SPEAKING OF SCIENCE
Food of ancient times spiced with chilli
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Chilli came to India as an exotic import in the 15th century
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PHOTO: AFP
FIERY FARE: Humans have domesticated and cultivated five of the 25 species.
GENERALLY, PEOPLE living in the tropical parts of the world eat spicier food than those in temperate zones.
Even within a given continent, the cuisine of people living near the tropics is `hotter' and spicier. Cajun and Creole food of the southern states of America are distinctly spicier than those of, say, Canada. Scandinavian food is blander than Greek, Italian or Spanish.
Spice islands
There is a theory that spices are added in order to cut down the spoilage of food that occurs faster at higher temperatures. (It would be nice to test this theory in a controlled lab experiment.) There is also the belief that the Europeans sailed the seas towards what they called the `spice islands'.
The object was to obtain the spices abundant in Africa, India and Southeast Asia on one side, and the Caribbean and Latin America on the other, in order to flavour up their otherwise bland food.
Some of these mariners liked to carry their cuisine along as they sailed the oceans to newer lands for trade and conquest. The Portuguese and Spanish were particularly finicky in this regard.
First they found interesting vegetables and spices in one place, and got hooked on them. Then they took these seeds, shrubs and plants with them as they travelled to countries elsewhere. Pepper, cloves, and similar spices and flavours were taken away by them from India; in return we got potatoes, maize, and of course the chili pepper from them.
Indeed the chilli came into India as an exotic import in the fifteenth century. From the moment it landed, it became a big hit. A remarkable way of admiring and extolling its virtue came, of all people, from the great Carnatic music composer Purandaradasa (1480- 1564); in one of his songs, he compares Lord Krishna with the ruby red chili!
Fieriest varieties
In fact, we have grown so used to the chilli in our daily lives over these 500 years that some of us mistakenly believe it to be native to India. It is not, although we produce the fieriest varieties. By the way, the hottest in the world come not from Andhra but from Assam.
Botanists tell us that the chilli plant belongs to the genus Capsicum, of which there are 25 species known so far. South America is where Capsicum originated and diversified. Humans have isolated, domesticated and cultivated but five of these species.
This selection has presumably occurred based on taste — the `hotness' and the exciting rush of feeling when you bite it. The long chain amide molecule called, what else, capsaicin, is responsible for this hotness and the rush arising out of endorphin release.
What the plant has produced in its seeds and fruit to ward off predator birds and small animals has turned addictive to us humans.
We now know where each of these five species originated. While Capsicum itself originated in Bolivia, C. annuum was domesticated first in Mexico, C. frutenses in the Caribbean, C. baccatum in lowland Bolivia, C. chinense in Northern lowland Amazonia and C. pubescens in the southern Andes.
Domesticated species
What do we conclude from these? Genetic analysis and modern plant distribution are useful, but there is another special archaeological feature about the Capsicum. All five domesticated species produce flattened, lens-like starch granules with a shallow depression, somewhat akin to a red blood cell, or a `makhana'.
Interestingly, the size and shape of the granules of each of the five serve as individual signatures, helping us tell them apart. When an archaeologist is looking at fossils, he/she can look at these `microfossils' of chilli pepper starch granules and can tell them apart. It is not an easy business doing so. Each starch granule is hardly a tenth of a millimetre in size. And the fossil digger is confounded with many other materials.
You have to look at each of them under the microscope. But when you persist after long hours of boring routine analysis, you hit pay dirt (pardon the pun).
This is precisely what a 15-member team of archaeologists, anthropologists, cultural historians and biologists from Canada, U.S., Panama and Venezuela did, as they dug at sites in Ecuador, Venezuela and Panama.
Pre-ceramic period
The principal sites date back to human habitations that existed there 6100 years before present (BP). Recall that this period is pre-ceramic, meaning that it is of an age before pottery was invented.
What did they eat, and how did they cook it without pottery? The answers came in surprising ways, as the microfossil analysis from two housing sites in southwestern Ecuador revealed (see Perry and others, Science, 16 February 2007).
It showed the presence of maize, cassava, arrowroot, achira , squash, jack beans, palms, and chilli pepper!
Starch granules of three of the 5 chili species domesticated, not in Ecuador, but elsewhere, were seen. Clearly, the chilli was domesticated well before 6100 BP elsewhere and found its way into Ecuador.
The tropical peoples' preference for hot food thus has a hoary history, dating back at least 6100 years.
Locale penchant
How apt it is that the locale for this penchant is a country sitting smack on the equator! And by the Indians, though not of the Asian continent but of the South American!
The early Ecuadorians liked it not just hot, but were epicures and connoisseurs. Recall that Perry and the others on the team found that the starch granules were not those of the wildly growing local chilli plant but those of the five that were domesticated elsewhere.
This points to the cultural exchange and trade that must have existed at that time. As Sandra Knapp of the London Natural History Museum comments on this work: "Discoveries such as these have enormous potential to help investigate the trajectories for domestication, cultivation and trade... and to help in efforts to understand the links between human transport and intrusive species, thus contributing to the challenge of biodiversity conservation".
D. BALASUBRAMANIAN
dbala@lvpei.org
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