In the beginning, God created a man and named him Narama and a woman whom he named Uxuu. Narama and Uxuu lived in a land of plenty where they wanted for neither food nor sustenance. In time, God cast them from this Eden.
Having been evicted from his homeland, Narama began to sweat so profusely that he came to be covered in salt. The Creator was, at the time, busy giving jobs to the creatures of the earthâheâs the keeper of this, sheâs the keeper of that, and so on. Uxuu, the first woman, was put in charge of the seeds and fruits of summer, and of rain. Narama, the first man, was given the enviable job of overseeing salt, mescal, and chili.
With roles assigned, the Creator invited everyone to a big potluck fiesta around a table situated on the center of the earth, to which all the creatures of creation brought their special foods. The last to arrive, Narama, showed up naked and covered in saltâpatron saint of mescal, remember. With everyone seated around the table, Narama scraped salt from his face and sprinkled it on the food. He then grabbed his testicles, which turned into chili pods, plucked them, and began sprinkling his fiery new spice onto the fare.
This went over with the other guests about as well as one might expect. Around the table creatures shouted in protest and scolded Narama for defiling dinner. He asked that they give him a chance. If everyone else got to contribute their thing, shouldnât he be able to add his own specialty to the buffet? Just try it and youâll see, he pleaded, that thereâs nothing better for a good meal than salt and chili.
Brave souls that they were, the others gave Naramaâs chili testes a shot. They ate, it burned, and they loved it. And thus, from the scrotum of the patron saint of mescal, who showed up late to a party naked and covered in salt, the first creatures on earth were converted into the worldâs original chiliheads.
The above comes from the creation mythology of the Cora, a people indigenous to central-western Mexico who still speak a language related to the Nahuatl tongue spoken by the Aztec. Itâs not incidental that Narama was the patron saint of both chili and salt, the only spice that is not a plant but a mineral essential for human survival (or, for that matter, the patron saint of mescal, but thatâs another story). In preindustrial societies salt was a rock on which empires were built and crushed, and the quest for it a matter of life and death. Let the fact that the saint who spoke for salt also spoke for chili speak for itself.
The Cora creation story is a particularly colorful one, but it is far from unique. Indigenous cultures throughout the Americas celebrate and revere the chili as a food, a medicine, and a sacrament central to their place in the cosmos. The Inca believed the chili was one of the four original gods and the brother of the first Inca king. The Maya prescribed chilies to treat a cough and a sore throat. The Aztec used an early form of pepper spray as kind of primitive chemical warfare by burning huge amounts of chili upwind from their enemies. Like many cultures after them, the Aztec punished errant children by making them eat a spicy chili pepper. They also dropped a little chili juice on a tooth to soothe its aching. The Aztec, and other civilizations, held the plant so sacred that abstinence from chili and sex was an important form of religious fasting.
Scientists believe the chili plant most likely emerged out of the evolutionary soup in a small area in Bolivia north of Sucre that straddles the RĂo Grande, a river that flows easterly into the MamorĂ© and ultimately the Amazon. Bolivians today enthusiastically eat the ulupica chili, a mostly wild variety that closely resembles members of that original pioneer community. These, or the similar but domesticated locoto pepper, are the spicy ingredient in a simple sauce made of chilies, tomatoes, and sometimes a little salt known as llajwa. Because of the geographic and genetic proximity of the ingredients and people who make llajwa to the ingredients and people who lived in the area in prehistory, it may well be that llajwa wasâready for it?âthe worldâs first hot sauce.
On the other hand, the earliest evidence we have of humans bold enough to chow down on chili peppers comes from excavations of a group of cave dwellings in southern Mexico led by archaeologist Richard Stockton MacNeish in the 1960s. Those digs turned up evidence dating to as early as about 6000 BCE of elaborate burials, including one of a child with its skull smashed inâin his report MacNeish suspects there may have been âsome sort of dirty work afoot . . . perhaps evidence of human sacrifice?ââas well as evidence of squash and chilies in the remains of discarded vegetable matter and, in case you needed proof that these people were actually chewing and swallowing the chilies, in caprolites, the polite term for the fossilized poop.
The earliest known word for a chili pepper is in the Proto-Oto-Manguean language spoken in roughly the same region of southern Mexico as far back as 6,500 or more years ago. The word, rendered as *Êki3 in the International Phonetic Alphabet, is a hypothetical reconstruction of a word that no longer exists in a language that has gone extinct, so itâs impossible to say for sure how exactly the oldest known word for the chili sounded coming out of the mouths of prehistoric Proto-Oto-Manguean speakers. But linguistic anthropologist Dr. Cecil Brown, who led a study on the subject, points us in the right direction. âI guess that the closest English word to the Proto-Oto-Manguean word for chili peppers,â Brown told me, âis key.â
The word chili comes to English by way of Mexican Spanish from the Aztec language Nahuatl, and itâs not alone. In addition to chili, English also inherited from Nahuatl the words chocolate, mesquite, avocado, sapodilla, tomato, peyote, and, for what itâs worth, shack.
As with many crops, exactly when and where wild chili pepper plants were domesticated is difficult to determine, largely because domestication is more a gradual process than a revolution. Small hunter-gatherer bands might cull and nurture a group of wild plants, or transplant a few closer to camp, well before larger villages start plowing and harvesting fields. But itâs certainly plausibleâindeed, it seems only logicalâthat humans were eating wild chilies before they started farming them.
âWe know from the paleobiolinguistic evidence that people were interested in chili peppers in some parts of the Americas at least one thousand years before (in the case of Oto-Manguean at least three thousand years earlier than) the development of village farming,â says Dr. Brown. âWhether this interest involved domesticated or wild peppers is difficult to determine.â
What we are reasonably sure of is that people started cultivating different varieties of chilies independently of one another in different parts of Latin America.
Itâs a truism that taxonomic classification is an inexact science at bestâin its unrelenting indifference nature recognizes no species or genus, only the spectrum of life in its myriad formsâbut that fact has never been more evident than in the case of chili peppers.
All chilies belong to the genus Capsicum, a word that comes to us from Joseph Pitton de Tournefort, the seventeenth-century French botanist at the royal garden of Louis XIV and a forebear of modern taxonomy, whose posthumously published Institutiones rei herbaria contains the first description of the genus. Why Tournefort assigned chilies the moniker remains a matter of speculation, but itâs generally believed that he named it for either the Latin capsa, meaning âboxââa reference to the generally hollow interior of a chili pepperâor the Greek kapto, meaning âto bite,â in reference to the obvious. Debate over the precise boundaries of and within the genus Capsicum has been simmering ever since.
Of the twenty-five or so known species of chili, just five (or four, or three, depending on how you slice it) have been domesticated, and within each are numerous cultivars, varieties of the species further refined through cultivation.
Capsicum pubescens, so named because of its hairy leaves, is found almost exclusively in midelevation areas running along the Andes mountains from Colombia to northern Chile. This is the locoto pepper used today in the ancient Bolivian llajwa hot sauce and a close relative of the wild ulupica peppers that most resemble the ancestral crew.
Capsicum baccatum is a variety found primarily in a wide band across South America, with a great many cultivars ranging from hot to mild, like the South American aji and the bishopâs hat, so named because of its bizarre flattened-cone shape.
The following three are closely related, and there is ongoing debate within the taxonomic community as to where, precisely, lie the lines between species. We wonât wade into that debate.
Capsicum chinense is not a Chinese pepper but a Brazilian one, originating in the Amazon and endemic in pre-Columbian times to a wide swath of northern South America, Central America, and the Caribbean. Cultivars include some of the hottest peppers on earth, such as the habanero, Scotch bonnet, Carolina reaper, and Bhut Jolokia, also known as the ghost pepper.
Capsicum frutescens is both widely used and not. Few of its cultivars are grown in any significant quantities except the Peri Peri pepper in Africa and the big one, tabasco, used in the eponymous sauce.
Capsicum annuumâyet another naming foible, since in the absence of frost this species is not an annual but a perennialâis by far the most widely grown species. Its cultivars include the bell pepper, ancho, jalapeño, serrano, cayenne, and many others.
Now for a word on pepper.
On a day in late April 1493, down the crowded, crooked streets of medieval Barcelona, in the vaulted banquet hall of the Grand Royal Palace, Christopher Columbus bowed before Queen Isabella of Castile and King Ferdinand of Aragon, andâwe must assumeâtook a deep and uneasy breath to steady his quivering heart.
The Genoese navigator had just returned from a voyage around the world to the east end of Asia and back. The expensive trip had been largely funded by the monarchs before him, and heâd brought back an odd and somewhat disappointing assortment of souvenirs: six unquestionably terrified Indians, two parrots (green and yellow), a regrettably small amount of gold, and some cinnamon, which did not, all agreed, taste right. Missing from Columbusâs assortment of proofs that heâd made the journey was an item the Italian merchant Marco Polo had brought back to much acclaim from his own trip to Asia via the overland eastern route two centuries earlier: black pepper. Indeed, Columbus had been partly inspired by Polo to make his journey and had taken with him a heavily annotated copy of the account of Poloâs travels. Finding a better and cheaper way to get to pepper was sort of the whole point of getting to the Far East by sailing west in the first place.
Though always exotic, for the European upper classes spices were more or less readily available in the world of antiquity, when traders along the rim of the Indian Ocean from East Asia to Arabia maintained a robust mercantile network that connected the Far East to the Mediterranean and beyond. Records survive of Roman sentries using pepper to season their meals while keeping tense watch against Caledonian barbarians at Hadrianâs Wall in the far north of modern-day England. Notwithstanding the occasional hiccup, throughout the Middle Ages, trade between Europe and the East continued such that a taste for spices among Europeans steadily grew. In time, even people outside the upper gentry could occasionally afford to enliven their food with exotic Oriental spices. Pepper was the most prized spice of all.
Itâs difficult for moderns to comprehend the place pepper held in the European minds of the distant past. Spices came from farther away than nearly any European had ever traveled, and they were, on the whole, outrageously expensive, marked up by middlemen on the long trade routes from their distant places of origin. The name given by Europeans to the Spice Islands was, in its time, a literal description of a place shrouded in myth and mystery whence came some of the most prized commodities known to humankind. Every clove consumed on earth came from a string of five tiny volcanic islands in eastern Indonesia. All nutmeg came from a similarly minuscule archipelago not far to the south. The worldâs pepper came from the jungles of southern India and out through the Malabar Coast on the southwestern tip of the subcontinent.
In a world with virtually no long-distance communication or reliable maps, when rumor, fantasy, and terror slathered together in the mind to paint a fearsome mirage of the world beyond the small confines of oneâs own immediate experience, spices were precious and tangible artifacts from alien landsâspecifically the Orient, with its fabled harems, infidels, and exotic seductions. Many believed spices possessed powerful medicinal, psychoactive, and sometimes dangerous properties, especially as aphrodisiacs. Pepper in particular was looked on as a treacherous narcotic capable of awakening overpowering lustâor sexual prowess, depending on oneâs point of view.
Take, for example, a tale from the extraordinary life of Duke William IX of Aquitaine, a lyric poet and early troubadour who, as author Jack Turner puts it in his essential Spice: The History of a Temptation, âon account of his riotous livingâ managed to both lead a minor Crusade and be excommunicated by the Vatican. Twice.
In a poem that professes to recount a not altogether unflattering misadventureâtoday we might call his tale a âhumblebragââWilliam tells of a summerâs day when, riding through Auvergne, in modern-day France, he was abducted by two noble ladies who imprisoned him in their castle and put him to use for a week of steamy mĂ©nage Ă trois. William confesses that before regaining his freedom he went 188 rounds, aided by a meal of two fat chickens, bread, wine, âand the pepper laid on thick.â
âI nearly broke my tool and burst my harness,â William laments. âI canât express the remorse that overtook me.â
Iâm sure.
To the medieval European, educated by folk wisdom and interpretations of the Bible handed down by church authorities, spices were of such encha...
