The Chili Pepper’s Journey: From American Traces To European Pages

The Americas: History Preserved In A Starch Grain

Perry and colleagues’ 2007 study reported Capsicum starch microfossils at seven archaeological sites from the Bahamas to southern Peru. The record examined extends from about 6,000 years before present to European contact. Residues on grinding stones and vessels reveal pepper as an ingredient being worked, as well as a plant.

In 2014, Kraft and colleagues combined genetic, archaeological, linguistic and ecological evidence for the origin of domesticated Capsicum annuum. Their models identified northeastern and central-east Mexico, either one or both, as possible areas. The result does not establish one valley as a certain starting point or reduce the domestication of all Capsicum species to a single event.

Ají: An Encounter Recorded Through Comparison

The original journal of Columbus’s first voyage is lost; the familiar text depends on Las Casas’s summary. An ají entry dated 15 January 1493 compares the plant with pepper familiar to a European reader. In Chanca’s letter of 1494, agi seasons bread and adds pungency to dishes of fish and birds.

These texts do not mark the beginning of the plant’s American history. They show Europeans describing a newly encountered ingredient through familiar spice vocabulary. Names such as Nahuatl chilli and Taíno-derived ají also recall the Indigenous languages of that encounter.

A Kitchen Painting And A Natural-History Page

The National Gallery identifies a shrivelled red pepper in the foreground of Velázquez’s Christ in the House of Martha and Mary, probably painted in 1618. Among garlic, fish and eggs, this small object places the ingredient within kitchen work. It does not establish a particular cultivar or a rate of consumption.

A 1705 sheet in the Rijksmuseum brings a pepper together with a butterfly, caterpillar and pupa. Pieter Sluyter’s hand-coloured etching after a drawing by Maria Sibylla Merian belongs to her book on Suriname, Metamorphosis insectorum Surinamensium. One work foregrounds food preparation, the other relationships between plants and insects: the same ingredient invites two kinds of attention.

Arrival In Istanbul: A Record Is Not The Same As Widespread Use

Özge Samancı’s 2019 study identifies red pepper in an eighteenth-century pickle recipe and occasional use under the name Arnavut biberi in the 1844 Melceü’t-Tabbâhîn. It treats the wider adoption of New World products in nineteenth-century Istanbul as a separate process.

This distinction makes the journey more precise: an early recipe record, market availability and widespread kitchen use need not share a date. Istanbul evidence cannot supply one arrival date for every Anatolian region. Regional pepper names and geographical indications form a different layer of the story. Curiosity about the origin of a pepper used in a hot sauce today can lead into those different records while keeping their kinds of evidence distinct.

• The pepper atlas: place, name and kitchen
• A botanical portrait of the pepper
• Ingredients in still life: Peale and Meléndez