Ancient foodies liked it hot

news@nature.com ^ | 15 February 2007 | Heidi Ledford

[neverdem]

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Published online: 15 February 2007; | doi:10.1038/news070212-11

Ancient foodies liked it hot

Domesticated chillies may have seasoned cuisine more than 6,000 years ago.

Heidi Ledford

Hot stuff: chillies have been a part of our diets for longer than we thought.Linda Perry

When it comes to cuisine, some traditions are sacred. A Thai curry, for example, should be spicy enough to make your eyes water and your nose run. The heat from Korean kim chi simply must sizzle your tastebuds and leave you gasping for relief. Now archaeologists have found that New World farmers may have established blistering traditions like these much earlier than we thought.

According to an analysis published today in Science¹, farmers in the Americas domesticated the chilli pepper more than 6,000 years ago. In some regions the desire for its flavour even predated the use of pottery.

Although they are vital for many traditional dishes around the world, chilli peppers are relative newcomers to the global culinary scene. The fiery crops originated in the Americas and didn't spread elsewhere until after Christopher Columbus had crossed the Atlantic.

But in their birthplace, the New World, it seems that people have been partial to spice for millennia. It is unclear what recipes they might have concocted — although given that their use predates pots and bowls, they may have been eaten raw at first.

Researchers led by Linda Perry, an anthropologist at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington DC, have found evidence of chilli cultivation at sites ranging from the Bahamas to the northwest corner of Peru. The oldest sites with evidence of domesticated chillies are in Ecuador.

Mystery food

The chilli leftovers were discovered by accident. For years, scientists had been finding microscopic grains of starch that they could not identify at archaeological sites around the Americas. The starch grains were clearly from plants, but did not match any of the usual suspects such as maize or squash. No one thought to check for chillies, says Perry, because everyone assumed early farmers would have focused on food staples. "It was quite a surprise because it was a plant being used as a spice rather than a staple," she says.

Archaeologists can be forgiven the mistake as they have had little opportunity to gain experience with chilli peppers, Perry adds. Ancient food crops often show up as charred remains left by a cooking fire, but chefs were unlikely to drop a chilli into the fire — not more than once, at least. Many species of chilli release an acrid smoke when burned, quickly turning a peaceful meal into a coughing fit.

The first person that bit into one of these peppers would have been in a lot of pain  Paul Bosland, New Mexico State University

Meanwhile, some plants leave behind small, durable silica microfossils, but chilli peppers don't make them. And pollen — which is often used to trace plants back through history — does not preserve well in the tropics.

But starch grains embedded in grinding tools and encrusted onto cookware have provided a new way of reconstructing prehistoric recipes, because the size and shape of preserved starch grains can be characteristic of a specific group of plants. Perry found that each of the five different species of modern cultivated peppers — members of the genus Capsicum — produce starch grains that are larger than grains from their wild relatives.

Armed with that knowledge, Perry looked back at the mysterious starch grain samples and realized that they were from domesticated chillies. Her next step will be to study samples from older sites, in the hope of tracking down intermediates between wild and domesticated chillies. Those intermediates will indicate exactly when and where cultivation began.

Stoneware

Over 6,000 years ago, the oldest site — the dry, forested Real Alto settlement in Ecuador — would have been a small village of mud and wood houses covered with thatched roofs, says Perry's colleague Deborah Pearsall, an anthropologist at the University of Missouri, Columbia. Now, all that's left of those houses are the mounds on which they stood.

Ecuadorian farmers had been growing key staples like squash and maize for at least 1,000 years before Real Alto cooks pounded their food with stone utensils, forcing starches into cracks in the stone and leaving clues to their spicy diet behind.

People had suggested that chillies were domesticated as long as 6,000 years ago, but no one had been able to prove it, says Vaughn Bryant, who studies ancient food plants at Texas A&M University in College Station. He suggests that ancient cultures might have traded domesticated peppers in the early days of agriculture. "Peppers were just another good commodity," he says.

Chilli pepper cultivation will always hold a little mystery, says Paul Bosland of New Mexico State University's Chile Pepper Institute in Las Cruces, because no one can explain why we persevered with the eye-watering effects of eating them. "The first person that bit into one of these peppers would have been in a lot of pain," he says. "So you have to wonder why humans kept going back to them. But we do, again and again."

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References

1. Perry L., et al. Science, 315 . 986 - 988 (2007).

[neverdem]

ping

[CarrotAndStick]

Indian food, with its spicy stereotype, couldn't have been so, before 500 years ago. Columbus brought the chilli to India, via Vasco Da Gama.

[Eric in the Ozarks]

Ditto "Thai" peppers.

[AnotherUnixGeek]

Indian food, with its spicy stereotype, couldn't have been so, before 500 years ago.

No, it most certainly could have been so. There are spices other than chili peppers. The reason for Vasco de Gama's voyage to India was to get in on the spice trade then monopolized by the Arabs and Venetians.

[CarrotAndStick]

Pepper(if you intended to mean the black, seed-like variety) isn't used that extensively even in present Indian food. The spices that were traded from India were quite bland, compared to chilli. What were they besides pepper?
-Cardamom, cinnamon, saffron...hardly pungent 'spices'...

[DB]

My theory is hot spices were used to make bad food edible...

No refrigerators...

The hotter the climate, the faster the food spoiled...

[CarrotAndStick]

Couldn't be... remember, spices were traded as luxury goods...some of them costing more than gold in value, weight-for-weight.

[Andy Ross]

Garlic. Mustard oil.

[CarrotAndStick]

Garlic, although from West Asia, was rarely used, if ever, in India, until armies from there attacked India.

Mustard oil, again, wasn't used extensively other than as condiments on few kinds of non-staple foods("snacks").

[Atlas Sneezed]

Ping

[SunkenCiv]

alas...

Red Hot Chili Pepper Research Spices Up Historical Record
Eureka Alert | 2-15-2007 | Gregory Harris - U Of Calgary
Posted on 02/16/2007 2:14:32 PM EST by blam
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1786098/posts

...but keep 'em comin'.

[SunkenCiv]

Just adding this to the GGG catalog, not sending a general distribution.

To all -- please ping me to other topics which are appropriate for the GGG list. Thanks.

Please FREEPMAIL me if you want on or off the
"Gods, Graves, Glyphs" PING list or GGG weekly digest
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[Joe 6-pack]

"My theory is hot spices were used to make bad food edible..."

This is the same theory that saw to the inclusion of little Tabasco bottles in MREs.