SC - Columbus' chilies

[david friedman]

At 9:12 AM -0500 6/16/00, Decker, Terry D. wrote:
>  >   "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.

What's the evidence for that? I've seen the assertion, but never the 
basis for it. The tastes are entirely unrelated, which makes me 
skeptical.

Or did you mean "'Grains of paradise' has been used to describe 
cardamom seeds by the authors of bad modern secondary sources on 
medieval cooking?"

>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.

Could be--but you don't need conquest for trade. Gold was coming up 
long before that.

David Friedman
Professor of Law
Santa Clara University
ddfr at best.com
http://www.daviddfriedman.com/