From SBS Food
Chilli is an essential ingredient in many cuisines throughout the world, featuring in everything from from piping hot vindaloo to Portuguese piri piri sauce, but who started the fire? Ed Charles investigates.
Christopher Columbus has a lot to answer for. He was the first European on record to find chillis, and now, together with the potato and the tomato, they are ubiquitous throughout the world, and for some reason prized for the burning sensation they produce.
Historians are split as to whether it was the Spanish or the Portuguese that spread the fire. All we know is that Columbus was Italian, possibly born in Genoa, and that he was funded by Italian investors and the ruling monarchs of Spain, Ferdinand II of Aragon and Isabella I of Castile.
At the time spices were transported by land to India and China. But in 1453 with Constatinople falling to the Ottomans, trade routes were threatened. Columbus reckoned if he sailed west he’d open up a sea route to Asia.
The real story of this member of the nightshade family starts some 6,000 years ago in Ecuador when it was domesticated. One attraction of the chilli is that it gave flavour to food that probably was very bland. “You look at Mexican culture it was maize and beans… it wasn’t necessarily preserving it but it gave it flavour,” says Raymond Said from Mary Dias Foods in Sydney, which imports and distributes many chilli products including many different types of seeds.
“All evidence shows that early domestication was in South America. You have got to remember too that between different cultures, the Aztecs and the Mayans, they created large trading routes.”
“Anywhere they had trading routes you would have seen chilli. It’s not just chilli. Everything from the tomato to vanilla and squash. There is a whole range of food that came out of South and Central America. Eventually it found its way into China and Europe.”
“It’s similar to thinking the Italians have had pasta bolognese sauce for centuries and centuries. It’s only since they’ve had tomatoes. The same with Asian cooking. Chillis spice up Asian cooking and Indian cooking. It was only made possible with the discovery of South America.”
Portugal takes its place in history for introducing the chilli to India through it’s colony in Goa. Chillis first arrived in Goa in the early 15th century, according to Lizzie Collingham in the book Curry. She says that the first imports to India probably came to Goa from Brazil via the Portuguese capital of Lisbon.
Of course, the most spicy curry is the piping hot Vindaloo, itself an Indian evolution of the carne de vinho e alhos, meat cooked in vinegar and garlic. “Of all the foods they introduced to India, chillies are undoubtedly the most important Portuguese culinary legacy,” Collingham says.
Chillis and peppers are now used across the Iberican peninsula according to Matt McConnell, chef at Melbourne restaurant bar Lourinha, which specialises in Portuguese-style cuisine.
“I found Portugal to be pretty interesting in terms of its use of spices, in particular chillis, especially piri-piri,” says McConnell.
For the uninitiated piri-piri is the name given to the birds eye chilli, which is also popular in former Portuguese colonies such as Mozambique. It also gives it’s name to the spicy piri-piri sauce used in the famous piri-piri chicken (probably best known from the Nando’s fast food restaurant chain). “Probably the best, most affordable meal you could have in the world is piri-piri chicken,” says McConnell.