By SIMON ROBINSON/TEZPUR, INDIA
In 1492, when Christopher Columbus set off from Spain to find a westward route to Asia, he was looking to secure Europe’s kitchen, not change it. Europeans had used black pepper as a medicinal aid and to spice up their cooking since Greek and Roman times. The ingredient, imported from the Spice Islands of Asia, had fueled the economies of trading ports like Alexandria, Genoa and Venice. But by the Middle Ages, black pepper had become a luxury item, so expensive that it was sold by the corn and used to pay rent and taxes. When the traditional land and sea routes to Asia were cut off by the rise of the Ottoman Empire, European traders looked for new ways to India and the lands beyond — not just for pepper but for other lucrative spices, and for silks and opium. Columbus headed west, certain he would find a new route to the East Indies. He never got there, of course, but in the islands of the New World the Italian navigator found a fiery pod that would, within years, not only infuse southern European cooking with bold new flavors but also revolutionize cooking in India, China and Thailand, the very places he’d set out to reach.
The remarkable spread of the chili (or chilli, or chile, or chile pepper, to use just a few of its myriad names and spellings) is a piquant chapter in the story of globalization. Few other foods have been taken up by so many people in so many places so quickly. Ask a Chinese chili lover or an Indian or a Thai and most will swear that chilies are native to their homeland, so integral is the spice to their cooking, so deeply embedded is it in their culture. European and American chili addicts, though less numerous, are just as passionate about the spice.
In terms of keeping billions of people fed, the chili can hardly compare to rice or corn or even potatoes, of course. But by adding spice to such staples, by making even the poorest food rich in flavor, the chili has become one of the most important ingredients in the world. For hundreds of millions of poor, chilies are the one luxury they can afford every day, a small burst of flavor in the slums of Asia or the parched grazing land of West Africa. The secret to the chili’s success lies in the fantastically colorful pods themselves: the chemicals that make them so hot and addictive. “Once we develop a taste for hot food, which provides a high, there is no going back,” says renowned Indian cook Madhur Jaffrey. “It turns into a craving.” The chili, she says, is not so much a seed of change “as a conqueror, or, better still, a master seducer.”
Chilies are native to South America, where people have been cultivating and trading them for at least 6,000 years. Linda Perry, a postdoctoral fellow in archaeobiology at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History in Washington, has identified microfossils of the starch grains found in chilies on grinding stones and cooking pots unearthed in the Caribbean, Venezuela and the Andes. In a paper published in Science last February, she and fellow researchers found that domesticated chilies were being eaten in southern Ecuador some 6,250 years ago. Because there are no wild chilies in southern Ecuador, domesticated plants must have been brought there from elsewhere, perhaps from Peru or Bolivia where, according to Perry and other scientists, chilies were probably first grown by humans. “For whatever reason, a lot of people really liked them,” Perry says. “Once they were domesticated, they spread very quickly around South America and into Central America.”
Chilies belong to the genus Capsicum, a member of the nightshade family that includes tomatoes, potatoes and eggplants. Only five of Capsicum’s 25 species have been cultivated, and in South America, where most of the world’s wild chilies are still found, chilies’ shapes and colors are far more varied than the classic curved red or green ones of Mexican cooking or the small bullet-shaped “bird’s-eye” chilies used in Thai cooking, or the sweet green and orange bell peppers or capsicums found in a million salads. There are pea-shaped chilies, heart-shaped chilies, chilies with the bumps and nodes of a surrealist brain, and chilies that are flat and long like a bean. They come in purple, rusty red, yellow, black, bright orange and lime green. “There are thousands of types and we’re still discovering new ones,” says Paul Bosland, director of the Chile Pepper Institute at the New Mexico State University in Santa Fe. “The variations are incredible.”
By the time Columbus sailed into the Caribbean in the late 15th century, chilies were a long-established part of most diets across the Americas. But as British author Lizzie Collingham relates in her excellent history Curry: A Tale of Cooks and Conquerors, which tells the story of India and its rulers through their food, Europeans initially weren’t that enamored with the new spice that Columbus brought back from the New World. “On the Iberian peninsula,” writes Collingham, “chilies were grown more as curious ornamental plants than as sources of a fiery flavoring.” But if Europeans didn’t immediately fall for the chili, they did become its greatest propagator. Portuguese traders carried it to settlements and nascent colonies in West Africa, in India and around East Asia. Within 30 years of Columbus’ first journey, at least three different types of chili plants were growing in the Portuguese enclave of Goa, on India’s west coast. The chilies, which probably came from Brazil via Lisbon, quickly spread through the subcontinent, where they were used instead of black pepper.
In Thailand, a short-lived Portuguese presence failed to convert the locals to Christianity but succeeded in revolutionizing the Thai kitchen. European traders introduced the spice to Japan. As chilies were added to the cooking pots of Asia, they also entered existing local trade routes and were taken to Indonesia, Tibet and China. The speed of their spread was phenomenal. Within a half-century of chilies arriving in Spain, they were being used across much of Asia, along the coast of West Africa, through the Maghreb countries of North Africa, in the Middle East, in Italy, in the Balkans and through Eastern Europe as far as present-day Georgia. Chilies spread so quickly in part because they are easy to grow in a wide range of climates and conditions, and therefore cheap and always available. “It was something spicy that now anybody could afford,” says Bosland. “It was probably the very first plant that was globalized.”
It wasn’t the only new plant on the market, of course. Columbus returned from his journeys with baskets of strange vegetables and fruits including tomatoes, potatoes and corn. But nothing spread as fast as chilies. Bosland believes it was because people thought the red pods were a new type of black pepper. “People are very conservative when it comes to food,” he says. “But here was something that they thought they knew, only it was spicier and easier to grow and get hold of.” Tomatoes and potatoes took much longer to spread through Europe and Asia.
In recent years, chilies have returned to Europe from Asia on the menus of Indian and Thai restaurants. Indian food is now the most popular cuisine in Britain. In 2001 then Foreign Minister Robin Cook called chicken tikka masala — a British invention that mixes chicken, cream and tomato puree with chili and other spices — the country’s national dish. In the U.S. — where, of course, the chili had arrived thousands of years ago from further south — Mexican food is ever more popular; salsas and chili sauces have outsold tomato-based ketchup since the early 1990s.
Why do we like hot chilies so much? Why eat something that can hurt us? The heat in chilies comes from their capsaicinoids, a series of related compounds concentrated in a chili’s internal ribs and seeds. The capsaicinoids turn on the pain receptors in our mouth and on our tongue. It’s essentially a defense mechanism designed to stop animals devouring the pod. “The body reacts as if it’s a poison,” says David Thompson, an Australian cook responsible for some of the most inventive Thai cooking of the past decade and owner of Nahm, London’s only Thai restaurant with a Michelin star. “It expects more than just a wallop of heat, but that’s all it gets.” At a very low level, that wallop is addictive because our body’s nervous system releases endorphins, a type of mild natural opiate, to ease the sting. It’s that mix of pleasure and pain that makes eating chilies such a wonderful experience. “The reason people get excited about eating more and more of them is you have an adrenaline rush,” says Thompson, who lives half the year in Bangkok to immerse himself in Thai cooking traditions. “We want more.”
We also seem to want hotter. In the past few years, chili lovers in places such as the U.S. and the U.K. have become obsessed with eating the hottest chili, the hottest sauce, the hottest anything. In an episode of the animated series The Simpsons, Homer Simpson coats his throat with hot wax so he can eat a steaming hot chili “grown deep in the jungle primeval by the inmates of a Guatemalan insane asylum.” Colleagues have inundated me with stories of their own encounters with chilies. One said he’d eaten chilies in Thailand that “stripped the enamel off my teeth.” Our Southeast Asia bureau chief told me she had grown up having chili-eating competitions with her father. “I’m proud to say I once beat him,” she wrote. “But then had to absent myself from school for an afternoon because of the consequences. Mother was not amused.”
In September 2000, a military laboratory in the garrison town of Tezpur in northeastern India announced that it had identified the hottest chili in the world. Chili heat is measured in Scoville Heat Units (shus), from the American chemist Wilbur Scoville who invented the scale in 1912. Pure capsaicin, the main capsaicinoid in a chili, measures 16 million shu. A bell pepper typically measures zero. An Italian peperoncino, used to spice up pasta dishes in southern Italy, measures about 500 shu, while the spiciest Thai chilies come in at around 100,000. Most people are reduced to tears by eating anything above 200,000, and until now the hottest chili ever measured was the Red Savina, a type of habanero grown in California by a commercial chili farmer, which measured 577,000 shu.
According to the tests carried out by India’s Defence Research Laboratory, pods from the bhut jolokia, or “ghost chili,” a plant grown across northeastern India, had measured 855,000 shu. The chili world met the claim with skepticism, but in 2005 the Chile Pepper Institute in New Mexico finally grew enough bhut jolokia from seeds a member had collected in India to be able to test it. The results were stunning: the bhut jolokia, also called the Naga chili after a traditionally fierce local tribe that enjoys eating them, measured just over 1 million shu, the sort of heat you normally find only in the hottest chili sauces made from pure pepper extract.
On a recent visit to Tezpur, I met with the director of the Defence Research Laboratory, R.B. Srivastava, and the scientist in charge of cultivating the bhut jolokia, R.K.R. Singh. The two men explained that the bhut jolokia was so popular in northeastern India that it was known as “the king of chilies” and celebrated in a festival that coincides with the beginning of the chili season in April. The men discussed the possibility of using the bhut jolokia in antiriot weapons such as tear gas. (I wasn’t allowed into the laboratories, Srivastava said, because I was a foreign national and clearance could take weeks.) The bhut jolokia might also make a good food for India’s troops, he suggested. We joked about soldiers eating bhut jolokias to get in the right mood before going into battle. “A balanced approach has to be there,” Srivastava said, half seriously, “or they will be running to the toilet all the time.” The laboratory is contemplating applying for Geographical Indication certification, which would mean only bhut jolokias from northeastern India could be sold as such. “The commercial applications are there,” said Srivastava, who mentioned using the chili in medicines and even, by smearing it on string encircling villages, to keep elephants away from crops and humans. “Chilies are packed with vitamins and just so good for you.”
After some time, a colleague brought in a small saucer containing three bhut jolokia pods. The pods had been picked a few weeks earlier and were beginning to shrivel. They were about 5 cm long and a burnt orange color. They had an extremely pleasant smoky aroma — half the reason people in the region adore them, said Singh, who is from the nearby state of Manipur and found the bhut jolokia “horrible” as a child but now loves it in small doses. With a cup of milky tea on hand in case of an emergency (milk or yoghurt is a much better way to counter the effects of chilies than water or alcohol), I used my fingernails to tear off a tiny shard of bhut jolokia skin. The men warned me not to try the seeds or the ribs. “Just place it on your tongue, don’t swallow,” Singh said. The heat took a few seconds to register but quickly spread across my tongue and around my mouth. It was hot, but not unpleasant. I tore off a slightly larger piece of chili and placed it between my front teeth. As I bit down I could feel the chemicals burst out and begin to heat my gums and tongue and down into the top of my throat. I took a swig of tea. Singh smiled and suggested I stop there. “You survived,” he said.
Chefs such as David Thompson dismiss the fixation on heat alone. “In countries where chilies have been part of the cooking culture for centuries, that rather adolescent approach has been discarded a long time ago. People in those places don’t have to prove their manhood by trying to eat the most number of chilies at one go,” Thompson says. He pauses and then adds, “although I’ve certainly been guilty of that.” The point of chilies, he says, is not just the heat but the way they enhance the flavors of other ingredients. “Chili is not meant to swamp or overpower but act as a counterpoint to something salty or sour or sweet, or to heighten the sensation of textures,” he says. No wonder, then, that in five centuries, the chili has successfully seduced the entire planet.
