The facts about chilli

It starts with a tingling feeling in your mouth. Then your face starts to flush, your eyes start to water and you gasp for air. And yet it all feels so very, very pleasurable. Such is the power of the chilli pepper. This small yet spicy fruit has for centuries been a key commodity in the global spice trade.

It was the explorer Christopher Columbus who launched chilli’s global popularity, following his first trip to the New World in 1492. He found its spicy qualities similar to black pepper, a commodity prized in medieval Europe, and in a letter written the following year, described his new discovery as growing on “bushes like rose bushes which make a fruit as long as cinnamon full of small grains as biting as pepper”. But the chilli was working its magic long before Columbus stumbled across it in his travels.

Age-old spice
The chilli pepper has been used by humans for millennia. Capsicum, from the genus Solanaceae, originates from the South and Central America region. The remains of wild chilli peppers found by archaeobiologists in caves in Mexico’s Tehuaca’n Valley provide the earliest evidence of wild chilli harvesting some 8,000 years ago. Signs also indicate that the cultivation of chilli began around 6,000 years ago. The fruits were used both freshly harvested and dried, as seasoning and flavouring for other staples such as maize and squash.

After Columbus sampled his first bite, it only took some 60 years for chilli to spread to much of the known world. It travelled across Europe via Renaissance trade fairs, huge open-air affairs in towns along the trade route such as Lyons in France or Naples in Italy. The Portuguese took the spicy commodity with them when they colonised Goa, their first colony, and other parts of the south of India.

It also spread to Africa: one theory is that Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama introduced chilli to Mozambique when he landed there en route to India in 1498. The spread then continued via slave trade routes.

“Chilli grew easily, wasn’t as expensive as other New World produce, such as chocolate, and could be dried, stored and transported easily,” notes Jan Longone, curator of culinary history at the Clements Library, University of Michigan, in the United States.