Hiya, I couldn't find a single previous thread that addressed your questions. However, combining two of them will cover the Indian angle of the question:

• /u/QVCatullus draws on the work of Michael Krondl, The Taste of Conquest: The Rise and Fall of the Three Great Cities of Spice, to show how Portuguese traders, whose trading networks very literally spanned the globe in the early modern era, introduced the hot peppers of the Americas to China and India

• /u/EvanRWT explains why the Portuguese initially found this such a profitable trade, and why Indians in particular steered their cuisine towards the American interloper. Namely, Indian food had long been quite "spicy" in the same chemical sense as American chili peppers, and it turned out that chilis grew really nicely (easily, affordably) in the Indian climate.

I don't know if it breaks the rules to suggest this in a top-level comment, but OP might try asking this question over at /r/AskFoodHistorians. It's quite a bit more niche than /r/AskHistorians (3k subscribers vs 575k) but does deliver answers to questions like this one within a couple days.

I'm a home cook and contribute more frequently to /r/askculinary, but I can mention that having read Bill Buford's Heat, in which he spends a sizable portion of the book discussing the history of recipe publication in Italy dating back to the 15th and 16th Century (the period when the spice trade was emerging between Italy and the Far East), the most sought after spices in Europe were nutmeg, cinnamon, and clove. The plant from which clove is derived is native only to a single island in Indonesia, so clove was extremely rare and sought after for many hundreds of years. If you managed to eat some, you were probably wealthy and educated, and therefore you might have written about it, which is how we know about the societal impact of these spices today. The addition of clove and nutmeg to semolina pasta (essentially ground wheat, egg, salt, and water), ricotta cheese, and butter (essentially cow's milk) is what gives us ravioli: one of the earliest recorded "recipe-worthy" Italian dishes.

I suspect, though, based on your question, that you're asking about the history of "spicy" foods, not "spiced" foods-- that is-- capsaicin-inflected foods with flavors derived from chiles and peppers. Here I can only point you towards the Columbian exchange, which is occurring roughly concurrently, but from the opposite end of the world. Spanish and Portuguese explorers are returning from expeditions to the Americas and bringing crops back to Europe, including potatoes, tomatoes, maize, peppers, and squash. These too would have a sizable impact on cuisine in Southern Europe, especially in Italy and Spain. Maize gives us polenta, for instance, which emerges as a rival grain staple to semolina wheat in certain parts of Italy.

As for how crops from the Americas (including peppers and chiles) made their way to Asia, the answer is almost certainly via European spice traders in the sixteenth and seventeenth century, some originating from Venice or other parts of what is now Northern Italy, others from Portuguese expeditions to China, others from Dutch expeditions to Indonesia. But there are also many plants native to Asia that produced such remarkably aromatic and exotic flavors (to European palates) that "spices" sealed their reputation as exotic luxury goods brought in from far corners of the non-European world, which at that time included both Asia and the Americas.

If I'm interpreting your question right, you also want to know a timeframe on how those crops-- brought from the Americas to Asia-- found their way into Asian preparations. For that I can say that many plants that provided flavors exotic to European palates in the 16th century (in addition to cinnamon, nutmeg, and clove these might also include ginger, coriander, and certain varieties of citrus) were already there. However, the history of capsaicin heat in those cuisines specifically is not something I'm prepared to comment on.

The last bit worth addressing, and maybe this isn't so much historical as it is sociological, is that current preparations of "Thai"/"Indian"/"Chinese" cuisines-- especially in present-day Europe and the Americas-- are not authentic dishes prepared as they were in the pre-colonial era, but are products of local tastes, food preferences, and ingredient availability. General Tso's chicken is a perfect example of such a dish: it uses sugar (not Chinese), chile powder (either chile arbol or cayenne pepper, neither Chinese), and deep-fried chicken leg meat (not a Chinese cooking method) to create a dish that was massively popular when and where it was invented: in a Chinese-owned restaurant in New York City in the late 1970s. The only thing those ingredients have in common is that they're cheap to buy in bulk.

I am interested in culinary history of China. One of the questions I have is regarding the introduction of chili to China's cuisine.

China's cuisine are clearly demarcated by regions and has it's own characteristics. The two Chinese cuisines which uses a lot of chili is Sichuan and Hunan. Both of these provinces are very much inland. I read somewhere that chili is introduced to China by the Europeans (Portuguese) via the southern ports. I kind of doubt that because if indeed it was introduced via the southern China, then surely the cuisines in that region (Cantonese, HK, Macau) would have chili in their cooking. Instead, we find that Cantonese cooking is almost devoid of the use of chili.

So, was chili actually introduced to China overland from India? Thoughts?

As a side question or follow-up, were there really no spices that contained capsaicin in the old world prior to the Columbian Exchange?

I’ve always been fascinated by the history of Sichuan cuisine. Here’s my understanding of it based on my readings. Sorry I don’t have references in English, as my reading has been in Chinese.

Ancient Sichuan regions seasoned food with rock salt, peppercorn, a type of ginger and soy sauced-based master stock. (Aside: Sichuan peppercorns give Sichuan dishes their distinctive numbing taste). During the Han dynasty, various other plants were then introduced into the region, including garlic.

The introduction of chili pepper (aka “sea peppers” to differentiate from indigenous peppercorns) into Sichuan cuisine would not have been more than 400 years ago, as records of Sichuan dishes before then had no chili peppers.

Interestingly, the practice of spicing food was common practice all over ancient China. The most common spices were peppercorns, ginger and dogwood cherries (mentioned in primary sources: 華陽國志; 禮記·內則; 呂氏春秋·本味篇). There is evidence that peppercorns were planted long the middle and bottom of the Yangzte and Yellow rivers, and over 30% of recipes collected during the Tang dynasty included peppercorns. The diet at this time consisted of more meat, as large scale agriculture of crop was not as common (primary source: 太平廣記 demonstrates the prevalence of meat consumption). Addition of these spices reduced the gaminess of meat, as well as helped to preserve the meat. During the Ming dynasty, corn, potatoes and sweet potatoes were introduced into China, causing a reduction in meat consumption. Consequently, the use of peppercorn dropped in most regions of China, expect for Sichuan (they just LOVE their spicy food there!) (secondary source: 中國古典食譜 shows the reduction in prevalence of peppercorn usage from the Yuan to Qing dynasties).

There are several possible routes, by which chili peppers could have been introduced into China. In late 1500s, there was a record of “foreign pepper,” which might have referred to chili peppers (primary source: 遵生八箋 by 高濂). Chili peppers eventually moved inland, likely upstream along the Yangzte River, ending up in Hunan. From Hunan, chili peppers spread to other regions of China that use the peppers today. (Aside: Hunan province is home to the Xiang cuisine, which is also spicy.)

There are several speculative reasons why chili peppers became an integral part of Sichuan but not several other Chinese cuisines. For one, addition of chili helped with food preservation, which is more of a concern for inland regions. (Contrast this with another inland cuisine, Hui , which embraces fermentation and fungal growth on food). Historically, the Sichuan regions have also been more protected from devastation of war (being a basin and more difficult to invade), and the relative stability over the course of hisotry is hypothesized to promote the focus on refinement of tastes as well as experimentation with food, making residents of Sichuan more receptive to new food ingredients. Furthermore, at the end of the Ming dynasty, the population in Sichuan went from several millions to 600-800 thousands, due to famine and war. This caused a schism in the passing down of the Sichuan cuisine, creating a vacuum in the cuisine, which allowed new ingredients to be incorporated. The results was a huge diversity in Sichuan dishes and flavors today. It is commonly said that Sichuan cuisine has “7 tastes and 8 smells.” During the mid-Qing dynasty, 38 different cooking methods were recorded for the Sichuan region (primary source: 醒園食譜 by 李調元), and over 2500 Sichuan dishes were recorded towards the end of the Qing dynasty (primary source: the 調鼎新錄 manuscript).

Edit: added sources/ references.

Hello everyone,

As food threads often do, this thread is starting to attract a large number of incorrect, speculative, or otherwise disallowed comments, including many asking about the deleted comments, which merely compounds the issue. As such, they were removed by the mod-team.

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