The Columbian Exchange, and the spices that changed places

Capsicum is the big one, and there is nothing else in the same category. Every chilli in this catalogue — cayenne, paprika, gochugaru, Kashmiri chilli, urfa biber, bird’s eye, scotch bonnet, the Ethiopian varieties in berbere — descends from plants domesticated in the Americas and unknown outside them before Columbus. Paprika, gochujang, harissa, berbere, sambal, chilli oil and the entire heat register of South Asian and Southeast Asian cooking are all post-1492 constructions.

Allspice is American and stayed narrowly identified with the Caribbean, which is why jerk seasoning is built on it. Vanilla is Mexican and remained a Mexican monopoly for three centuries until hand-pollination was worked out in the 1840s, which is a separate story with its own consequences. Annatto is South American and became the colouring of Filipino, Caribbean and Mexican cooking alike.

Two more travelled without ever being thought of as travelling. Tagetes — the marigold ground into Georgian khmeli suneli and sold as Imeretian saffron — is Mexican, which means the Georgian blend cannot predate the sixteenth century whatever its name suggests. And the tomato, which is not a spice and which reshaped the cuisines this catalogue keeps referring to.

The traffic was not one-directional, and the American half of the exchange is usually told without it. Black pepper, cinnamon, cassia, cloves, nutmeg, ginger, cardamom, coriander, cumin and sesame are all Old World, and all of them are now embedded in cooking across the Americas.

A Mexican mole is the clearest single illustration in this catalogue: chillies, chocolate, tomato and allspice from the Americas; cinnamon, clove, black pepper, sesame and anise from Asia and the Mediterranean. It is a dish that could not have existed on either side of the Atlantic before contact, and it is now among the most identifiably Mexican things there is.

The same pattern runs through Caribbean cooking, where allspice and scotch bonnet meet thyme, ginger and black pepper, and through the American South, where filé — a Choctaw ingredient — sits in a pot alongside African okra and European roux technique.

Extraordinarily fast, by the standards of anything else in food history. Chillies were documented in India within a few decades of Portuguese arrival, and were established across South and Southeast Asia within a century. They reached the Ottoman lands, the Balkans and Hungary by comparable routes and comparable speed, and reached Korea and Japan through Japanese contact around the end of the sixteenth century.

Three properties explain the pace. Capsicum grows readily across an enormous range of climates, from Hungarian fields to Kerala smallholdings. It propagates from seed, so it needs no plantation infrastructure and no trade monopoly. And it does something no locally available plant did: it delivers pungency cheaply, in a world where black pepper was expensive and long pepper was scarce.

That last point is the one most often missed. Chilli did not arrive into cuisines with no concept of heat. It arrived into cuisines that had black pepper, long pepper, ginger, mustard and Sichuan pepper and could not afford enough of them, and it displaced those uses because it was better value rather than because it was new. Long pepper’s near-disappearance from Indian cooking is the clearest casualty.

The practical consequence for anyone using this site is a habit of mind: when a cuisine is identified by a chilli, that identification is younger than the cuisine by a wide margin, and the older layer underneath is usually still visible.

Berbere is a warm-spice blend — korarima, fenugreek, coriander, ginger, nigella — that a large quantity of chilli was added to. Gochujang is a fermented soybean paste, an ancient Korean technology, that chilli joined in the seventeenth century. Sichuan cooking’s numbing half is native and its hot half is not. Hungarian paprika cooking is four hundred years old in a food culture much older than that.

It also means a claim that a spice blend is ancient should be read carefully. Khmeli suneli contains an American flower. Urfa biber is a Turkish product of a plant that reached Anatolia after the sixteenth century. Neither is less authentic for it — a tradition four hundred years old is a tradition — but the word ancient is doing work it has not earned.

And it is worth noticing what did not travel. Epazote, hoja santa and avocado leaf are all pre-Columbian Mesoamerican seasonings that stayed in Mesoamerica, and the reason is unglamorous: they are used fresh, and a fresh leaf could not be shipped in 1550. What crossed the Atlantic was what could be dried.