Chili

Capsicum annuum from The Flora Homoeopathica, London, 1852–53.

There are five domesticated species of the chili plant, which all belong to the genus Capsicum. There are also around thirty wild species.¹ The domesticated species are:

C. annuum – the most common chili in the world. These include the characteristic and typically finger-shaped chilis, but have a lot of variability in shape, size and colour. They were first domesticated in Mexico and range from hot to mild.²

C. chinense – includes the Scotch Bonnet, Habanero and Carolina Reaper varieties. The fruits are typically globular or cherry-shaped and are super-hot. Domesticated in northern Amazonia.

C. baccatum – includes the Bishop’s Crown or Friar’s Hat and Aji Amarillo varieties; first domesticated in Bolivia. The chili pods typically hang down and they are very hot.

C. frutescens – includes the Tabasco, Malagueta and Cabe Rawit peppers. They are typically small with elongated conical shape and grow erect on the plant. Domesticated in the Caribbean.

C. pubescens – includes the Rocoto peppers; fruits tend to be globular. It is a long-lived species, and the chilis have a characteristic fruity aroma. Domesticated in the southern Andes.

Capsicum is a member of the Solanaceae family, which includes tomatoes, potatoes and eggplants. Chilis are believed to have first arisen in Bolivia and the various species are all traced to different parts of South America. Wild chili harvesting began about 8,000 years ago and they seem to have been cultivated from around 6,000 years ago.³ The earliest macro remains of chilis were retrieved from caves in Mexico, being roughly 9,000 to 7,000 years old – this makes them among the oldest spices used by humans.⁴ Very early remains (starches) of chili peppers were also recovered from sites in Ecuador in sediment samples, milling stones, and as food residues in sherds of cooking vessels.⁵ The sites date to 6,100 years old.

The heat of chilis seems to be quite addictive to a lot of people, myself included. This heat or ‘pungency’ is recorded in Scoville Heat Units (SHU), and this is based on the amount of capsaicinoids (capsaicin being the most abundant) present. Capsaicinoids are alkaloids which occur in the tissue surrounding the seeds, internal membranes and other parts of the chili. The modern method to measure pungency is ‘high performance liquid chromatography’ – then multiply capsaicinoids in ppm by 15 to convert to SHU. On the Scoville scale anything above 80,000 SHU is termed ‘very highly pungent’, but a mere 80,000 score is kids’ stuff when you look at the table below. Bear in mind that these are a tiny selection of well-known varieties – there are over 50,000 Capsicum cultivars worldwide.

Table 7 | Common Chili Varieties and their Pungency

The world’s hottest chili is now the Carolina Reaper, which has reached up to 2.2 million SHU.

Chilis spread throughout South and Central America – Perry et al. reported a site with chili starch on a groundstone tool, some 5,600 years old, in Panama; in Peru there was cultivation of three domesticated species of chili from 4,000 years BP; in San Salvador from 1,000 years ago; and from a site in Venezuela 450–1,000 years ago. They found the association of chili with maize at every site. Chili plants themselves were spread naturally by birds as they do not have receptors to feel the burn of capsaicin (unlike most mammals, who feel the pain as much as we do).

However, chili didn’t spread to Europe until after it was discovered by the Genoese navigator Christopher Columbus in 1492. Columbus was actually searching for a western route to Asia, which was believed to be the source of spices only obtainable at great cost and (it was thought) by the overland Silk Road route. The voyage was financed by Spain after the Portuguese had rejected the idea (this was to be four years after Bartolomeo Dias had rounded the Cape of Good Hope, but still several years before da Gama reached India). Columbus’ fleet comprised the Santa Maria (his flagship), the Niña and the Pinta. The round-trip journey was much shorter than that of da Gama and subsequent expeditions to the East – seven months in this case as opposed to two or three years for the early eastern voyages. Columbus reached San Salvador in the Bahamas a little over two months after departing Spain, and reached the north coast of Cuba about two weeks later.⁷ After exploring some of the islands west of San Salvador, they headed south-west for Cuba following native advice, with Columbus confident that it would be rich in gold and spices (he wrongly thought that Cuba might be the island of Cipango, or Japan).

Peter Martyr d’Anghiera, a chronicler in the Spanish court, wrote a letter in 1511 based on the first voyage describing ‘rough-coated berries of different colours more pungent to the taste than Caucasian pepper’.⁸ Columbus described the indigenous people as ‘naked and without arms but hopelessly timid’ and scrupulously honest. This observation was sadly prescient, and the subsequent Spanish colonisation of the Americas was terribly brutal. We are indebted to Bartolome de las Casas, a contemporary writer and priest who arrived in Hispaniola in 1502, for the surviving lengthy abstract of the Columbus journal. Columbus finally reached Spain in March 1493, returning to a hero’s welcome.

Columbus’ second voyage, in 1493, used a much larger fleet, comprising two carracks and fifteen caravels with around 1,200 men, and their main aim was to spread Christianity. They departed Spain on 25 September and made landfall in Dominica in the southern Leeward Islands on 3 November.

Columbus called this new plant pimiento (though the word ‘chili’ is derived from an Aztec word), associating it with pepper on account of its pungent heat, despite there being no botanical relationship between chili and black pepper.

The second voyage eventually descended into a physical and moral quagmire. Many of the settlers died of illness or malnutrition; officers abused and enslaved the indigenous people; and many of the enslaved natives were shipped back to Spain. The fleet finally returned to Spain in 1496. He was to lead two more voyages, finding the South American mainland at Venezuela and reaching Central America, and had to endure rebellions and imprisonment and other indignities, but he would never find his way westwards to the Spice Islands. He died in 1506.

The Santa Maria at anchor, Andries van Eertvelt, c. 1628. Columbus’ flagship was lost on Christmas Day 1492 at Hispaniola. (National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London)

Although Columbus brought the plant back to Spain, it was the Portuguese traders who exported chili to Portuguese Africa, India, Malacca and Indonesia.¹⁰ The chilis were part of a food group, i.e. maize, beans, squash and chili, brought over to Europe by Columbus and the Portuguese. After this initial phase of rediscovery, chili spread to Europe, Africa and Asia very quickly. Initial use in Europe was probably as curiosities within botanical gardens or as ornamental plants, later evolving towards culinary use.

The earliest European picture of chili (C. frutescens) comes from the Codex Amphibiorum of around 1540, held in the Austrian National Library.¹² This, together with the herbal catalogue with Capsicum illustrations by the German botanist Leonhart Fuchs in 1543 (Figure 29), proves that peppers were known in central Europe by that time.¹³ Both Fuchs and later John Gerard (1597) illustrated rounded, finger- and globular-shaped forms. Gerard described chili as Ginnie or Indian Pepper, suggesting sources from West Africa and from India by the late sixteenth century.¹⁴

The Portuguese could have obtained their chilis (and associated foods) from the Spanish Main or from Spanish ports. From Portugal the trade went to the Portuguese Atlantic Islands, Angola, Portuguese East Africa and India. They had reached Goa at a very early date; maize was exported from Gujarat in the early 1500s. Shortly after this, the food complex routed to Malacca and Indonesia and to the Bay of Bengal, Burma and China. Diffusion might also have occurred from Africa and India to the Mediterranean and parts of Europe via the Red Sea and/or the Persian Gulf by Turk and Arab traders.¹⁵ Maize was already established with the Ottoman Turks by 1539, and other components of the food group, including chili, also became widespread. Andrews says that the Ottoman Turks were probably more responsible than any other group of people after the Portuguese for distribution of the Meso-American foodstuffs. The Ottomans conquered Hungary in 1526 and laid siege to Vienna; shortly thereafter, peppers were recorded in central Europe. Hungarian pepper was used to make paprika from dried and ground bright red C. annuum, a spice now generally associated with Hungary. In the Czech lands of the sixteenth century, peppers were known as ‘Turkish Pepper’ or ‘Indian Pepper’; archaeobotanical remains have been found dating from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries in Prague and Brno.¹⁶ Chilis reached England by 1548 – and we’ve never looked back!

M.-C. Daunay et al. documented the variety and changing forms of Capsicum illustrations in the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literature demonstrating that species other than C. annuum were present.¹⁷ C. chinense and C. frutescens were more likely to have been exported before C. annuum, as these were the species most likely cultivated in the West Indies in that time.¹⁸ Other authors consider C. annuum to have arrived in Europe first – it has certainly been the most successful species – but there probably wasn’t much in it as illustrations of all three occur in mid-sixteenth-century European literature. One of the reasons for chili’s global conquest is the ease of reproduction – it can self-pollinate and is also adaptable to a wide variety of settings, though it mainly thrives in tropical and subtropical environments.

Chili arrived in China via a southern coastal route, possibly from Zhejiang Province.¹⁹ The first written reference to the plant is in the Yashangzhai Zunsheng Bajian of 1591 by Gao Lian. It is also plausible that chili was first introduced by the Portuguese in their Macau colony, which was held from 1557, and only then to Zhejiang via Shanghai and westwards into the interior along the Yangtze River. It may have started to be used for seasoning food in Guizhou Province, still one of the main chili-producing areas today. Chili would also have found its way into China from India via the Indus, and then the overland Silk Road route. Figure 30 illustrates the rapid global diffusion of Capsicum.

Curiously, chilis may have had only minor spread to North America from Mexico, etc., and only became established after colonisation by Europeans! Use of slave labour from the early 1600s probably had an impact as the African slaves already used chili.²⁰

There is a huge diversity in shapes, sizes and colours of chilis, even among single species.

After the introduction of chili to South Asia it was cultivated rapidly, with the climate being very well suited to this crop. India is now the largest producer and exporter of chilis in the world.²¹ Dr Mehta has some good stories about chili folklore and unusual uses: from deterring vampires and werewolves in eastern Europe to marauding wild elephants in Assam. They are often used in hangover cures, have been used in blushers to give cheeks a healthy glow, as a deterrent for children prone to sucking their thumbs and biting their nails and, almost unbelievably (especially to anyone who has inadvertently rubbed their eye after chopping chilis), as eye drops for curing headaches. The main conventional uses of chilis are as a source of pungency, food colourant, flavour and texture. Paprika adds flavour and colour without too much pungency; similarly, bell peppers are used as colourful textured vegetables rather than sources of heat. Common food products include fresh, dried, crushed, powdered, smoked and fermented chili, oleoresin (a viscous liquid extracted from fine powdered chilis), a huge variety of chili sauces and pastes, chili oil, in curry powders and other spice mixes, and in various salsas and seasonings.