Chillies were domesticated in the Americas thousands of years ago, then spread across Africa, Asia and Europe within about a century of 1492. How that happened, with the myths set straight.
Overview¶
Every chilli in the world, from Kashmiri to Korean to Hungarian, descends from plants domesticated in the Americas. Before 1492 no one in Europe, Africa or Asia had eaten one. Within roughly a hundred years they were grown from West Africa to India, and within two or three centuries they had become defining ingredients in cuisines that now seem unthinkable without them. That spread is one of the fastest adoptions of a food plant in history.
Origins¶
The genus Capsicum is native to the Americas, with its greatest wild diversity in South America. Five species were domesticated:
| Species | Where domesticated | Examples |
|---|---|---|
| C. annuum | Mexico | Jalapeño, cayenne, poblano, paprika, bell pepper |
| C. frutescens | Probably Caribbean or lowland South America | Tabasco, piri-piri, many bird's eye types |
| C. chinense | Amazon basin | Habanero, Scotch bonnet, ghost pepper |
| C. baccatum | Bolivia and Peru | Ají amarillo |
| C. pubescens | Andes | Rocoto, manzano |
Starch grains from chillies found on grinding stones and pots in Ecuador and elsewhere suggest people were using domesticated chillies at least 6,000 years ago. Archaeological and genetic work points to east-central Mexico as a likely centre of domestication for C. annuum. By the time the Spanish arrived, chillies were central to Aztec, Maya and Andean cooking, used fresh, dried, smoked and ground.
Across the Atlantic¶
Columbus encountered chillies in the Caribbean in 1492–3 and brought seeds back to Spain. They were grown in Spanish monastery and botanical gardens in the 16th century, first perhaps as curiosities. The idea that Columbus's crews carried chillies directly to Asia is wrong: the main carriers east were the Portuguese.
Africa and India¶
Portuguese ships sailing between Brazil, West Africa, Lisbon and Goa carried chillies across the whole of their network. They became established in West Africa and on the Malabar coast of India in the 16th century. A song by the Kannada poet-composer Purandara Dasa (c. 1484–1564) refers to the chilli as a saviour of the poor, which suggests it was already familiar in southern India by the mid-16th century. Chillies were cheap, easy to grow, and gave the heat that Indian cooks had previously got from black pepper and long pepper, at a fraction of the price.
In Africa they were adopted widely, from Ethiopian berbere to Mozambican and Angolan piri-piri, a Swahili-derived name for small hot chillies.
Southeast Asia and China¶
From Goa and Malacca, chillies moved through Portuguese, Malay and other trading networks to Thailand, Indonesia and the Philippines (where they also arrived from Mexico on the Manila galleons). The earliest Chinese record is usually taken to be in Gao Lian's Zunsheng Bajian of 1591, which mentions a fanjiao ("foreign pepper") grown for its attractive red fruit. Chillies entered Chinese cooking slowly, becoming important in Hunan, Guizhou and Sichuan from the 18th century onward. Before that, sichuan pepper supplied Sichuan's pungency; see sichuan cuisine.
Korea and Japan¶
Chillies reached Korea around the late 16th century. A widely repeated account says they came with Japanese armies during the invasions of 1592–1598; other scholars argue for arrival via Japan through trade or even via China, and the question is not settled. A Korean encyclopaedia of 1614, the Jibong yuseol, mentions the plant as coming from Japan. Red, chilli-seasoned kimchi as we know it seems to date from the 18th century onward; earlier kimchi was seasoned with other ingredients. See gochugaru and korean cuisine.
Europe¶
In Europe chillies were grown early but adopted into cooking patchily. In the Ottoman Balkans and Hungary they became paprika, which was established as a Hungarian staple by the late 18th and 19th centuries. In Spain, Extremadura developed smoked pimentón de la Vera; the story that Jeronimite monks at the Monastery of Yuste were the first to cultivate it is a local tradition rather than documented history. Basque espelette pepper was established in the 17th century. Northern European cooks mostly used cayenne pepper, dried and ground, in small quantities.
⚠️ Myth: chillies are native to India or Thailand
Because chillies are so central to Indian, Thai, Sichuan and Korean cooking, many people assume they are native there. They are not. All chillies are American in origin and reached Asia after 1492. Before then, heat in Asian cooking came from pepper, long pepper, ginger, mustard and sichuan pepper.
Why they spread so fast¶
- Easy to grow. Chillies grow in a wide range of climates, fruit in a single season and can be saved from seed.
- Cheap heat. They replaced expensive imported pepper, making pungency available to ordinary households.
- Birds. Birds are not sensitive to capsaicin and spread the seeds, helping chillies go wild in tropical Asia and Africa.
- Familiar niche. Many Old World cuisines already valued pungency; chillies slotted into an existing role.
See also the Columbian exchange, chilli pepper and the Scoville scale.