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The hot and mild varieties of peppers are all descended
from Capsicum annuum a genus of the family
Solanacea which relates them to tomatoes, potatoes,
aubergines (and deadly nightshade). Columbus, when he was
looking for his shortcut to the East Indies for spices,
found America and also the Caribbean islanders using hot
capsicums for cooking. The Oxford Companion to Food
records the confusion over their name, peppers? chillies?
capsicums? and what they're called in different countries.
Alan Davidson explains that it stems back to a conflict
between the Dutch traders, and everyone in Europe that
they traded their true black pepper, Piper nigrum with. Columbus,
apparently really, really wanted them to be pepper (pimienta
in Spanish) and to break the hold of the Dutch on the
valuable spice. Black pepper was used extensively to hide the flavour of 'off' meat. He called the new plants 'pimiento'
and most Europeans seemed happy to also call them peppers.
Fearing that this new cheap spice would supplant their
expensive black pepper, the Dutch tried to enforce the
Mexican Indian's name for the plant, chilli. Today, we call them
capsicums in Australia, the English and Americans call
them sweet bell peppers and we all reserve the chilli tag
for the hot smaller varieties. It doesn't matter much
what they're called, they've been cultivated in South America for thousands of
years and are depicted on pre-Columbian ceramics dating from 5000 BC. Europe
adopted them eagerly around 1500 AD and they quickly spread to India and Eastern
Asia.
There's a website dedicated to the culinary
adventures of Christopher Columbus as part of the site of Tuscan wine producer,
Castello Banfi. Written by Lucio Sorré it has some translation quirks from the
Italian, not the least is the title -
Christopher Columbus, his gastronomic persona. There are even some recipes
linked to the legacy of food introduced by Columbus. There's teachers list of
Columbus links here.
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