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

The Americas: Traces Of A Processed Ingredient

In 2007, Linda Perry and colleagues reported starch microfossils distinctive to Capsicum at seven archaeological sites from the Bahamas to southern Peru. The evidence spans approximately 6,000 years before the present through European contact. Residues on grinding stones and vessels show how pepper can be investigated as a processed ingredient as well as a gathered plant.

A fruit may disappear while its starch grains survive. Using modern peppers as a reference collection, Perry and colleagues examined grain size, flattened lens shape and central depression. These small forms on a tool made it possible to investigate pepper’s past beyond surviving whole fruits.

Kraft and colleagues’ 2014 research approached the origin of domesticated Capsicum annuum through four lines of evidence: genetics, archaeology, linguistics and ecology. Combined models identified northeastern Mexico, central-eastern Mexico, or both as possible regions. This geographical framework is broader than a certain point of origin in one valley. The research concerns C. annuum; the domestication of all Capsicum species is not reduced to one event.

New evidence continues to reshape the geographical picture. In 2024, Chiou and colleagues combined modern and archaeological pepper seeds, settlement distributions and ecological models of past climates. They identified the Yucatán Peninsula and southern coastal Guerrero as areas conducive to early encounters between people and wild peppers. Their view of domestication as a process spread across places and times brings the conditions that preserved remains into conversation with the environments where the plant could once grow.

Ají: Describing An Unfamiliar Ingredient Through A Familiar Name

The original manuscript of Columbus’ first voyage diary is lost. Its known text is read through Las Casas’ summary. In the entry for 15 January 1493, ají is compared with pimienta, a spice familiar to European readers. An unfamiliar ingredient is being described through the vocabulary of a known spice.

In Chanca’s letter of 1494, agi adds pungency to bread, fish and bird dishes. Voyage accounts describe European observers encountering an existing cuisine. Naming the ingredient did not begin with them: Nahuatl chilli and Taíno-derived ají carry an Indigenous American world of names.

A Kitchen Painting And A Natural-History Page

The National Gallery identifies a wrinkled red chilli 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 pepper within food preparation. Its relationships are read from the details of one scene.

On a Rijksmuseum sheet dated 1705, pepper appears alongside a butterfly, caterpillar and pupa. Pieter Sluyter’s hand-coloured engraving after Maria Sibylla Merian’s drawing belongs to Metamorphosis insectorum Surinamensium, her book on Surinam. Pepper participates in food preparation in Velázquez’s kitchen; here it becomes the subject of attention to relationships between plants and insects. The same ingredient belongs to two different forms of observation.

Istanbul: The Time Between An Early Recipe And Wider Adoption

Özge Samancı’s 2019 research traces red pepper in an eighteenth-century pickle recipe. She notes its sparse appearance as Arnavut biberi in the 1844 Melceü’t-Tabbâhîn. The wider adoption of New World products in Istanbul, especially during the nineteenth century, is a separate process following those early traces.

At the Istanbul stop, the journey slows. Time lies between appearing in a pickle recipe and becoming an everyday ingredient. Sparse use in the 1844 book makes that interval tangible. The story of a pepper once leaving a trace on a grinding stone, then appearing in a painter’s kitchen, continues through the place it gradually finds at another table.

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