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Chapitre D'ouvrage Année : 2020

Flavors and colors : the chili pepper in Europe

Résumé

When Christopher Columbus (1451–1506) landed in 1492 on the Caribbean island of Hispaniola, he discovered new food plants, among them the chili pepper, that the local inhabitants, the Taíno (speakers of an Arawakan language), called ají. When he returned to Spain in 1493, he presented the American plants to the Catholic kings. Peter Martyr d’Anghiera (1455-1526), who reported this event,described the ají as "a pepper more pungent than those from the Caucasus". In the following years, other explorers brought back plants, including chili pepper, from different parts of the American continent. Capsicum annuum, the Mexican species, with about 100 landraces in that country alone, is now the most widely cultivated chili pepper species around the world : all around Europe, the Mediterranean, Asia and parts of Africa, where Capsicum chinense and C. frutescens, brought from Brazil by the Portuguese, can also be found. I will explore how Capsicum annuum was adopted in Europe, how it is consumed and how local cultivators appropriated that plant and selected it to fit to their tastes, especially in terms of flavor and color. The analysis of historical published sources forms the core of this article, but as an anthropologist, I will complete it with my observations from fieldwork conducted in Mexico and different parts of Europe, mainly France, Spain and Hungary, as well as with botanical and anthropological documents.
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Dates et versions

hal-02906289 , version 1 (24-07-2020)

Identifiants

Citer

Esther Katz. Flavors and colors : the chili pepper in Europe. Kaller, M. (ed.); Jacob, F. (ed.). Transatlantic trade and global cultural transfers since 1492 : more than commodities, Routledge, p. 30-53, 2020, Routledge Studies in Modern History, 978-1-138-38515-3. ⟨hal-02906289⟩
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