The Taste of Conquest (26 page)

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.
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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.

T
HE
P
EPPER
M
YSTERY

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.
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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 make 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.