SC - Columbus' chilies

[Decker, Terry D.]

>   "Decker, Terry D."<TerryD at Health.State.OK.US> writes:
> 
> >  The Portuguese had introduced
> >  > grains of
> >  > paradise no more than 70 years prior to Columbus' voyage and they
> >  > were
> >  > accepted and widely used.  Why not chilies?
> 
> What is your source for that? Grains appear in  Le Menagier and 
> Taillevent, both of which are more than 70 years before Columbus' 
> voyage.
> 
> David/Cariadoc

IIRC, the source was a paper from the cooks symposium earlier this year.  In
any event, I am depending on someone else's research, which is often a
source of error.

I apologize for being imprecise.  Rather than "grains of paradise," I should
have used Aframomum melegueta.  "Grains of paradise" has been used to
describe cardamom seeds as well as the melegueta pepper.  A. melegueta is a
West African plant and the Portuguese were the primary source for Europe
after opening the West African trade in the first half of the 15th Century.

It is possible that the Islamic world introduced A. melegueta to Europe
prior to the Portuguese, but Islamic contact with West Africa seems to have
been limited until Timbuktu fell to the Berbers in 1433.

Perhaps Francisco Sirene or someone else who has made a serious study of
spices could provide better information about the terminology and the
history of the spices known as "grains of paradise."

Bear