Chilli

[JohnnyTarr]

I am so cold these last few weeks that I am going to thaw myself out one way or another. I am going to make my own chilli recipe. I found three other recipes that I am going to work with and make my own out of. Now I was just wondering if chilli could be in GAoP? The chilli pepper is from Mexico and was brought to the rest of the world by the Spanish in the mid 15th century. I could believe that cooks on ship would use the pepper to spice up and cover up bad tasting food. What say you all??

[Quartermaster James]

My Dear Mr. Tarr,

What I have to offer is by no means an expert opinion. And, furthermore, it is information I garner'd as a 'lubber. I have no sure knowledge of what might have been true on ship...

But, despite all we have been taught about heavily spiced mediaeval dishes that used great amounts of spices to preserve, or even to cover that fact that the meat or fowl was actually putriyfing, the truth is that the very spices we now buy for pennies an ounce were, at the time, traded weight for weight with gold. On land, it was hardly worth wasting them on putrid meat!

Best regarrrds,

Captain Jigme

PS: I have no direct knowledge, but fancy presents that the reality of being on a ship would not be how best to season one's food, but how best to ignore the maggotts.

[Edward T. Porter]

One possible origin for Chili can be found by the Native Americans: There is a cecipe called "Pemmikan". It´s a mix from dried meat, fat, spices and dried berrys.

I guess Chili is post GAop. The oldest recorded recipe I know of is from "Mrs. Owen's Cook Book" (1880). Another old recipe can be found in the "Manual for Army Cooks" (War Department Document #18), 1896.

But, despite all we have been taught about heavily spiced mediaeval dishes that used great amounts of spices to preserve, or even to cover that fact that the meat or fowl was actually putriyfing

That is one of many scientific assumptions... but still discussed.

Just use Google and you surely will find more.

[Patrick Hand]

There is a cecipe called "Pemmikan". It´s a mix from dried meat, fat, spices and dried berrys.

There are a lot of (heated) discussions on the Muzzleloading forum about Pemicin ... Pemmikan......however it's spelled..... but none of them mention using any spices.....

From what I can figure out, it's more of an Indain made (survival) food, So I can't see if (or how) it would ever end up on a ship.....

I agree with Captain Jigme's post.... spices were too expensive to be used to cover the taste of bad meat.... fresh meat was a lot cheaper than the spices....

I've read that during the American Civil War (I think it's in "a Detailed Minitude of life in the Confederate Army"... but I'd have to look it up...), There was a soldier who liked his food spicy, so he added some peppers to the cook pot (also figuring that the other soldiers wouldn't like it so "hot" so he could get more food.... unbeknonst to him, a few other soldiers had the same idea.... so the food came out too hot for anyone to eat....

Sorry that I can't be any help about if Chilli is period or not.....

[Rumba Rue]

Peppers were grown in Jamaica, Haiti, the Azores, and a host of other places. But chili is an American invention, dating back to the 19th century.

[JohnnyTarr]

All right, follow me on this idea. I am not an expert on GAoP. This is just a line of theroy. Ok let's not get hung up on the name Chilli. Let's call it stew then. I will agree that in the Middle ages spices were very expensive. I can even see that in Europe in 1700 spices can be pricey. I just don't see that at the source of the spices that they could command that high of a price. It would be a matter of supply and demand. High supply and low demand at the source. Now pirates would take a ship full of what ever. They could devide up the gold and trinkets easily but they would have to sell the goods. I have heard that they did not command the highest prices for their illicit goods. This again would flood the market. Now also someone out there was consuming these spices and I would like to think that they were cooking with them. I can personally say that depending on the chilli it would not take much to flavor a dish. So can no one else out there see a dish that would be made from illicit spices and served to the men on board?

[Edward T. Porter]

There is a cecipe called "Pemmikan". It´s a mix from dried meat, fat, spices and dried berrys.

There are a lot of (heated) discussions on the Muzzleloading forum about Pemicin ... Pemmikan......however it's spelled..... but none of them mention using any spices.....

I will check my books if I mixed something up.

[Lady Alyx]

Ahem...well as a good cook I have to interject now...move aside men....ha ha ha Just teasin yea all. The chili peppers are from the South America's including the Mexico region. Chili did sprout from the American Southwest region. As to spices...well we all know how important the Spice Trade route was and the Salt mines in Bavaria. Salt and spices have traditionally been used to make plain food taste better in all cultures and it is a for sure thing that many spices did make the meal of a bit of odds and ends and lets say slowly "aged" meat that is on hand to make any stews/soups of any sort taste better. Many spices are also used to cure meats.

Remember the spice that Jack used as deoderant for his roasting...one of my fav's Paparika. Which is also made from peppers. Actually HOT Paparika is pretty darn hot. Goulash anyone?

[John Maddox Roberts]

Generally, Europeans were slow to adopt the "hot" spices such as the capsicum (chile) pepper. Many of them still do not include them in their national cuisines. The British developed a taste for curries due to their prolonged tenure in India, but otherwise their native cuisine remained bland. Even in the States, only the Southwest used chile to any extent. I doubt pirates would have cared much for it, and at sea where drinking water was scarce, it might have been inadvisable anyway. By the way, I am from New Mexico, where it's spelled "chile." Heathens from outlandish places like Texas spell it "chili."

[Silver Steele]

Interestingly enough, Yahoo just posted an article saying Ancient Americans cooked with chili peppers 6,100 years ago.

You can read the article on Yahoo HERE

[Edward T. Porter]

@Patrick: I refered my book and mixed something up... next time I will read first, read again and then write something

[Lady Alyx]

Yeah because like I mentioned before the peppers come from this southern region.

Yesterday on California's Gold (probably only shown here on public) Huel Howser went to a Chile Roasting here in so cal. I cannot find the place exactly...searching...

and check this out entire chile listing:

Chile's

[JohnnyTarr]

Generally, Europeans were slow to adopt the "hot" spices such as the capsicum (chile) pepper. Many of them still do not include them in their national cuisines. The British developed a taste for curries due to their prolonged tenure in India, but otherwise their native cuisine remained bland. Even in the States, only the Southwest used chile to any extent. I doubt pirates would have cared much for it, and at sea where drinking water was scarce, it might have been inadvisable anyway. By the way, I am from New Mexico, where it's spelled "chile." Heathens from outlandish places like Texas spell it "chili."

Now I like this arguement. It makes you think without getting anyone upset. I could believe that sailors didn't like the taste of chille peppers and need lots of valuable water. That is a great arguement against the idea.

[Lady Alyx]

pishawww water?...Rum! (just teasin')

[Sir Eric]

Generally, Europeans were slow to adopt the "hot" spices such as the capsicum (chile) pepper. Many of them still do not include them in their national cuisines. The British developed a taste for curries due to their prolonged tenure in India, but otherwise their native cuisine remained bland. Even in the States, only the Southwest used chile to any extent. I doubt pirates would have cared much for it, and at sea where drinking water was scarce, it might have been inadvisable anyway. By the way, I am from New Mexico, where it's spelled "chile." Heathens from outlandish places like Texas spell it "chili."

Now I like this arguement. It makes you think without getting anyone upset. I could believe that sailors didn't like the taste of chille peppers and need lots of valuable water. That is a great arguement against the idea.

I wouldn't completely overlook native influence on ships cooks... especially on ships that were bopping all along the coasts from Brazil to Mexico to Cuba to Jamaca. To think that the men on those boats never encountered, tasted or perhaps even came to enjoy things like hot spices doesn't really have the ring of reality to it.

It's too bad nobody writes down the little stuff like: "tasted of wot the tribesmen called a ah-bah-nehr-oe, a small wrinkled vegitable, orangeish in color and that is grown in the mountains above the town. Cook put it to the moartar and pestle it and served it in large supply with a brothy meat, of beef or pork I cannot say. I will say that it was a most regrettible experience. It hath seart me tung so that I have had the cook shot today, Capt. Whoosis, dated June 10, 1723." and then we'd know.

But, speculation runs all kinds of ways. What about african influences? Spanish influences? Even Egyptian and Medditeranian influences. Think there aren't any connections? There are. I'd bet a typical pirate's galley was a shmorgashborg of regional and cultural influences, probably based mainly on the background of the cook, doing whatever he could with whatever he could get his hands on. Hot spices I am sure were no real stranger. Cook probably dipped into the cans before they sold them off at the next stop.

[Patrick Hand]

Edward T. Porter...

@Patrick: I refered my book and mixed something up

Minor point.... no big deal.... Heck... that's why we are here..... You post something.... or I post something... we question it.... Heck if we are wrong ... we say so.... that's how we learn this stuff.......

Now if I could spell it.... Sculligry (or something like that) wasn't that highly spiced food (more of a soup or stew but with a lot of vinagar...) of a buncha expensive food..... kinda the Pyrate version of a Hangtown fry(1) ...

This may or may not be true..... but the story goes....

A gold miner (outta Hang Town (Placerville CA)) went into town after a good "strike" with a buncha gold in his pouch... he wanted to celledrate, so he ordered a mixture made outta all the most expensive ingreadents avalible.....Oysters , baccon, eggs,,,, alla the "good stuff".....(well it's kinda of an omelete) and thus was born a now touristy meal.........

[The Doctor]

Here's a recent archaeological article on peppers.

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Archaeologists: Chili Peppers Cooked, Eaten 6,000 Years Ago

Thursday , February 15, 2007

AP

WASHINGTON —

Who says food fads can't last?

Thousands of years before the advent of Tex-Mex, ancient Americans were spicing up stew with red hot chili peppers.

New fossil evidence shows prehistoric people from southern Peru up to the Bahamas were cultivating varieties of chilies millennia before Columbus' arrival brought the spice to world cuisine.

The earliest traces so far are from southwestern Ecuador, where families fired up meals with homegrown peppers about 6,100 years ago.

The discovery, reported Friday in the journal Science, suggests early New World agriculture was more sophisticated than once thought.

"Some people who have described ancient food ways as being simple will probably have to rethink their ideas because of this work," said lead researcher Linda Perry of the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History.

"It tells us a lot about what was going on around the prehistoric hearth," adds co-author Deborah Pearsall, an anthropology professor at the University of Missouri-Columbia, who found evidence of chili-laced stew in pots in an ancient Ecuadorean village.

Archaeologists trace food origins not just from curiosity about the ancients' everyday lives. How a crop spreads sheds light on prehistoric travel and trade.

In the Middle East, figs were domesticated 11,400 years ago. Wheat wasn't far behind. In the New World, corn was being cultivated around 9,000 years ago.

How do you trace a pepper, which leaves no husk or other easily fossilized evidence?

A dozen researchers at seven sites around Latin America kept finding microscopic starch grains on grindstones and cooking vessels and in trash heaps.

Perry finally identified these microfossils as residue from domesticated, not wild, chili species that in some spots even predated the invention of pottery.

"We now have a marker, in starch granules, that allows us to look back in time and demonstrate the widespread use of domesticated chili peppers throughout the Americas at much earlier times than previously documented," said botanist W. Hardy Eshbaugh of Miami University in Ohio, a pepper expert not involved in the research.

The microfossils suggest vitamin C-rich chilies were usually mixed with corn and a few other foods, not just used as a spice.

Now the hunt is on for the first site of homegrown chilies. It can't be Ecuador, too far from where wild chilies flourish in Bolivia and Brazil.

"Whether this is migration of people or early trade is one of the fascinating questions," said Pearsall, who calls these early farmers pretty sophisticated. "They were not at the edge of starvation. ... People were growing all kinds of things and not just focusing on staples."

[Lady Alyx]

Heck if I was a sailor on board and we plundered some spices...I sure would ask cook to put some in the stew!