What was Indian food like before the arrival of the chili pepper from the Americas?
One of the things associated with Indian cuisine is heat from chili peppers. Yet, chili peppers can only have been introduced to Asia from their Central and South American homeland after the Spanish conquests of the 1500s.
What was Indian food like before this time? Did heat come from elsewhere or were Indian people eating bland, boring food? Or have I got my food history completely back to front?
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Chillies were cultivated and used for various dishes in Sri Lanka long before Christopher Columbus was born.
I am sure Chilli Pepper existed in India during the same period. Many traditional Sri Lankan dishes contain chilli. And these are not the cuisine introduced by European invaders.
The recipe 'thevasam' in the link is authentic ( but regional ) pre-columbian exchange cuisine, made with ingredients from species largely native to the indo-malayan ecoregion, and is pretty much reflective of Indian cuisine before the columbian exchange.
I study crop dispersal, as I had an agricultural background from South India.
Other heat giving ingredients would include Xanthoxylum spp. (timur) - relatives of sichuan pepper, long pepper, roasted garlic, ginger, mustard, cinnamon, cloves - all native or widespread in South and South-East Asia well before the columbian exchange.
Sorry but the "prevailing theory of Portuguese and Columbus" carting chillie all the way to India and asia BUT (BUT) not eating it themselves seems odd to say the least.WHY else is chillie not used extensively in Portugal or Spanish cuisine??? I think Chillies left South America long before for Asia via a Pacific route taken by Asian traders, Polynesian traders and popularised before 1000 AD.
Hottest Chillies are in North east India Bhoot Jalokia. Korean, Padang, Andhra, Szechuan food is Chillie Hot but Columbus' spain and Portugal are not chillie hot. Hungarian food is chillie hot too - was it left over by the Khans - i e Ghengis Khan ??
I asked myself this a lot about Thai food...what would that be without chillies? The best I can come up with is to look at the classical Chinese kitchen. They don't use chillies, but pepper, and they get the kick of salt and sugar instead of capsicum. So yes, my guess is that Indian food would have been made with the same spices...maybe not in the quantities they are used now, but it would be sweeter and saltier. But that is really just a guess...we don't even really know what European food was like in the middle ages for example....which is amazing when you think about it.
Hardly - pepper was exported from India before chillis were introduced. Some linguistic subgroups still use it in preference to chillis, and certain dishes use it in preference to (or in addition to) chillies.
Ginger's also native (or at least an early import) to India (and while not always used in 'traditional' cooking), I do believe that garlic and ginger were as well.
Many other spices - one of the cinnamon varieties, cardamom and quite a few other spices were native.
While fairly well known, chillis aren't essential to cooking.
Oddly enough, the 'source' I used to try to reverse engineer what are 'native' and what aren't is the traditional funeral anniversary or 'thevasam' menu. While essentially vegetarian, it would use mostly native produce and spices. You can find an example here, though specifics tend to differ with cultural groups or even families
India is rightly called the Land of Spices. From black pepper to sunth (dry ginger powder) there were a wide variety of spices for inducing heat in food. Indian traditional cooking, also called Paak Shaashtra that derived from Ayurveda (a traditional Indian medicinal system), mainly rely on balancing of tastes for developing better digestion.
It is based on 5 ras (flavours): sweet, bitter, acidic, salty & heat.
Ayurveda originated in about 2000 - 5000 BC (some consider it older), depicting use of chillies as painkillers and for relieving stress. Various chillies which are only cultivated in India are Bhoot Jholakia, Naag Jholakia, Boria Marcha, Bhavnagri Marcha, Surti Marcha, Lavingyaa Marchaa have found place in Ayurveda & Indian Cuisine from the oldest available reference.
Though Indian Cuisine is rich in variety of flavours with spices, facts say that it's unlikely to that Indian cuisine existed without chillies.
There are evidence of the use of chili pepper in Asia centuries before the Columbian Exchange.
The thirteenth century stone inscriptions from the Bagan period of Myanmar (formerly Burma) documented the use of chili pepper as either donation or payment towards the cost the construction of its many pagodas.
Farther to the east, Korean researchers (Yang et al., 2017) also concluded that it would be genetically impossible for Mexican chili (aji) to evolve into Korean red peppers just in the time frame in the historical misconceptions that “Red peppers (chilies) were introduced to the country through the Japanese invasions of 1592–1599.”
References:
Myanmar Language Commission (2009). "Bagan Period". Sarkoe-Abidan: Myanmar Stone Inscriptions and Ink Writings. Yangon, Myanmar: Ministry of Education. pp. 61, 143.
Tun Nyein (trans. & ed.) (1899). "Inscriptions of Pagan, No. (16). - Obverse". Inscriptions of Pagan, Pinya, and Ava: Translations, With Notes. Rangoon, Burma: Superintendent, Government Press. p. 114.
Yang, Hye Jeong & Rhan Chung, Kyung & Young Kwon, Dae. (2017). DNA Sequence Analysis Tells the Truth of The Origin, Propagation and Evolution of Chili (Red Pepper). Journal of Ethnic Foods. 4. 10.1016/j.jef.2017.08.010.
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