History

Like almost everything humans get their hands on, the history of spice has reached us a little embellished. Here we lay out the theories on the table (some sturdier than others) and you decide which one to keep.

The origin: the Americas, over 6,000 years ago

Archaeological evidence points to Mexico: the genus Capsicum was already grown there more than 6,000 years ago, and it was one of the first crops in the Americas to self-pollinate. Domestication happened almost simultaneously at several points across Central and South America.

Long before Europe knew it existed, the Incas, Maya and Aztecs were already growing dozens of chile varieties and using them in cooking, in medicine and even as punishment: the Codex Mendoza shows Aztec parents disciplining their children with the pungent smoke of burning chiles.

Columbus, or history’s tastiest misunderstanding

In 1492, Christopher Columbus was looking for a route to the spices of the East, above all black pepper, hugely expensive back then. He never found it, but he came back with a fruit that burned even more. On his second voyage, in 1493, he brought the chile and its seeds to Spain, and from there it spread across Europe and, later, the entire world.

That is why we call it «pepper». Columbus believed he had reached the Indies and named these fruits a kind of pepper. The mix-up stuck for good: in English we say pepper and in Spanish pimiento, the same name as black pepper, with which the chile has no botanical relationship whatsoever.

Around the world in a single chile

Spice travelled fast and went local everywhere. There were two main routes into Asia:

• The Spanish one, via the Philippines and from there to India, China, Korea and Japan.
• The Portuguese one, through their colony of Goa, in India.

From Central Asia and Turkey it reached Hungary, where it became the national spice in the form of paprika. In China it caught on above all in the inland regions, partly as a cheap substitute for salt to flavour dishes. They made it so thoroughly their own that today they call it là jiāo, «spicy pepper», with no trace of its foreign origin.

Mao and his weakness for chile. Born in the fiercely spicy province of Hunan, Mao Zedong took his passion for heat to the extreme: he is said to have sprinkled chile flakes on watermelon. For him, handling spice was almost a test of character; he would seriously wonder how anyone who could not take a good fiery dish was going to stand up to their enemies.

What if they arrived before Columbus?

Here comes the theory you were not expecting. In 1995, the archaeobotanist Hakon Hjelmqvist claimed to have found Capsicum remains in a 13th-century layer at a dig in Lund (Sweden). How could it have got there, centuries before Columbus?

The hypotheses range from the curious to the far-fetched: that the Vikings brought it back from their voyages to America (Leif Erikson, around the year 985, perhaps?), or that chile was already known in antiquity. The Roman poet Martial mentions a piper crudum, «long and full of seeds», that would fit, although he was probably talking about long pepper, not chile.

Whatever the truth, one thing is clear: ever since Columbus’s misunderstanding, the world has not stopped sweating. And we could not be happier.