From toxic fruit to hip crispy chili oil: American pepper in Asia

‘THey Best Thing Since Sliced ​​Bread« Is an English expression that is mainly used ironically. The cry dates from the 1920s, when there were just bread cutting machines invented and cut bread won the market. Now many people look down on sliced ​​bread, which is often made in factories and is sold in plastic.

Without irony, the best invention since cut bread is concerned with regard to food Crispy Chile Oil. Spicy and crispy, a combination that you didn’t know you needed. The Chinese Kokkin Tao Huabi was the first to bottle the stuff and started selling in the 1990s under the name LOA GAN MA (old godmother). The hot, crispy sauce first won China and then the rest of the world. She is now also in the Dutch supermarket.

There are Chili Crisp of Chili (Chilli, Chile) crunch often onions and fermented soybeans and other flavorings. But now it is about the most important ingredient, the name giver, the chili, the pepper of the peppers. A Chinese botanist wrote about it in 1618: « The fruit is bright red, like coral. The fruit contains poison and is so spicy that your hair cannot put in your mouth. »

Black pepper comes from Asia, but the pepper with the many names, from Spanish to Dutch pepper, from Pernambuco to Cayenne to Goa Pepper, from ‘barbaric pepper’ and ‘strange ginger’ to ‘spicy eggplant’ to ‘surpasses black pepper’, that pepper does not. This pepper comes from Meso-America and was unknown in Europe and Asia for 1492.

In Mexico, among others, the plant was domesticated thousands of years before the start of this era. He went through the chocolate drink that drank the Aztecs. The Taino on the Caribbean island of Hispaniola would have fought Columbus with chili powder, among other things. The first pepper spray.

Heat

The red pepper is part of the Columbian Exchange, the term for the exchange of plants, animals, diseases and culture between the Americas and the rest of the world by historian Alfred Crosby in 1972. The crops include tobacco, tomatoes, potatoes, chocolate, vanilla, corn, peanuts and pumpkins also the pepper with the many names. In Europe this pepper did not do much, all the more in Asia.

The kitchens of India, Indonesia, China, Korea, Thailand etc. cannot be introduced without the heat that the American pepper adds.

And that while Columbus started his robbery to get spices from India to Europe. Columbus wrote: « There is a lot of axi, what their pepper is, of a kind of more valuable than pepper, and nobody eats anything without it, because they think it is very healthy. » Whether Columbus also returned pepper from his first trip is not known. Of his second journey.

It was then the Portuguese who took the American pepper to Africa and Asia, where the plant became much more popular than in Europe, the first in Goa where the Portuguese dish carne de vinho e alhos (meat in wine with garlic) finally the Indian curry Vindaloo became. In Indonesia, the pepper was introduced via Malacca and the Moluccas.

Often that introduction happened via the multi-ethnic crew of the ships, which took the pepper for its own use. In any case, it happened in China, as Brian R. Dott describes in his book The Chile Pepper in China. A Cultural Biography.

The first mention of the chili pepper in China is in a text by Gao Lian from 1591. He mentions the Chile in his Treatise on the pure pleasure of civilized laziness « Foreign Pepper » and describes the strong taste, says these peppers are pleasant to look at and believes that the fruits look exactly like the worn point of a writing bran.

In 1621, only thirty years later, another writer claims that the chilis can be found everywhere. They are no longer viewed, but eaten, and that is pure pleasure, also in 2025.

It may have to do with the fact that the chili peppers were easy to grow outside the tropics and also cheaper than black pepper and Szechuan pepper on the market. And of course the exciting taste.

The origin of chili pepper has fallen into oblivion over the centuries. Almost everywhere, chili pepper now has a local product, since time immemorial in use.

According to great helmsman Mao, someone who could not tolerate spicy food could never be a real revolutionary. On the other hand, chilis also symbolize passionate women. And Tao Huabi became a billionaire from her Crispy Chile in Oil.

The meaning of the chili pepper is stretchable: male and female, strange and own, communist and capitalist. The chili can handle it.

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