Foods from the old and new worlds

Isn’t it funny how you can stumble across the same thing in completely different ways at more or less the same time?  A couple of weeks ago, while preparing for my annual St. Patrick’s Day feast, I went on a detour about potatoes in Ireland (here) – how they got there and how important they were to Irish cuisine and culture.  Like dozens of other foods, it was native to the Americas and imported into Europe shortly after European explorers/traders stumbled across the American roadblock to their western route to India.  The potato was well suited to grow in the climate of Ireland and soon became the staple food for Irish farmers.

A couple of days after that I was listening to an interview on BBC Food with restauranteur and cookbook author Zoe Adjonyoh on African food, something I know very little about. Many of the foods she discussed sounded intriguing and I thought I should investigate a little more.  That afternoon, I came across The Soul of a New Cuisine: A Discovery of the Foods and Flavors of Africa by Marcus Samuelson in a thrift store near my house and several of at the recipes were based on either sweet potatoes or peanuts, both foods that originated in the new world and were imported to Africa as a side effect of the slave trade.  In fact, corn (aka maize), sweet potatoes, cassava, and peanuts have transformed the diet of large parts of western and southern Africa since those foods migrated across the Atlantic.

So when I came across this same topic – the migration of food across the Atlantic in the 16th century – I knew I had to slow down for a moment and spend some time on this.  I’m currently reading The Taste of Conquest: The Rise and Fall of the Three Great Cities of Spice by Michael Krondl.  Krondl explores how Venice, Lisbon, and Amsterdam all achieved power and riches through the spice trade, primarily with India but throughout Asia.  He has a breezier style than most academics and spends a not inconsiderable time debunking some pieces of conventional wisdom – I highly recommend it. At any rate, I just finished a section where Krondl attempts (and fails) to document how what we call chili peppers migrated from the Americas to Lisbon.  The historical documentation is so spotty that mapping this definitively is impossible but in the effort, he raises a number of issues that I find fascinating.

Before the Portuguese began sending ships to Brazil and Spanish ports along the Caribbean coast, capsicum was unknown outside of the Americas.  I use the word capsicum deliberately, because identifying the more common name can be problematic.  In English, we can call them hot peppers, peppers, chilis, chilies, chillies, chili peppers, and more specific names like jalapeños, scotch bonnets, bird’s eye, and so on.  They are (usually) small vegetables with a waxy finish that deliver a sensation of heat when a substance known as capsicum (again, confusing) comes in contact with our taste buds.  In other languages, the situation can be even more confusing because the same words used to describe the several varieties of capsicums can also describe the sweet peppers of Spain and Italy (what we sometimes call bell peppers) or the small dark dried berries of the pepper plant of India and Southeast Asia or the grains of paradise of west Africa.  That word “pepper” (and it’s Spanish/French/German/Italian/etc.) equivalent is just too versatile for it’s own good.

This linguistic confusion makes it very difficult to interpret contemporary written sources, but the introduction of these particular chili peppers to Africa, India, Southeast Asia, Spain, and Italy can be clearly attributed to Portuguese traders.  Now stop and think about that for a minute. Indian food has always been known for it’s spiciness and it’s heat – that’s what attracted European traders in the first place.  Yet before the late 16th century, there were no hot chili peppers in India.  That heat was generated through black pepper and ginger.  How different would your vindaloo be if the heat supplied by chilis was supplied by black pepper and ginger?

I once made a Chinese hot and sour soup and was amazed to find that the recipe included no chili – the “hot” part of the soup was an extraordinary amount of black pepper. Now for me, that’s a good thing.  I love black pepper and I apply it very liberally to almost anything I roast and certainly to every soup I’ve ever made, but we don’t usually think of black pepper in the same way we think about chili peppers, do we?

These stories about the transatlantic exchange of foods really point out how changeable our diets can be.  The fundamental source of food in Ireland and many parts of west Africa changed completely as the result of foods introduced from the Americas.  The character of food from India and southeast Asia was transformed by chili peppers, another American food.  There are lots of other examples, but I want to look for how this worked in reverse.  How did foods from Europe or European traders get introduced into the Americas?  And how did all these food exchanges affect centuries old traditions of food culture.

This is a rabbit hole just waiting for me.

If anyone knows of a good source of information on the effect of the opening up of the new world, I’d be very interested in hearing about it.