundreds of cultivars) that botanists can reliably identify.
Columbus and his crew mention chili peppers several times during those early Castilian visits to the Caribbean. “The pepper which the local Indians used as a spice is more abundant and more valuable than either black or melegueta pepper,” he writes. Elsewhere, he notes that “there is…much aji, which is their pepper and is worth more than our pepper; no one eats without it because it is very healthy. Fifty caravels can be loaded each year with it on this Isla Espanola [the island of Hispaniola, today divided between Haiti and the Dominican Republic].” The misguided Genoan naturally called this newly encountered spice pimienta, after the Spanish word for black pepper, in much the same way as he called the islands he visited the Indies and the indigenous people, Indians. There’s been confusion ever since. In South America, the term ají (from the Arawak axi ) became a common name for the spice; in Mexico, chile (from the Nahuatl chilli ) was preferred; while in Spain, pimienta de India (“Indian pepper”) was gradually supplanted by the word pimentón. In most European languages, some variation on the word pepper is used.
Back in Castile, as we know, Isabella did not exactly leap off her throne in delight when she learned the details of Columbus’s discoveries. Others were more intrigued. Within months of the Niña’s return, the spice was planted in several monastery gardens, the botanical incubators of the time. By 1564, the visiting Flemish botanist Charles de L’Écluse reports seeing peppers growing all over Spain. He adds, “The fruit has various shapes and is used both fresh and dry as a condiment.” Five hundred years on, we can’t be sure whether these peppers were of the sweet or hot variety, but it’s a fair bet they were both. Later on in the text, he mentions coming across a hotter, yellowish variety at a Lisbon monastery. These were apparently so strong that they would burn the jaws for several days. Today in Spain, pungent and mild pimentón exists side by side, though the sweet type is much more common. We can infer from pimentón’s absence from Spanish cookbooks for the next couple of hundred years that it was a decidedly lower-class seasoning used by peasants to color as much as flavor their fare. Given the way ground red pepper is often used to tint food orange in today’s Spain and Portugal, it may have replaced domestic saffron in the culinary ecosystem rather than imported black pepper. In other parts of Europe, capsicums were slow to take off, though botanists across the continent noted the new plant with great curiosity.
One of the earliest descriptions and illustrations of the capsicum plant comes from an herbal written in 1542 by the German naturalist Leonhard Fuchs. Here (in the hand-tinted versions, at least), we have peppers in shades of red and green. There were also little champagne-cork-shaped chilies and long peppers like lizards’ tongues. You would presume that they made their way to Germany from the Caribbean by way of Spain. But just where Fuchs himself thought they came from is hard to decipher. The one he calls Piper hispanum, or Spanish pepper, is a nobrainer. But did he think the Indianischer pfeffer (Indian pepper) came from India, or was it just a translation of the current Spanish name? More intriguing is the Calechutischer pfeffer (Calicut pepper). Had capsicums already made the round-trip from the Americas to Malabar and back to Germany in the fifty years following Columbus’s inadvertent discoveries? It’s possible. Fuchs spent most of his career in German cities up the Rhine from Antwerp, the great spice entrepôt of its day. Literally tons of Portuguese black pepper were being shipped up the river in those days, so who is to say that a few capsicum seeds might not have made the trip, too?
But how did chilies arrive in India to begin with? In the West Indies, according to at least one Castilian conquistadore, Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdes, European settlers were eating as many chilies as the natives by the 1520s at least. The hidalgo was particularly taken with the plant’s healthful qualities. Because of its heating properties, it is most suitable for the winter, even better with meat and fish than “good black pepper,” he writes. He also mentions in passing that the spice had been taken to Spain, Italy, and many other places, though, unfortunately, he doesn’t spell out any specific itinerary.
There are two likely scenarios that sent the spice around the world, the first premised on boredom and the second on curiosity. While wealthy officers and passengers of the Portuguese naus boarded with plenty of fine spices to flavor their oversalted food, common sailors had fewer options. It’s reasonable to think they picked up dried chilies as they stopped to provision the ship on the way to India so as to add a little zing to their dreadful diet. They then introduced the spice to new ports along the way. This dissemination could have occurred intentionally or perhaps inadvertently as the pepper seeds were deposited in dung heaps from Moçambique to Malacca. Another possibility is that members of the religious orders carried the seeds with them to gardens established in Portuguese forts along the spice route.
Where the sailors (or friars?) got the chilies to begin with is unclear. The Carreira da Índia made one, or sometimes two, stops on the way to the Cape of Good Hope: one in the Cape Verde Islands to pick up fresh water and provisions and occasionally another (though Lisbon discouraged this) in Brazil as the ships swung across the Atlantic to take advantage of the trade winds. Most likely, it was the semiarid Cape Verdes, ideally situated off the African coast, that were the first tropical beachhead for chilies’ march around the world. Whether the peppers came from the Caribbean or Brazil is impossible to say. José de Acosta, a sixteenth-century Jesuit priest who spent many years in New Spain, claims that in his day, chilies were called axi (a variant spelling of ají ) in India. Brazil was closer, though, and the so-called bird chilies grown early on in India and eastern Africa are closely related to their South American cousins. Both might have occurred—there was plenty of traffic between the African islands and the New World. As early as 1512, a letter from the Cape Verdes records “a large concourse of ships” arriving from Portugal, Brazil, as well as the nearby Guinea coast.
After the Atlantic islands, the next stop en route to India was the eastern African port of Moçambique, just down the coast from the Swahili-speaking cities in what are now Tanzania and Kenya. Across southeastern Africa, hot peppers would come to be known by their Swahili name pilipili or piri-piri. Goans, too, use the term periperi masala for a mixture made especially spicy with the addition of hot chili peppers, though just when the African term came into use here is unclear.
In the
Indian subcontinent, the first mention of the chili appears in the work of the southern composer Purandaradasa around the middle of the sixteenth century. “I saw you green, then turning redder as you ripened,” he sang, “nice to look at and tasty in a dish, but too hot if an excess is used. Savior of the poor, enhancer of good food, even to think of [the deity] is difficult.” A roughly contemporary Sanskrit work also mentions chilies. Nevertheless, it is surprising that the otherwise highly perceptive Garcia da Orta did not mention them in his 1563 opus, despite the fact that he was living right there in Goa. Were chilies first introduced into the south before reaching Goa? (Recall that Fuchs calls it “Calicut pepper,” not Goan pepper.) Portuguese ships typically made landfall in the southern city of Cochin before going on to the viceroy’s capital. Would it not be logical that the residents of the pepper coast would pick up the habit of using chilies before Indians to the north?
I put the question to Thomas Thumpassery, as we had lunch at his pepper plantation in the southern Indian province of Kerala. Thomas’s mother had been sure to choose dishes that would not cauterize my delicate gringo palate. Accordingly, I was presented with a series of delicate vegetable dishes and mild meat preparations along with a sweet mango pickle that is usually served to children. The food was a delicious blend of smoke, coconut, and spice with a subtle interplay of chile, turmeric, cumin, ginger, and curry leaf. But where was the black pepper that grew just across the driveway? “We don’t eat it,” Thomas told me. One of the odd ironies of the black pepper trade is that the spice is hardly ever used in the local cooking. Just about the only exception, made mostly by Keralan Christians, is in so-called continental preparations, which are the local interpretations of European cooking. But very little is used in indigenous dishes. This is not true in other parts of India, where Keralan pepper is used much more commonly than in its place of origin. Even just across the Western Ghats, which separate Kerala from the state of Tamil Nadu, they use lots of black pepper. “I hate the taste,” quips Thomas, confirming the point.
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