The Portuguese and the Chilli

Vasco da Gama reached Calicut in 1498, and from the Portuguese hold on Goa, taken in 1510, the plants of the Americas began to move into Indian soil and Indian kitchens. The chilli, Capsicum annuum among its species, came by Portuguese ships and ports on the western coast, and from there it travelled inland and along the shores until it was grown almost everywhere. It reached a country that already had its own sources of heat, and that settled history is the ground on which this essay stands.

Before the Portuguese, the heat in Indian cooking came from black pepper, Piper nigrum, native to the Malabar forests and the oldest of the subcontinent's exports, and from long pepper and fresh ginger. The Manasollasa of 1130 and the Sangam poems belong to a kitchen that knew pungency without the chilli. Garcia de Orta, who lived in Goa and wrote on the drugs and simples of India in the sixteenth century, belongs to the same world of exchange in which the new plants arrived. The chilli was a plant of the Americas, and the Portuguese were the carriers who set it down on the Indian coast. The plant took hold because it was easy to grow, it dried well and it gave a sharper heat than pepper at a fraction of the price. Cooks in the south and the Deccan took it up first, and in time it became the base of regional signatures: the dried red chilli of the Andhra and Karnataka kitchens, the Kashmiri chilli valued for colour more than fire, and the varieties that now carry protected names, among them Byadagi chilli and Guntur Sannam chilli. Raghavan Iyer, in On the Curry Trail, follows the dishes of the subcontinent and its diaspora back along the routes of trade and conquest, and the chilli is among the clearest cases of a foreign plant becoming a native one. The Portuguese brought other things with the chilli: the potato, the tomato, the cashew, the pineapple, the papaya and the guava, together with a habit of vinegar and of pork. In Goa the result is plain in the cooking. Vindaloo descends from the Portuguese carne de vinha d'alhos, meat steeped in wine or vinegar and garlic, and in Goan hands the wine gave way to palm vinegar and the dish took on dried chillies and spices. The sweet and sour of sorpotel, the baked sweets of the Christian households and the cashew orchards that yield Goa cashew feni all belong to the same meeting. The cashew, Anacardium occidentale, came from Brazil by the same route and was planted along the coast, first perhaps to hold the soil. Bread, too, changed hands: the Goan pao, raised with palm toddy, is the Portuguese loaf rebuilt from local materials. These are the adoptions that lasted, and each was remade until it sat naturally beside coconut, kokum and tamarind. The chilli thus stands as a marker of how India takes in what comes to it. The subcontinent did not simply receive the Portuguese plants; it sorted them, named them and fitted them to its own grammar of tempering, grinding and souring. Within a few generations the heat that had been pepper's work was the chilli's, and a cook of the nineteenth century would have been astonished to be told the plant was young in the country.

At the Goan table the Portuguese inheritance is tasted in the sourness of vinegar and kokum, the heat of dried red chillies ground with garlic and cumin, and the sweetness of coconut and jaggery, set beside rice and fish curry. Pork in vindaloo and sorpotel is kept for feast days and Christmas in the Christian households, while the daily meal is rice, fish and a coconut-based curry eaten with the fingers. Elsewhere on the western coast the same plant appears in the red chilli pastes of Malvan, the dried chilli tempering of Karnataka and the fiery pickles of Andhra, each region holding the heat to its own measure.