After 1492 plants, animals, people and diseases crossed between the Americas and the rest of the world. For spices it meant chillies, allspice and vanilla for the Old World, and a new plantation economy.
Overview¶
The Columbian exchange is the transfer of plants, animals, microbes, people and ideas between the Americas and Afro-Eurasia that followed Christopher Columbus's voyages from 1492. The historian Alfred W. Crosby coined the term in his 1972 book The Columbian Exchange. Its most catastrophic element was disease: smallpox, measles and other infections brought by Europeans killed a very large proportion of the Indigenous population of the Americas in the following century. Its most lasting culinary element was an entirely new set of crops for the Old World, among them maize, potatoes, tomatoes, cacao and the chilli.
Columbus and the "pepper" he found¶
Columbus sailed west in 1492 hoping to reach Asia and its spices. What he found in the Caribbean were plants he did not recognise. His journal (which survives only in a summary by Bartolomé de las Casas) records in January 1493, on Hispaniola, a spice the Taíno called ají, which he described as their pepper and more valuable than black pepper. Diego Álvarez Chanca, physician on the second voyage in 1493, also described chillies. Columbus's decision to call them pimiento, from the Spanish for pepper, is why English still calls a fruit of the genus Capsicum a "chilli pepper", though it is unrelated to black pepper.
Columbus brought chilli seeds back to Spain, but the plant's spread through the Old World was mainly the work of Portuguese traders over the following century. See how chillies spread around the world.
From the Americas¶
| Plant | Origin | What happened next |
|---|---|---|
| Chillies (Capsicum spp.) | Mexico, Central and South America | Adopted across Africa and Asia within about a century; now among the most-used spices on earth |
| Allspice (Pimenta dioica) | Caribbean and Central America, especially Jamaica | Called "Jamaica pepper"; exported to Europe from the 16th–17th centuries |
| Vanilla (Vanilla planifolia) | Mexico, cultivated by the Totonac | Used with cacao by the Aztecs; grown elsewhere only after hand pollination was developed in 1841 |
| Annatto (Bixa orellana) | Tropical Americas | Colouring for food and textiles; now used in cheeses, Filipino and Yucatecan cooking |
| Pink peppercorns (Schinus spp.) | South America | Planted widely as ornamentals; a spice mainly since the 20th century |
| Epazote | Mexico | Remains mostly a Mexican herb |
| Culantro | Caribbean and Central America | Spread to Southeast Asia, where it is used in Vietnam and Thailand |
To the Americas¶
Europeans, Africans and Asians brought their own plants west. Black pepper, cinnamon, cloves and nutmeg arrived as trade goods; cumin, coriander, oregano, garlic, mint, parsley and citrus were planted in Spanish and Portuguese colonies and became central to Mexican, Caribbean and South American cooking. Ginger was grown in Spanish Caribbean colonies in the 16th century and later in Jamaica. Sesame, tamarind and okra came with the transatlantic slave trade from Africa.
Sugar, spices and slavery¶
The most important crop moved to the Americas was not a spice but sugar cane, and the plantation system built around it was founded on the enslavement of millions of Africans. Spice crops fitted into the same economy: ginger in the Caribbean, nutmeg in Grenada in the 19th century, and vanilla on the Indian Ocean island of Réunion.
📜 Edmond Albius and vanilla
Vanilla orchids flower outside Mexico, but without their native pollinators they rarely set fruit. In 1841, on Réunion, Edmond Albius, an enslaved boy of twelve, devised a quick method of hand-pollinating the flowers with a sliver of bamboo and his thumb. The technique made commercial vanilla possible across the tropics and is still used. Albius was freed in 1848 when France abolished slavery, but received little reward and died poor in 1880.
Manila and the Pacific¶
From 1565 until 1815, Spanish galleons sailed each year between Acapulco and Manila, carrying American silver to Asia and Chinese silks and porcelain back. They also carried plants and cooks. Chillies, maize, sweet potatoes and Mexican techniques reached the Philippines this way, and Asian goods, including spices, reached New Spain.
Why it matters for cooking¶
It is hard to imagine many "traditional" cuisines without American plants: Hungarian cooking without paprika, Sichuan food without chillies, Italian food without tomatoes, or Indian and Thai curries without chilli heat. Most of these combinations are between about 200 and 450 years old. None of this means those cuisines are inauthentic; it means that cuisines have always changed, and that the Columbian exchange changed them faster than anything before it.