The truth about Chile is that only Mexicans and Amexicans fully understand it. In the first place it is not a spice. Spice comes from the East. The mistake is as crass as calling the Aztecs and Tlazcaltecas Indians. Europe's head was facing backwards as it headed west in the 15th century.
Spices are dry condiments, often powdered - designed to mask and even enhance the smell and taste of decaying meat or enhance the flavour of boring vegetarian food. Spices work particularly well with odiferous mutton. They give flavour to lentils and Paneer.
The truth about Chile is that it is syncretic. Wherever it was taken, along with maize, squash, tomatoes, cocoa, beans and vanilla, it was made to fit contours. Outside Mexico Chili is a lexicalised borrowing not a neologism.
Think of the Welsh. They went to the Pampas and New Zealand in search of the rain and the green. Think of the Russians who chose Canada. Who wanted to live on the edge of their familiar tundra. Think of the British who appropriated Kikuyu land, made tea plantations and laid out English gardens in the Kenyan highlands.
The Inhabitants of the north German plains moving to fields in Pennsylvania. They all imposed their stories on the land and they lied. The original accounts of the nations and tribes of Africa and America were ignored and erased. It was more white mischief. They told stories about the Man Eaters of Tsavo, Gordon and Livingston, Jock of the Bushveld, Blood River, Custer's Last Stand, The Alamo, the Indian Mutiny and Ned Kelly, by way of covering up their traces and marking out their newly acquired territory.
Let's get this out of the way right now. The vegetables, fruit, meat and flavourings that came out of Mexico were the cultivated products of an advanced and old agricultural civilisation, they were not 'found' by the Spanish in the wilds of Mexico. They were the efficient harvests of Mexicans. These products were the result of thousands of years of careful cultivation and selection. I have written about this elsewhere.
There is a fruit in the north of India called the Chicu. Further to the south, in Kerala and Tamil Nadu it is called Sapote. It is neither. It is Chico Zapote, a Mexican fruit, the fruit of the rubber plant and it grows in an amazing range of shapes and tastes, coloured everything from deep orange to jet black. In India, however, it is usually just a sad little brown ball.
It takes thousands of years to master and understand a food product and the rest of the world hasn't mastered Chili yet, though countries like Thailand, Italy, India and China have shown some precocity. Spain and Italy in their transformation of chili into the blander and juicier green peppers - a move to the vegetable. India towards the spice, China the stir fry, Thailand a mangrove of curries, sauces and salads. The Bulgarians make a goulash if it.
Perhaps food is flexible, like truth and language, and it is a mere matter of belief and use. New varieties based on chile are easily cultivated. If this is the case and then any orcish use of the chile plant would be legitimised. However, there is the matter of essence and provenance. The rest of the world speaks pidgin chile. Chile speaks Nahuatl and other Mexican languages with perfect eloquence and later, after the great meztizaje, it mastered Spanish.
Of course in Spain you will learn nothing of chile. Like Italy it sent the chile plant along the vegetable route speyed and fattened. But Spain's gastronomy, like the gastronomy of the rest of the world, has been conquered by the Mexican cultivars they only half understand. The gazpacho, for example, is principally tomato and green pepper; Mexican ingredients, with the addition of bread, olive oil, garlic and onion. Pimientos de padron, the Galician game of chile roulette, is just token entertainment.
What on earth did northern Europe survive on before Spain conquered Mexico? Larks tongues in honey, bits of beef, pig and venison eaten with cabbages, apples pears and pickles? Beets and neeps? White bread, cheeses and beer?
European civilisation was hardly a civilisation that understood its own fruit and vegetables, apart from the apple. How could they be expected to understand the chile. Europeans were obsessed by meat and still are. In Barbara Tuchman's novel a Distant Mirror, she describes how the rich in France ate guilded meat with their boiled neeps.
In Africa chile is Johnny-one-note from Maputo to Mombasa - piri piri and chili powder for green mangoes by the beach. But the African use of chili gets more interesting in Ethiopia with its hot Harisa sauce. Sadly, the uses of Chile in the Arab world are nothing to write home about at all.
This said, clearly, Hindu cultures, Buddhist cultures, Muslim cultures and Christian, believe they have fully appropriated and mastered the chile plant. But the conversation about chile must begin with a patient Mexican saying:
'Calm down and pay attention. No, chile is not about that. No. It's not that. No, chile is not that. No, you haven't mastered our plant at all, though you think you have.'
Far from it, instead they have constructed the culinary equivalent of building a mock Tudor cottage on a lawn in a tea plantation in Kericho.
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