The Taste of Conquest (27 page)

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.

He reminds me that in India, outside of its native Malabar, black pepper was also an exotic import, which—while perhaps not so dear as in Antwerp—was affordable only for the well-to-do. The only part of India where black pepper was used as a seasoning by the common people would have been right here where they could go into the woods to pick it for free.

Coincidentally, just about the time chilies arrived in India, around 1500, the worldwide demand for black pepper (in China and North India as well as Europe) was going through the roof.
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For the first time, black pepper began to be cultivated rather than just foraged in the woods. It became a cash crop. Put yourself in the place of a Keralan peasant. Would you sell your pepper crop for hard currency or crush it into your curry? The cheaply grown chilies must have made landfall at just the perfect time to replace the locally grown but now especially marketable pepper. There are other indications that chili was a poor people’s spice—
pimento dos pobres,
as it was once known in Goa. Thomas explains that when it comes to ritual foods made by upper-caste Brahman monks in the south, only black pepper will do, even in preparations that commonly use red peppers. Yet despite these sorts of ritual exceptions, most of the population would have found it easy enough to incorporate chili into their cuisine. In Indian cooking, spices are used to correct or adjust other foods much as they were in the Europe of Vasco da Gama’s time. Accordingly, capsicums not only made food spicy-hot in a way reminiscent of black pepper, they fit the same pharmacological slot.

From Malabar, chilies must have followed the same routes traveled by black pepper for hundreds of years: up the coast to Goa and then to North India, across the Himalayas to the interior provinces of China. (The Sichuanese were especially enthusiastic converts to the new spice.) Going west, Indian chilies certainly made it as far as Persia and even possibly Turkey, though it is much more plausible that the Ottomans got their hot peppers from Spain.
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It was also Portuguese (and Gujarati) traders who most likely brought chilies to Southeast Asia as well, though it is also perfectly possible that Spanish seamen sailing the Manila galleon route from Acapulco to the Philippines can be assigned the credit. But even in places where merchants and mariners were inadequate to the task, birds swooped in, scattering capsicum seed–filled droppings in even the most remote locations.

West Africa is a different matter altogether and adds yet another layer of haze to an already cloudy picture. In the years when Christopher Columbus was hanging around the Lisbon court, Portuguese caravels were shipping two kinds of “pepper” from what was known as the Guinea or Melegueta coast of Africa: grains of paradise, aka melegueta pepper (
Aframomum melegueta
), and also an African peppercorn (
Piper clusii
) related to cubeb pepper. Few people would mistake the spice called
pimenta malagueta
in Portuguese for black pepper (
Piper nigrum
). The seeds are much smaller, smoother, and lighter in color. They largely resemble the cardamom seeds to which melegueta is related, though, once it is ground, the spice has its own floral, juniperlike aroma with, admittedly, a distinctly peppery bite. The second pepper, which the Portuguese came across as they were nosing up the Niger in 1485, was dubbed
pimenta de rabo,
“pepper with a tail,” because it looked like a peppercorn with a little stem attached. The Italian pilot aboard described it as especially pungent. “It is very similar to cubeb pepper in appearance, but in flavor an ounce of this [African pepper] has the effect of a half-pound of ordinary pepper.” These little berries, occasionally called Ashanti pepper today, actually are related to the Indian spice; they have a similar kind of pungency. However, their somewhat bitter flavor may explain why this so-called false pepper had a relatively short run in the European market.

The caravels weren’t just shipping pepper, of course. One of the main “commodities” transported from the Guinea coast to Madeira and southern Spain to work the sugar plantations was human beings. Then, after Columbus’s famous trip, the Portuguese quickly got into the business of supplying slaves to the new Spanish colonies, and by the 1530s, they could count on customers in Brazil as well. Once again, the records are inadequate, but chilies must have arrived on the West African coast by way of the Cape Verde Islands, since this was the most common stopover for the slavers going in both directions. By the late sixteenth century, some Europeans are referring to chilies as “Guinea peppers,” while Brazilians are calling their native chilies
malaguetas
or
pimenta de rabo.
Is it any wonder that historians as knowledgeable as Aporvela’s Hernâni Xavier are convinced that chilies were native to West Africa and were being imported into Portugal long before Columbus set sail?

My guess is that chilies got to Portugal proper relatively late through several distinct if circuitous routes and were incorporated into the cuisine in a series of waves. Walk into any Portuguese deli and you’re likely to bump into red-tinted
chouriços, linguiças, morcelas,
and
salpicões
hanging from the ceiling and filling the display cases—all sausages tinted to a greater or lesser extent with
pimentão.
Cooks will add
pimentão
to foods cooked at home as well but with nowhere near the frequency found across the border in Spain. All the indicators suggest that these mild chilies reached Portugal by way of its next-door neighbor rather than directly from the New World and that here, too, they replaced expensive saffron as much as black pepper.

When a
Lisboeta
wants heat, she reaches for a
malagueta
or for
piripiri.
Both words are used rather loosely for any hot pepper, though the latter is usually dried. At some point, chilies called
malaguetas
must have been brought in from both Brazil and the Guinea coast, probably long after
pimentões
arrived from Spain. They’ve become widely popular only in the past few decades when the
retornados,
colonials (and natives) who fled Portugal’s newly independent former colonies in the 1970s, brought their African tastes back to the metropolis. The popularity of East African
piripiri
is of similarly recent vintage. Ask for
piripiri
in a restaurant (it is as common as ketchup in America) and you’ll get a little jar of ground hot pepper in olive oil. You can slather the condiment on whatever pleases you (though you might see a few eyebrows raised if you use it on some very traditional dishes). Even today, hot pepper has a working-class (and gender) association. I have found that
piripiri
is by no means ubiquitous in Portugal. Rui Lis, the nonconformist lawyer who has seen his fair share of heat in Africa, insists that’s because I’ve eaten at too many yuppie restaurants. When pressed, he admits that Portuguese women are also generally not fond of the condiment, but men, real men, need their
piripiri.
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Of course, most contemporary
Lisboetas
give as little thought to the origin of
piripiri
as they do to the globe-spanning empire the capital once ruled. No wonder: the hot pepper is much more pungent than some dimly remembered history lesson about a little country whose long-gone wealth was once coveted by grasping hands from Madrid to London to Amsterdam.