History of chilli

Chilli peppers come from the Americas. People were eating them for thousands of years before Christopher Columbus brought them to Europe – and within a single century they had spread into the kitchens of Africa, India and China.

Cradle in the Andes

The genus Capsicum has about 35 species. According to a 2016 phylogenetic study, it originated in the Andes of western and north-western South America, spread around the Amazon basin to Brazil and finally north into Central America. Peru and Bolivia are still the main centre of diversity of cultivated peppers.

Five domesticated species

People in the Americas domesticated five species independently:

Thousands of years on the menu

The oldest plant remains clearly identified as chilli come from the Tehuacán Valley (Puebla) and the Ocampo Caves (Tamaulipas) in Mexico and are roughly 9,000–7,000 years old. Even more telling are microscopic starch grains, whose shape is unique to Capsicum: archaeologists have found them at seven sites from the Bahamas to southern Peru, the oldest – about 6,100 years old – in south-western Ecuador. There chilli was eaten together with maize, in some regions before people even made pottery.

The word for chilli is ancient too: in Proto-Otomanguean, a protolanguage about 6,500 years old, it is the oldest reconstructed word for chilli pepper in the New World.

Columbus and “pepper”

Columbus was looking for a route to the spices of the East, so he named the hot fruit after black pepper. On 15 January 1493, on Hispaniola, he wrote in his log: “There is also much ají, which is their pepper, and it is worth more than pepper; nobody eats without it, as they find it very healthy.” That is the origin of the Spanish pimiento and the English chili pepper. The fleet physician on Columbus’s second voyage (1493), Diego Álvarez Chanca, wrote to the Seville city council about “a spice called agi” which the islanders ate with fish and birds.

Around the world in a century

Peppers entered Europe through the Iberian Peninsula and spread around the Mediterranean. From the early 16th century, Portuguese trade routes carried them from Brazil to Africa, India and China; in the 17th century the Spanish “silver route” from Mexico and Peru to China followed. Genetics shows Africa acted as a bridge between American and Asian peppers, and there are traces along Ottoman trade routes northwards from Turkey.

In the mid-16th century Europeans did not yet know where the plant came from: Leonhart Fuchs’s 1543 herbal calls it “Calicut pepper” or “Indian pepper”. In China it was first mentioned by Gao Lian in 1591 – as an ornamental plant.

Hungarian paprika and vitamin C

Peppers reached Hungary in the second half of the 16th century. They were first grown as ornamentals, then as a remedy for rheumatism and fever, and only later as a spice; the first written record of red pepper in Szeged dates from 1748. It was in Szeged, in the early 1930s, that Albert Szent-Györgyi discovered that local paprika was “an unbelievably rich source” of hexuronic acid, which he renamed ascorbic acid – vitamin C. From a single paprika season he produced more than half a kilogram of it. In 1937 he received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

Capsaicin: what makes chilli hot

• 1816: Christian Friedrich Bucholz extracted the pungent substance in impure form and called it “capsicin”.
• 1876: John Clough Thresh isolated it in almost pure crystalline form and named it capsaicin.
• 1919: E. K. Nelson described its formula and part of its structure.
• 1930: Ernst Späth and S. F. Darling first synthesised capsaicin.

Heat is measured today on the Scoville scale.

Why it burns us but not birds

In 1997 David Julius’s team discovered the receptor capsaicin binds to, now called TRPV1: an ion channel in nerve endings that also responds to painful heat – which is why chilli feels “hot”. In 2021 Julius shared the Nobel Prize with Ardem Patapoutian for discovering receptors for temperature and touch.

Birds do not feel capsaicin: the bird version of the receptor does not respond to it, though it still responds to heat. Ecologists see this as a clever plant strategy: capsaicin deters mammals that chew up the seeds, but not birds that swallow them whole and spread them far and wide.

Sources

1. Carrizo García C. et al. (2016): Phylogenetic relationships, diversification and expansion of chili peppers (Capsicum, Solanaceae). Annals of Botany 118(1): 35–51. doi:10.1093/aob/mcw079
2. van Zonneveld M. et al. (2015): Screening Genetic Resources of Capsicum Peppers in Their Primary Center of Diversity in Bolivia and Peru. PLoS ONE 10(9): e0134663. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0134663
3. Kraft K. H. et al. (2014): Multiple lines of evidence for the origin of domesticated chili pepper, Capsicum annuum, in Mexico. PNAS 111(17): 6165–6170. doi:10.1073/pnas.1308933111
4. Perry L. et al. (2007): Starch fossils and the domestication and dispersal of chili peppers (Capsicum spp. L.) in the Americas. Science 315(5814): 986–988. doi:10.1126/science.1136914
5. Columbus’s ship’s log, entry of 15 Jan 1493: Diario de a bordo del primer viaje de Cristóbal Colón (Wikisource); Scott N. M.: La comida como signo, UNAM 2018
6. Major R. H. (ed.) (1870): Select Letters of Christopher Columbus, Hakluyt Society, pp. 68–69 (letter of D. Á. Chanca)
7. Tripodi P. et al. (2021): Global range expansion history of pepper (Capsicum spp.) revealed by over 10,000 genebank accessions. PNAS 118(34): e2104315118. doi:10.1073/pnas.2104315118
8. Silvar C., Rocha F., Barata A. M. (2022): Tracing Back the History of Pepper (Capsicum annuum) in the Iberian Peninsula. Plants 11(22): 3075. doi:10.3390/plants11223075
9. Dott B. R. (2020): The Chile Pepper in China: A Cultural Biography. Columbia University Press
10. Museum.hu: The Szeged paprika (permanent exhibition)
11. Szent-Györgyi A. (1937): Oxidation, energy transfer, and vitamins, Nobel lecture
12. Basith S. et al. (2016): Harnessing the Therapeutic Potential of Capsaicin and Its Analogues. Molecules 21(8): 966. doi:10.3390/molecules21080966
13. Nelson E. K. (1919): The constitution of capsaicin. J. Am. Chem. Soc. 41: 1115–1121. doi:10.1021/ja02228a011
14. Späth E., Darling S. F. (1930): Synthese des Capsaicins. Ber. dtsch. chem. Ges. 63: 737–743. doi:10.1002/cber.19300630331
15. Caterina M. J. et al. (1997): The capsaicin receptor: a heat-activated ion channel in the pain pathway. Nature 389: 816–824. doi:10.1038/39807
16. Tewksbury J. J., Nabhan G. P. (2001): Directed deterrence by capsaicin in chillies. Nature 412: 403–404. doi:10.1038/35086653
17. Jordt S. E., Julius D. (2002): Molecular basis for species-specific sensitivity to “hot” chili peppers. Cell 108(3): 421–430. doi:10.1016/S0092-8674(02)00637-2